Hamlet thomas kyds the spanish tragedy
The Spanish Tragedy
The Spanish Tragedy of Thomas Kyd (1587) is one of the touchstones of the Drama of the English Renaissance and well worth reading for anyone with an interest in Shakespeare, the evolution of English Drama and Literature and in the history and culture of the Renaissance and Elizabethan Age. The play is notable in the history of English drama in being the first innovative model of the genre of the "Revenge Tragedy," and as such a precursor of better known works, most particularly Shakespeare's Hamlet.
But why is such a Renaissance Revenge Tragedy of continuing interest to us today?
I would answer and positively recommend your reading of this compelling work by first observing that such revenge tragedy is about much more than revenge. It is laced with the acid and very modern existential consciousness of an underlying world in which the cant of both human and divine law, order and justice is found wanting at best, and which presents persons injured and abused with the dilemma of turning alternatively to either vengance, protest, faith in a continuously deferred questionable karmic or divine retribution, or quietest acceptance of a violently absurd and meaningless world.
The "Revenge Hero" is also a precursor and brother to our own modern and post-modern "anti-heroes" in books and cinema from Batman to film noir to Django, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and Oblivion, who finding that corrupt institutions and the absent or impotent hand of a divine or natural order, feel called upon to rebel and take justice into their own hands. Even the modern Jihadist paints himself as a "revenge hero" against a perceived unjust social order of militarist repression from the West and Israel or a soulless and corruptive materialist modernity.
The Revenge Tragedy thus is of continuing interest, not only as a moving drama of crime
Front Matter: I wrote about ST for a previous blog post, and my intentions are not to rehash that here. I will mention things noted in my earlier entry, but this will be a fresh take on what is an enjoyable and well-written play.
There’s not a lot of information on Thomas Kyd (1558-1594). He was apparently a well-known playwright during the 1580s, the decade when The Spanish Tragedy is thought to have been written. It was a smash hit at the time and was played for many years with much success. ST started the vogue for revenge plays, a genre which is exactly what it sounds like: someone gets killed or murdered, and someone else, usually a family member, works to exact revenge on the killer/murderer. It is believed the genre was based on classical Roman, likely Senacan, tragedies (see below for more on Seneca). There is some consensus that Kyd also wrote what is called the Ur-Hamlet, the Hamlet that may have inspired Shakespeare’s play of the same name. Later, Kyd was an associate of Christopher Marlowe, an association that brought him some trouble. More on Kyd, as well as the Marlowe affair, can be found here and here.
The plot of ST is intricate, and involves 1) Andrea, killed in battle, who was in love with Bel-Imperia; 2) Andrea’s best friend Horatio, who becomes Bel-Imperia’s lover and is killed by her brother Lorenzo and suitor Baltazar; 3) Horatio’s father, Hieronimo, who exacts revenge in an unusual way. There are similarities to Hamlet: feigned madness, a perceived delay in revenge, and a play-within-a-play. ST is very meta, as noted in my previous blog post. It is framed in a way that makes the play itself seem like a play-within-a-play, even before the actual play-within-a-play begins in the last act. There are also references to the process of putting on a performance in an early modern theatre. Not only do these insights add to the play’s meta-ness, they are historically interesting.
Here are the characters:
- BAZULTO: An elde
The Spanish Tragedy
Play by Thomas Kyd
The Spanish Tragedy, or Hieronimo is Mad Again is an Elizabethantragedy 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. The play contains several violent murders and personifiesRevenge 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). It is unclear whether Jeronimo was The Spanish Tragedy, or The First Part of Hieronimo (printed in 1604), the anonymous "prequel" to Kyd's play, or perhaps either on different days.
The Admiral's Men revived Kyd's original on 7 January 1597, and performed it twelve times to 19 July; they staged another performance conjointly 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. English actors performed the play on tour in Germany (1601), and both German and Dutch adaptations were made.
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The Spanish Tragedy, also known as Hieronimo is Mad Again, is widely considered to be the first fully-formed Elizabethan stage drama, rivaled only by Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine. As such, The Spanish Tragedy influenced a number of playwrights who collaborated with or followed Thomas Kyd. The most prominent of these figures was William Shakespeare, whose 1600 play Hamlet draws on a number of themes, tropes, and theatrical conventions of Kyd's earlier play.
The most explicit similarity between The Spanish Tragedy and what is likely the most famous English drama of all time, Hamlet, is their genre: both plays are revenge tragedies, meaning that the desire for revenge is what drives their plots. In Hamlet, the murder that must be avenged occurs before the action of the play proper (when the King's brother, Hamlet's uncle, murders Hamlet's father). In The Spanish Tragedy, it is both Don Andrea's death before the play and Horatio's death during the play that inspire revenge narratives for both Bel-Imperia and Hieronimo.
Hamlet also draws on The Spanish Tragedy through its incorporation of the supernatural in the form of the ghost of the late king. The Spanish Tragedy, of course, features the ghost of Don Andrea as part of the Chorus along with the personified figure of Revenge. Many have argued that, because of the novelty of The Spanish Tragedy during its early performances, this personification of the play's central theme was necessary in order to orient audiences to what was, at the time, unfamiliar theatrical territory. By the time theater-goers got to Hamlet, the need for such explicit representation was obsolete; the simple presence of the ghost in the first scene would have alerted the audience that the play would revolve around betrayal and revenge.
Finally, both plays feature a meta-theatrical dramatization of the play-within-a-play, used
- Spanish tragedy text
- The spanish tragedy symbols