Revenge Tragedy and the Drama of Commemoration in Reforming England

Thomas Rist

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351903370
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Considering major works by Kyd, Shakespeare, Middleton and Webster among others, this book transforms current understanding of early modern revenge tragedy. Examing the genre in light of historical revisions to England's Reformations, and with appropriate regard to the social history of the dead, it shows revenge tragedy is not an anti-Catholic and Reformist genre, but one rooted in, and in dialogue with, traditional Catholic culture. Arguing its tragedies are bound to the age's funerary performances, it provides a new view of the contemporary theatre and especially its role in the religious upheavals of the period.

Chapter 1
‘Outrage Fits’: Revenge and the ‘Melodrama’ of Mourning in The Spanish Tragedy, Titus Andronicus and Hamlet¹

The Spanish Tragedy, c.1586–1587²

The persistence of ‘Broudian’ readings of The Spanish Tragedy is visible in an essay by J.R. Mulryne published in 1996, in which he discusses Hieronimo’s play ‘Soliman and Perseda’ as follows: ‘If we accept the Hispanophobic prejudice drawn out by [Ronald] Broude and [Eugene] Hill as pertinent to the play as a whole, then the relevance of the Turkish tragedy of Soliman and Perseda to the play’s portrayal of the fall of the papist realm of Spain becomes obvious.’³ Reflecting the importance of The Spanish Tragedy in Broude’s theory of ‘classic’ revenges, this tragedy was the only one to which Broude accorded a whole essay on matters religious.⁴ Since this essay presents Broude’s most detailed and developed illustration of his theory, it is without apology that I begin with a consideration of Hill and Broude’s specific arguments: on them both, as Mulryne recognized, The Spanish Tragedy’s alleged anti-Catholicism has substantially rested, while Broude’s particular attention to the play deserves a particular response. Despite Mulryne, however, notice from the outset that although given focus by a Spanish Armada both threatened and in 1588 delivered, English antipathy to Imperial Spain is not to be equated simply with anti-Catholicism: irrespective of their religion, Elizabethans (including Catholics) could resent Spain on grounds purely patriotic.⁵ Pointed though it may be – I shall challenge this too – The Spanish Tragedy’s ‘Iberian history’⁶ is therefore not in itself anti-Catholic; and since we can no longer infer a Protestant audience holistically anti-Catholic, we should not thus delimit the play.

This chapter argues a further point against Broude and Hill: that their anti-Catholic readings ignore vital pieces of information and therefore cannot be said (again despite Mulryne) to describe The Spanish Tragedy ‘as a whole’. Bearing in mind the historical observations of the Introduction, this argument will demonstrate textually how substantial the un-Reformed aspect of the play is, and thus how incomplete (and occasionally unlikely) anti-Catholic readings are – especially as there is only one direct allusion to ‘Babylon’ in The Spanish Tragedy.⁷ Fending off suspicions of misrepresentation by drawing on his established (and sympathetic) accounts, however, I begin with Mulryne’s useful summaries of Broude and Hill’s positions.

Mulryne summarizes Broude as follows:

Broude argues that Kyd’s play may be seen to turn on the fulcrum of Isabella’s line (II.v.59):

‘Time is the author both of truth and right.’

He [Broude] tells us:

Time as the revealer of truth and bringer of justice was a topos well known in Humanist circles… It was particularly prominent in Protestant thought… During the ominous 1580’s and 90’s… the topos [sic.] enjoyed special currency and seemed to promise not only that England would come through individual trials but that Divine Providence would guide English Protestantism through all its perils to ultimate victory.

The narrative of The Spanish Tragedy, Broude says, functions to reveal this humanist (but here sectarian) topos in action. Four narrative threads bind the play together in a series of revelations. Innocence is vindicated, calumny is unmasked, secret murder is revealed and avenged, and the wickedness of the Spanish royal house is brought to light. The play’s ultimate catastrophe shows Time as not merely serial but providential. Broude takes this to mean that The Spanish Tragedy must have jingoistic appeal for its English audience.⁸

Superficially this seems plausible enough, but a moment’s consideration reveals inherent problems. If the ‘innocence’ of Hieronimo is vindicated, what are we to make of his death? And if Spain presents ‘wickedness’, what are we to make of its ‘innocent’ conqueror’s Spanish-ness? Perhaps these paradoxes can be resolved – especially if we recognize the paradox of a Reformed England still largely in the thrall of Catholic customs – but in the Broudian reading they reveal a discordance. Further discordance is revealed by Broude himself: his reading, he acknowledges, is ‘symbolic’, rather than strictly historical, because ‘the Spain of Kyd’s play cannot be taken literally as the historical Spain’.⁹ This acknowledgement implies that less ‘symbolic’, more strictly historical (and perhaps other), readings of The Spanish Tragedy will reveal differing views of its religio-politic; in addition, notice that if the anti-Spanish reading is ‘symbolic’, then an interpretative leap is needed to achieve it which is not textually self-evident – a point worth emphasizing as anti-Spanish readings tacitly but fallaciously imply the play’s contemporary reference to a corrupt Spain implies hostility to all things Spanish. However, even leaving each of these difficulties aside, there remains a more substantial problem: one should not but hesitate to endorse the reading of an entire play which centres on a single idea – let alone a single line. Nor, being the basis of the play’s holistic interpretation, should the line thus bear so powerfully on the interpretation of the genre! Illustratively, in what follows I shall argue that the implication of different lines belonging to Isabella – especially ‘O, gush out, tears, fountains and floods of tears; / Blow, sighs, and raise an everlasting storm; / For outrage fits our cursed wretchedness’ (II.iv.105–7) – offer a very different perspective of The Spanish Tragedy.

Next, however, I consider Hill’s argument, again making use of Mulryne’s established and sympathetic summary. Highlighting another drawback of Broude’s analysis, this view ‘takes in, as Broude does not, the framing action of Andrea and Revenge’:¹⁰

For Hill, The Spanish Tragedy evokes, foregrounds and enacts ‘a translatio studii, an historical rearticulating of privileged cultural models’, these models being the creative insights associated with Virgil (in the framing action largely) and with Seneca. Recent studies, Hill argues, have recovered something of the Elizabethan Seneca as a writer who ‘has no peer among classical poets in conveying the texture of evil in a hopelessly corrupt polity’. Virgil, by contrast, evokes in the Aeneid the burying of a regretted past, and the foundation of an enduring kingdom. ‘In Seneca’, Hill writes, ‘we observe with horror a hell-bent royal house, foundering in corruption. In Virgil we participate with wonderment in a rite of passage which inaugurates a new era of history. The Senecan emphasis of The Spanish Tragedy is perhaps clear enough; the Virgilian perhaps needs some clarification. The Senecan prologue of the play, Hill explains, has been rewritten as an inversion of Aeneid VI:

‘In place of pious Aeneas… Kyd gives us proud Andrea… Aeneas is led into the underworld by the ever-vigilant Sybil… Andrea is taken from the underworld by Revenge, who falls asleep. Aeneas learns the glorious destiny of his Trojan line and sees the future Emperor of Rome; Andrea watches the downfall of the Spanish royal house…’

Hill shows how such sentiments would chime with popular myth-making among the Elizabethans. Spain came to be regarded as a kingdom ‘too arrogant to note that it is ripe for downfall’, while England began to cherish imperialist visions of London as the new Troy (following Rome) and Englishmen as the new Romans. Thus anti-Spanish propaganda achieves in Kyd’s play a culturally secure expression, making the energies of Senecan theatre expressively present for the Elizabethan popular stage.¹¹

We cannot suggest this view is as reductive as Broude’s: on the face of it, its persuasiveness derives from the very holistic-ness of its approach. Yet sophisticated as it is, it is not a ‘secure expression’ because it was never intended to present ‘popular myth-making’ in any holistic sense. Hill himself makes this clear, claiming his reading only ‘speaks for a significant body of advanced Elizabethan opinion’.¹² The implication of this claim would seem to be that the less ‘advanced’ saw differently.

Hill’s reading has three further limitations of a serious kind. First, it says nothing of that other source for revenge tragedy noted in the Introduction: Aeschylus, specifically his funerary remembrance;¹³ and as we shall observe, it omits the substantial – ultimately Homeric – view of funerals to which Aeschylus himself was indebted. Lukas Erne’s recent claim that Horatio’s funeral in The Spanish Tragedy derives from The First ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• General Editor’s Preface
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 ‘Outrage Fits’: Revenge and the ‘Melodrama’ of Mourning in The Spanish Tragedy, Titus Andronicus and Hamlet
• 2 Funerary Theatre: Mourning, Antonio’s Revenge and Paul’s Theatre
• 3 Melodrama and Parody: Remembering the Dead in The Revenger’s Tragedy, The Atheist’s Tragedy, The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi
• Conclusion
• Select Bibliography
• Index