Abstract
Nicoleta Cinpoeş’s collection of essays on The Spanish Tragedy begins with her assertion that Kyd’s play now stands ‘at the forefront’ of discussions surrounding early modern ‘stage practice, the emergence of the revenge genre in England, authorship, collaborative playwriting and the (re)distribution and attribution of plays from the period’ (4).
The first two essays included, Philip Edwards’s ‘Supernatural Structures in Kyd and Shakespeare’ and Jonathan Bate’s ‘Enacting Revenge: The Mingled Yarn of Elizabethan Tragedy’, substantiate her claim. Edwards views the play as among the first ‘which freed’ itself from ‘moral clichés’ and focused on the ‘interweaving’ of ‘passions, desires, and plans’ of ‘individuals, the outcome of which had nothing to do’ with ‘divine guidance’ (15). Kyd’s scepticism influenced Shakespeare, whose Hamlet shares with The Spanish Tragedy a suggestion that ‘the future belongs neither to the individual nor to the gods’, as well as a tragic form that foregrounds ‘intersecting paths of desires and passions of relatively ordinary individuals’ (20).
Bate’s ‘Enacting Revenge’ commences with a superb brief history of English tragedy, covering both its constitution and contemporary critical reactions to it. After commenting that the most ‘memorable’ feature of Elizabethan tragedy is to be found in its celebration of the ‘energies’ of its vice figures – and not in any ‘structure of redemption’ (29), Bate explains that neither Aristotelian nor Elizabethan tragedy relies upon hamartia, or tragic flaw, to enact a play’s tragedy. Instead, and as illustrated by The Spanish Tragedy’s Hieronimo, ‘hamartia is an action, not a predisposition’ (31). Bate likewise distances Kydian and Shakespearean popular tragedy from Seneca; their tragedy juxtaposed ‘spectacle’ alongside ‘comedy’ (33).
Evghenii Musica’s ‘Vindicating Revenge’ and Kristine Steenbergh’s ‘Gendering Revenge in The Spanish Tragedy: Feminine Fury and the Contagiousness of Theatrical Passion’ examine Kyd’s play’s metatheatricality. Musica claims Kyd ‘radically metaphorises justice as theatre and theatre as justice’ (45) as he reveals how ‘universality assumed by law and civilisation at the break of modernity’ emerges as ‘the true problem pertaining to the notion of peace’ (44). Despite our denials, ‘no viable alternative’ to revenge exists, ‘either in this world or the next’ (49). Identifying revenge in Kyd’s play as feminine, and explaining Seneca’s and the Inns of Court’s gender expectations in revenge tragedy, Steenbergh examines how The Spanish Tragedy ‘employs gender strategies to problematise the theatrical performance of vengefulness’, including the reversal of ‘gender patterns’ (53). While Bel-imperia drives the play’s revenge plot, she never loses self-control and thus disrupts expectations of women in revenge plays. Kyd depicts Hieronimo, on the other hand, as ‘mad and out of control’ (54) and, more significantly, ‘infected’ by a ‘feminine fury’ (53) that threatens social stability by staging it before lower-class audiences.
These essays constitute the collection’s first section, entitled ‘Vindicta mihi’, which traces the revenge genre from Seneca to the English stage. The second section, ‘The Spanish Tragedy in Print’, commences with Simon Barker’s ‘Undoing Kyd: The Texts of The Spanish Tragedy’, an account of his and Hilary Hinds’s preparations of Kyd’s text for publication. Barker discusses the complications regarding financial and textual matters as well as those involving gender, domestic, ethical and other issues that Kyd’s text foregrounds. The section’s second essay, Jesús Tronch’s ‘Editing The Spanish Tragedy in the Early Twenty-First Century’, probes the necessity for another edition of the play. After explaining the differences in each of the text’s first four quarto editions, as well as discussing the ‘innovations’ (92) Q4 introduced, Tronch suggests an edition that offers Q1 and Q4 together yet ‘typographically distinguished’ (103).
Part 3, ‘Chronicles of Spain or Tales of Albion?’, includes essays that consider political and cultural contexts. Clara Calvo’s ‘How Spanish is The Spanish Tragedy? Dynastic Policy and Colonial Expansion in Revenge Tragedy’ considers Kyd’s portrayal of Mediterranean culture ‘in relation to early modern England’ and England’s ‘desire’ for ‘colonial expansion’. Calvo believes Kyd ‘simultaneously’ (113) depicts Mediterranean dynasties as corrupt and outlines England’s pursuit of empire at their expense. In ‘Kyd’s Use of Antonio Perez’s Las Relaciones in The Spanish Tragedy’, Frank Ardolino focuses upon those episodes dealing with Serberine’s murder and Pendringano’s betrayal and execution. These scenes introduce a ‘subtext that is related to the play’s anti-Spanish themes’ (130). Ardolino parallels Perez’s ‘scandalous revelations’ (134) with the play and illustrates how Kyd created ‘repeated images of betrayal, sexual intrigue, political murder and legal punishment’ within the Spanish ruling elite (140). Ton Hoenselaars and Helmer Helmers’s ‘The Spanish Tragedy and Revenge Tragedy in Seventeenth-Century Britain and the Low Countries’ offers an overview of Kyd’s play’s influence, through translation and adaptation, on the continent, as well as these translations’ ‘challenge’ to the ‘stability of’ the play’s text as accepted by English editors (149). Hoenselaars and Helmers also discuss the play’s later usefulness to ‘Anglo-Dutch discourse’ during the Puritan revolution (152).
Part 4, ‘Doing Kyd’, includes three essays exploring The Spanish Tragedy in performance. Tony Howard’s ‘Staging Babel: The Spanish Tragedy IV.iv in Performance’, examines how four Spanish Tragedy productions since 1978 ‘handled a great but problematic Elizabeth text’ (172), particularly as concerns space, staging, choice of text (as well as of language) and themes. Howard’s text closes with a discussion of Orhan Pamuk’s borrowing of IV.iv in his novel, Snow. In ‘Hieronimo Still Mad: Why Adapt The Spanish Tragedy Today?’, screenwriter Tod Davies argues that Kyd’s play speaks to us because it depicts a man ‘who believes in the justice of an unjust society – until it takes away the thing he loves most in the world’ (196). Carol Chillington Rutter’s essay, ‘“For what’s a play without a woman in it?”’ focuses on Isabella, Hieronimo’s wife and Horatio’s mother, and her enactment of both the ‘feminine fury’ (Steenbergh’s phrase) that Hieronimo will perform and the ‘vir-tuous, manly reason’ (204) that he could perform. Their ‘double act’ allows Kyd to ‘stage interiority’ and ‘to show mental and emotional states outside the body even as’ he concentrates on the ‘materiality of that body’ (207).
This valuable compendium, which revisits the critical reception of a landmark play and confirms its relevance for modern-day audiences, concludes with Cinpoeş’s comprehensive bibliography of Kyd studies from 1993 to 2013 as well as an index.