thumb|Title page of the 1615 edition

The Spanish Tragedy, or Hieronimo is Mad Again is an Elizabethan tragedy written by Thomas Kyd between 1582 and 1592. Highly popular and influential in its time, The Spanish Tragedy established a new genre in English theatre: the revenge play or revenge tragedy. It is considered one of the most influential plays of the Renaissance theatre. The play contains several violent murders and personifies Revenge as its own character. The Spanish Tragedy is often considered to be the first mature Elizabethan drama, a claim disputed with Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine, and was parodied by many Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights, including Marlowe, William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson.

Many elements of The Spanish Tragedy, such as the play-within-a-play used to trap a murderer and a ghost intent on vengeance, appear in Shakespeare's Hamlet. (Thomas Kyd is frequently proposed as the author of the hypothetical Ur-Hamlet that may have been one of Shakespeare's primary sources for Hamlet.)

Performance

Early performances

Lord Strange's Men staged a play that the records call Jeronimo on 23 February 1592 at The Rose for Philip Henslowe, and repeated it sixteen times to 22 January 1593. It is unlikely, however, that the performance in February 1592 was the play's first performance, as Henslowe did not mark it as 'ne' (new). The two plays were staged as pairs (over consecutive performances) in March and May 1597.

English actors performed the play on tour in Germany in 1592. The Admiral's Men revived Kyd's original on 7 January 1597, and performed it twelve times to 19 July; they staged another performance jointly with Pembroke's Men on 11 October of the same year. The records of Philip Henslowe suggest that the play was on stage again in 1601 and 1602.

The play became a popular hit in Germany and The Netherlands. Playwright Jakob Ayrer produced a translation into German before 1600, which appeared in an anthology of his plays in 1618. Everaert Siceram included scenes in his Dutch translation of Orlando Furioso, published Antwerp, 1615.

Modern performances

The Spanish Tragedy was performed at London's National Theatre, first in 1982 at the Cottesloe Theatre, with Michael Bryant in the role of Hieronimo, directed by Michael Bogdanov. It transferred to the Lyttelton Theatre in 1984.

The Royal Shakespeare Company performed The Spanish Tragedy in May 1997 at the Swan Theatre, directed by Michael Boyd. The cast included Siobhan Redmond as Bel-imperia, Robert Glenister as Lorenzo, Peter Wight as Hieronimo, Jeffry Wickham as the King of Spain. The production later transferred to The Pit at London's Barbican in November 1997.

An amateur production of The Spanish Tragedy was performed 2–6 June 2009 by students from Oxford University, in the second quad of Oriel College, Oxford. Another amateur production was presented by the Hyperion Shakespeare Company 21–30 October 2010 with students from Harvard University in Harvard's New College Theatre. In November 2012, Perchance Theatre in association with Cambridge University's Marlowe Society staged a site-specific production in King's College Chapel, Cambridge. In October/November 2013, the Baron's Men of Austin, TX performed the work in a near-uncut state, with period costumes and effects, at Richard Garriott's Curtain Theatre, a mini replica of the Globe Theatre. Another amateur production was presented by the Experimental Theater Board of Carleton College 27–29 May 2015.

Other professional performances include a modern-dress production staged at the Arcola Theatre in London in October–November 2009, directed by Mitchell Moreno, with Dominic Rowan as Hieronimo, as well as a production in Belle Époque era costume, staged by Theatre Pro Rata in Minneapolis in March 2010, directed by Carin Bratlie.

The play has been produced a number of times on radio by the BBC:

  • 11 October 1953, BBC Third Programme, with Cecil Trouncer as Hieronimo, Denise Bryer as Bel-Imperia and Peter Coke as Lorenzo.
  • 2 March 1969, BBC Radio 3, with John Laurie as Hieronimo, Rosalind Shanks as Bel-Imperia and Anthony Jacobs as Lorenzo.
  • 6 November 1994, BBC Radio 3, with Oliver Cotton as Hieronimo, Kristin Milward as Bel-Imperia and Jonathan Cullen as Lorenzo. This production marked the 400th anniversary of Kyd's death.
  • 12 November 2023, BBC Radio 3, with Robert Glenister as Hieronimo, Joanna Vanderham as Bel-Imperia and Sandy Grierson as Lorenzo.

Publication

In the "Induction" to his play Bartholomew Fair (1614), Ben Jonson alludes to The Spanish Tragedy as being "five and twenty or thirty years" old. If taken literally, this would yield a date range of 1584–1589, a range that agrees with what else is known about the play. The exact date of composition is unknown, though it is speculated that it was written sometime between 1583 and 1591. In a review of academic debate on the topic, Lukas Erne summarises the conclusions as pointing to a completion date before 1588, noting that the play makes no reference to the Spanish Armada, and because of possible allusions to the play in Nashe's Preface to Greene's Menaphon from 1589 and The Anatomie of Absurdity from 1588 to 1589. Kyd's biographer J. R. Mulryne, while acknowledging that evidence is scant, concludes that the year 1587 remains the most likely year for completion of the play.

Kyd's play was entered into the Stationers' Register on 6 October 1592 by the bookseller Abel Jeffes. The play was published in an undated quarto, almost certainly before the end of 1592; this first quarto was printed by Edward Allde—and published not by the copyright holder Jeffes, but by another bookseller, Edward White. On 18 December that year, the Stationers Company ruled that both Jeffes and White had broken the guild's rules by printing works that belonged to the other; both men were fined 10 shillings, and the offending books were destroyed so that the first quarto of The Spanish Tragedy survives in only a single copy. Yet the Q1 title page refers to an even earlier edition; this was probably by Jeffes, and no known copy exists.

The popular play was reprinted in 1594. In an apparent compromise between the competing booksellers, the title page of this, the second, quarto credits the edition to "Abell Jeffes, to be sold by Edward White". On 13 August 1599, Jeffes transferred his copyright to William White, who issued the third edition that year. White in turn transferred the copyright to Thomas Pavier on 14 August 1600 and Pavier issued the fourth edition (printed for him by William White) in 1602. This 1602 quarto ("Q4") contains five additions to the preexisting text. Q4 was reprinted in 1610, 1615 (two issues), 1618, 1623 (two issues), and 1633. The style of The Spanish Tragedy is considered such a good match with Kyd's style in his other extant play, Cornelia (1593), that scholars and critics have universally recognised Kyd's authorship.

In 2013, scholar Douglas Bruster theorised that some awkward wordings in the "additional passages" of the 1602 fourth edition resulted from printers' errors in setting type from the (now lost) original manuscript. Furthermore, after examining the "Hand D" manuscript (widely accepted as in Shakespeare's handwriting) from the play Sir Thomas More, Bruster argued that the speculated printers' errors resulted from reading a manuscript written by someone with Shakespeare's "messy" handwriting, thus bolstering the likelihood that Shakespeare wrote the additional passages.

Characters

;Figures in the Frame

  • The ghost of Don Andrea
  • An embodiment of Revenge

;Spain

  • The Spanish King
  • Don Cyprian, Duke of Castile, the King's brother
  • Don Lorenzo, the Duke of Castile's son
  • Bel-imperia, the Duke of Castile's daughter
  • Pedringano, Bel-imperia's servant
  • Christophil, Don Lorenzo's servant
  • Don Lorenzo's page boy
  • Don Hieronimo, Knight Marshal of Spain
  • Isabella, his wife
  • Don Horatio, their son
  • A servant to Don Hieronimo
  • A maid to Isabella
  • Don Bazulto, an elderly man
  • General of the Spanish army
  • Three watchmen
  • A deputy
  • A hangman
  • A messenger
  • Three citizens

;Portugal

  • The Portuguese Viceroy
  • Prince Balthazar, his son
  • Don Pedro, the Viceroy's brother
  • Alexandro and Villuppo, Portuguese noblemen
  • The Portuguese Ambassador
  • Serberine, Balthazar's serving-man
  • Two noblemen of Portugal
  • Two Portuguese citizens (Portingales)

;In Hieronimo's play

  • Soliman, Sultan of Turkey (played by Balthazar)
  • Erasto ("Erastus"), Knight of Rhodes (played by Lorenzo)
  • Bashaw (played by Hieronimo)
  • Perseda (played by Bel-imperia)

Setting

The Spanish Tragedy primarily takes place in Spain.

Due to many unknowns surrounding the authorship of The Spanish Tragedy, it is currently unknown whether the play was written before or after the armada in 1588. Scholars believe the play was written before 1588, due to the lack of any mention of the armada.

The play is set against the backdrop of the unification of Spain and Portugal, which was carried out as Philip II of Spain ascended to the throne in Portugal. The battle in which Balthazar is captured before the play starts is one which occurred in the fallout of the annexation. The characters of the Ghost of Andrea and Revenge form a chorus similar to that of Tantalus and Fury in Seneca's Thyestes. Hieronimo also references the Senecan plays, Agamemnon and Troades, in his monologue in Act 3, scene 13. The character of the Old Man, Senex, is seen as a direct reference to Seneca.

The play also subverts typically Senecan qualities such as the use of a ghost character. For Kyd, the Ghost is part of the chorus, unlike in Thyestes where the Ghost leaves after the prologue. Also, the Ghost is not a functioning prologue as he does not give the audience information about the major action on stage nor its conclusion.

Allusions

The Spanish Tragedy was enormously influential, and references and allusions to it abound in the literature of its era. Ben Jonson mentions "Hieronimo" in the Induction to his Cynthia's Revels (1600), has a character disguise himself in "Hieronimo's old cloak, ruff, and hat" in The Alchemist (1610), and quotes from the play in Every Man in His Humour (1598), Act I, scene iv. In Satiromastix (1601), Thomas Dekker suggests that Jonson, in his early days as an actor, himself played Hieronimo.

A companion play to The Spanish Tragedy was anonymously published in 1605 entitled The Spanish Comedy or The First Part of Hieronimo. The play spans from Don Andrea's departure for Portugal to demand the payment of tribute and an end to the uprising, and his untimely murder. Only parts of the text have been preserved. The play takes place before The Spanish Tragedy chronologically, although it was published more than a decade later. Due to the author's anonymity, there is debate between scholars about whether this was a companion piece also written by Kyd or another writer's attempt to contribute to the story themselves.

In modern times, T. S. Eliot quoted the title and the play in his poem The Waste Land. The play is performed in Orhan Pamuk's 2002 novel Snow, where the murder of the performance director, Sunay, is likened to the death of Horatio in the play.

1602 additions

The White/Pavier fourth quarto of 1602 added five passages, totalling 320 lines, to the existing text. The most substantial passage is an entire scene, usually called the painter scene, since it is dominated by Hieronimo's conversation with a painter; it is often designated III, xiia, falling as it does between scenes III, xii and III, xiii of the original text. Scholars have proposed various identities for the author of the revisions, including Dekker, John Webster, and Shakespeare—"Shakespeare has perhaps been the favourite in the continuing search..."

John Marston appears to parody the painter scene in his 1599 play Antonio and Mellida, indicating that the scene must have been in existence and known to audiences by that time. Andrew Gurr rejects the view that Jonson is the author of the 1602 additions, summing up modern opinion that the chronology of the payments, the inferior verse (not following the original metric style) and the introduction of plot inconsistencies make the attribution "debatable". Anne Barton, however, suggests that Henslowe approached Jonson to expand the part of Heironimo (once played by Jonson himself) to give more effect to the character's grief and madness.

Themes and motifs

Revenge

Revenge bookends the entire play. The embodied Revenge promises Don Andrea that his killer, Balthazar, will be killed, which is not resolved until the end of the play. The play almost seems to acknowledge the slow burn of Andrea's revenge, as the embodied Revenge falls asleep before the end of the play.

The morality of revenge has been a source of discourse for years, and as revenge is one of the key themes of the play, a lot of debate has been made over it in the context of the Spanish Tragedy specifically. It is argued that Kyd used the revenge tragedy to give body to popular images of Catholic Spain.

Some critics claim that Hieronimo's attitude is what central Christian tradition calls the Old Law,

Christopher Crosbie cites academic commentators who consider class antagonism as a context Kyd is exploring in the play. Hieronimo, the ambitious Knight Marshal (an appointed court official) is set against the aristocratic nobility of the courtiers: Hieronimo and his family are labeled as a "middling sort". Kyd establishes a situation in which conflict between Hieronimo's household and the nobility is inevitable: the middle class is seen as a threat, one that is pressing up on the aristocrats. This is evident in scenes such as the resulting competition from the 'middling sort' Horatio, and Lorenzo, the King's nephew.

Torture and justice

Torture also comes up within the play, most notably at the end of Act IV, when the King of Spain threatens to torture Hieronimo after he reveals that the murders in the play were real. Hieronimo's response, biting off his own tongue, has been interpreted in a multitude of ways. Scholar Timothy Turner notes that this biting off of the tongue has been interpreted as "a rejection of the fatuities of language, a radical gesture demonstrating Hieronimo's sense of 'inwardness,' or an indictment of the Spanish Court." However, while this torture is threatened by the Spanish King, it also mirrors time period in which it is believe Kyd authored the play within England, as torture was increasingly used by the privy council. The growing presence of Jesuit missionaries within England, as a result of the Regnans in Excelsis (which excommunicated Elizabeth I), inspired a belief that Spain and France were preparing an invasion. As such, these missionaries were the most frequent victims of England's growing use of torture.

Bel-Imperia and Horatio, moments before the latter's murder, make-love, and exchange coy lines rife with war imagery, though scholar David Willbern notes it is unknown whether the act is actually consummated, as Lorenzo and Balthazar rush in and murder Horatio. Tyburn was surrounded by a variety of viewing options including seats, boxes, rooms, houses, and standing room sections. This made them accessible to the upper and lower classes alike. Thus, executions became a performance, not unlike the legitimate theatre.

Similarly, in Hieronimo's play, voyeuristic pleasure is derived from the audience as they watch the characters watch the play. Thus, the second spectacle comes from the theatre itself and the position of Heronimo's play within the play of The Spanish Tragedy. One of the most common forms of entertainment during this era included watching a play. The resolution is the explanation to the king of what has happened. The play within the play is not described until the actual play is performed, intensifying the climax, and the resolution is short due to the explanations that have already occurred.

Critics say that The Spanish Tragedy resembles a Senecan Tragedy. The separation of acts, the emphasized bloody climax, and the revenge itself, make this play resemble some of the most famous ancient plays. Kyd does acknowledge his relations to Senecan Tragedies by using Latin directly in the play but also causes Christianity to conflict with pagan ideals. We also see Kyd's use of Seneca through his referencing three Senecan plays in The Spanish Tragedy. It is said that this play was the initiator of the style for many "Elizabethan revenge tragedies, most notably Hamlet".

Select editions

  • Kyd, Thomas, The Spanish Tragedy Broadview Edition (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2016). ISBN 978-1-55481-205-9. Edited by Patrick McHenry. Includes introduction and supplementary historical documents.
  • Kyd, Thomas, The Spanish Tragedy (London: Bloomsbury, 2013) . Edited with an introduction and notes by Clara Calvo and Jesús Tronch.
  • Maus, Katharine Eisaman, editor, Four Revenge Tragedies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) . Contains The Spanish Tragedy, The Revenger's Tragedy, The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois, and The Atheist's Tragedy.

Notes

References

Further reading

  • The Spanish Tragedie from Project Gutenberg
  • The Spanish Tragedy Shorter version of the play for a modern audience
  • Listen to the 1994 BBC Radio Production on Internet Archive
  • Listen to the 2023 BBC Radio production on Internet Archive