The Spanish Tragedy, Thomas Kyd (365 Books, Day 80)

[rushthatspeaks]

This play is much earlier than I'd thought-- on account of the title, I had it mentally down as Jacobean, but no, it is sometime between 1582-92 and hence pre-Shakespearean, and therefore the introduction is full of people arguing about How Important It Is To The Development Of The Modern Tragedy and saying nasty things about Marlowe, which is an unfortunate side-effect of having a Thing about someone other than Marlowe having written The First English Modern Tragedy No Really We Insist. (There is still, after all this time, nothing wrong with liking Tamburlaine, people, no matter what Kyd may have said about Marlowe in prison.)

Anyway. I am still going to have trouble thinking of this as anything other than a Jacobean; it acts like one. Almost bloody enough for Webster, and Revenge is not only actually a character, he is officially and textually the chorus. Whenever anything goes right for anybody, there's Revenge coming on again, with attendant ghost, assuring the audience that in half a moment we will have blood and rhetoric all round, just wait for it. And then after the first murder he falls asleep and has to be prodded to wake up again and remember what he's doing here, a nice touch.

And no echo scene (sigh-- I do like a good echo scene), but a play-within-a-play in which all the stabbings are real; also various letters written in blood, respectable persons run lunatic, someone biting out his own tongue, etc. And it has a sense of humor I enjoyed. In the play-within-a-play, for instance, the director of it (who is also arranging the stabbings) tells the cast that he wants them to give an impression of the events as taking place at a great distance, since the story happened in Turkey, and so each of them is to speak in the language they know that is most foreign. We don't get their actual dialogue, but we're told one is speaking French, one ancient Greek, one Latin, one dog-Latin, and one maintaining a sensible and dignified Spanish. I am sure it had the distancing effect the director wanted, and I really hope that whatever company first played this went for the gusto.

The thing that's odd about The Spanish Tragedy is how very, very much it both quotes and cribs from Latin literature generally. There are entire paragraphs of Seneca just thrown untranslated at the stage and a fair amount of Statius and even some odd things like a few tags of Lucretius. And the ghost who follows Revenge around is very, very clearly living in the cosmos of the Aeneid: it's not a Christian underworld he went to, and no one else seems to expect one either. There is very little by way of appealing to God or to church symbols in the play; all the soliloquies are in the classical mode and cry out to Fates and Furies. This is sufficiently odd for me to be unsurprised that Kyd found himself in prison at least partly because some of the papers in his room were considered irreligious and blasphemous. Usually there is at least some allusion to Christian burial, but the ghost here had trouble getting across Acheron because he didn't have coins on his eyes. I don't think Kyd is suggesting the Spanish are all heathens, though I admit I may be missing something.

Oh, and the poetry is good. Some of it is really good. I would love to see this acted, though it's not one I've ever noticed being revived or I'd have gone to it. The internet suggests there is no movie, but I may have to poke around some and see if I can find any filmed stage versions.

I mean, I don't love it as much as The Duchess of Malfi, but then, what lives up to that? Very good play, is what I am saying here.

Comments

[trifles]

As a side note, I love Tamburlaine, and sincerely wish someone would hurry up and do a decent revival of it. Marlowe is so incredibly awesome, and I wish more people were aware of him.

[zeborah]

"echo scene"?

This sounds tremendous fun.

[rushthatspeaks]

An echo scene is a scene in which one or more characters are talking in a place where there are echoes, and the audience hears the echoes in a way such that they contribute to the plot or character development.

From The Duchess of Malfi. Antonio's wife is dead, though he doesn't know it, and he's going to get killed when he goes off looking for her:

ANTONIO: Echo, I will not talk with thee,
For thou art a dead thing.

ECHO: Thou art a dead thing.

ANTONIO: My duchess is asleep now,
And her little ones, I hope sweetly: O heaven,
Shall I never see her more?

ECHO: Never see her more.


And so on. That's the tail of quite a long scene. He's remarked earlier how much the echo sounds like his wife's voice, and traditionally when this is staged she's either offstage or on a balcony doing the echo's lines.

[zeborah]

Ooh, I remember that scene; I didn't know it was a whole trope. Neat!

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

What I don't get about The Spanish Tragedy, is why Lorenzo is so keen to marry off his sister to Balthazar, since by doing so he seems to be doing himself out of a very good chance of inheriting the Spanish throne. But somehow this never comes up. Also love the idea of reconciling the Spanish and Portugese courts by showing how they've both been pwned by the English in days of yore. After all, everyone loves being reminded of military defeat!

But yes, I do like the play a lot. And Bel-Imperia rocks, even if not quite as much as the Duchess.

[deliasherman.livejournal.com]

I love this play unreasonably, since reason has little to do with anything in it. Bel-Imperia is a wonderful character. I've never seen it produced, but Red Bull Theatre is doing a staged reading of it next month, and I'm SO going to be there.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Oh hey, this reminds me: have you ever read Bussy D'Ambois? It was everyone's favorite "I never even heard of this play before, but it is surprisingly good (and weird)" play from a class in Jacobean drama I took about a hundred years ago.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I don't love it as much as The Duchess of Malfi, but then, what lives up to that?

The Changeling?

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Yes!! Totally love The Changeling.

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

...blood and rhetoric all round...

Wonderful review. Yours always make want to read/reread the book.

I hope you've read The Knight of the Burning Pestle? Delirious Jacobean metadrama (a city pastoral tragicomedy romance) in which a grocer and his wife seeded in the audience remake the play at their whims, casting their apprentice as the hero. And it's a magnificent heap of vernacular: there's a louche old reprobate in it who sings snatches of old lauds, nursery rhymes, bawdry, and ballads. I love it.

Nine

Nine

[sovay]

I would love to see this acted, though it's not one I've ever noticed being revived or I'd have gone to it.

I've never even seen a poster. It's even less-performed than actual Seneca.

Also, it sounds awesome.

[crowleycrow.livejournal.com]

You know it appears in the Waste Land ("hieronymo's mad againe" in a pastiche passage). I tried to produce it with puppets (tall and noble rod puppets) in high school, but failed before the difficulties.