The Spanish Tragedy by Rist Thomas;Hiscock Andrew;Hopkins Lisa;

Author:Rist, Thomas;Hiscock, Andrew;Hopkins, Lisa;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: A Critical Reader
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2019-11-23T00:00:00+00:00

6

New Directions: The Spanish Tragedy and Virgil

Tom Rutter

Although Hieronimo’s grief for his son Horatio, and his struggle to achieve justice for him, are the emotional and thematic focus of The Spanish Tragedy, Kyd also supplies the play with a framing device of unusual prominence and detail: the story of Don Andrea, whose words introduce and conclude the action and who watches it unfold, providing occasional comment and thus serving along with Revenge as ‘chorus in this tragedy’ (1.1.91). In the opening scene, Andrea’s Ghost briefly summarizes his birth, life at court, love for Bel-imperia, and death in the war against Portugal. He then offers a more detailed account of his soul’s descent to the Underworld, the disagreement between Minos, Aeacus and Rhadamanth over where he should spend eternity, and the decision of Proserpine that he should return to the upper world where, in the words of Revenge, he is to see

the author of thy death,

Don Balthazar, the Prince of Portugal,

Deprived of life by Bel-imperia. (1.1.87–9)

At this point the tragedy proper begins with the entry of the Spanish King and the other characters.

Kyd’s decision to open The Spanish Tragedy with speeches from a Ghost accompanied by Revenge was probably suggested by the practice of the first-century dramatist Seneca (see Gordon Braden’s chapter in this collection), whose Thyestes begins with an exchange between the Ghost of Tantalus and a Fury in which the bloody events of the play are anticipated and whose Agamemnon, in turn, opens with a speech from the Ghost of Thyestes. However, the details of Andrea’s posthumous journey show the clear influence of an earlier Latin poet, namely Publius Vergilius Maro or Virgil (70 bc–19 bc), whose twelve-book epic the Aeneid includes a description of the hero’s descent to the Underworld. The current chapter surveys some of the ways in which Kyd’s use of Virgil has been understood by critics, before considering his play in the light of two texts from his own era that seem to address the broader question of how popular drama should position itself in relation to the classical tradition of which Virgil was a part: Thomas Nashe’s Preface to Menaphon and Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus.

*

In book 6 of Virgil’s poem, the hero, Aeneas, whose wanderings by sea after fleeing the destruction of Troy have finally brought him to Italy, is led by the prophetic Sybil into the land of the dead. Here he encounters former comrades, is told of the punishments suffered by evildoers, speaks with his dead father Anchises, and sees a vision of the future foundation and history of Rome before returning to the world of the living. This sequence provides considerable material that finds its way into Andrea’s narrative. The ferryman Charon’s insistence that with Andrea’s ‘rites of burial not performed, | I might not sit amongst his passengers’ (1.1.21–2) recalls the fate of Aeneas’s friend Palinurus, unable to cross the river Styx while his body remains unburied. The Sybil helps Aeneas past the three-headed guard-dog Cerberus with the help of drugged honey, while Andrea talks of ‘pleasing Cerberus with honeyed speech’ (1.

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