Andrea. Have done, impatient marshal.
The Spanish Tragedy continues the story of Jeronimo. Balthazar (the spelling has changed) is brought back to Spain, the joint captive of Horatio and Lorenzo: to the former, however, is allotted the ransom, while to the latter falls the privilege of guarding the prisoner in honourable captivity. The Portuguese prince now falls in love with Bell'-Imperia, and has her brother's full consent to the match. But that lady has already transferred her affections to young Horatio. Lorenzo encourages Balthazar to solve the difficulty by the young man's death. While Bell'-Imperia and Horatio are making love together by night in a garden-bower, Lorenzo, Balthazar and two servants (Serberine and Pedringano) surprise them and hang Horatio to a tree beside the entrance. They then decamp with the lady, whom they forthwith shut up closely in her room at home. Old Hieronimo (formerly Jeronimo), alarmed by the outcry, rushes into the garden, closely followed by his wife Isabella. The body is instantly cut down, but life is extinct.—The rest of the play, from the beginning of the third act, is concerned with Hieronimo's revenge. It is a terrible story. His first information as to the names of the murderers reaches him in a message, written in blood, from Bell'-Imperia. This, however, he fears as a trap, and attempts to corroborate it from the girl's own lips. Unfortunately he only succeeds in awakening the suspicions of Lorenzo, who, to make the secret surer, bribes Pedringano to murder Serberine, at the same time arranging for watchmen to arrest Pedringano. Balthazar is drawn into the matter that he may press forward the execution of Serberine's murderer, while Lorenzo poses to the wretch as his friend with promises of pardon. Pedringano consequently is beguiled to death. Lorenzo is now at ease, and enlarges his sister's liberty. The suggestion of a political marriage between her and Balthazar is warmly supported by the king. Alone among the courtiers Hieronimo is plunged in unabated grief, uncertain where to seek revenge. By good fortune Pedringano, before his trial, wrote a confession, which the hangman finds and delivers to the Marshal. This corroborates the statement of Bell'-Imperia. Yet it brings small comfort, as it seems impossible to strike so high as at Lorenzo and Balthazar. In his despair Hieronimo contemplates suicide, until he remembers that the act would leave the murderers unpunished. He cries aloud before the king for justice, digs frantically into the earth with his dagger in mad excess of misery, then hurries away without telling his wrong. He haunts his garden at night-time; and in the silence of that darkness at last hits upon a scheme: under the appearance of quietness and simplicity he will return to Lorenzo's society, awaiting his time to strike. As if to soothe him with the thought that his griefs are shared by others, chance brings before him one, Bazulto, an old man also bereaved of his son by murder. The reminder, however, is too sharp: Hieronimo becomes temporarily mad, mistaking Bazulto for Horatio and uttering pathetic laments over the change that has passed over his youthful beauty.
Sweet boy, how art thou chang'd in death's black shade!
Had Proserpine no pity on thy youth,
But suffer'd thy fair crimson-colour'd spring
With withered winter to be blasted thus?
Horatio, thou art older than thy father.
When the fit passes, he and Bazulto go off together, one in their misery. But the guileful scheme is not forgotten. Some one has observed the strained relations between the Marshal and Lorenzo: Lorenzo's father insists on a reconciliation, and Hieronimo cordially agrees. Even when the final ratification is given to Bell'-Imperia's marriage with Balthazar, Hieronimo is all smiles and acquiescence. He is willing to heighten the festivities with a play. Lorenzo, Balthazar, Bell'-Imperia and himself are to be the actors, though two of them demur at first at the choice of a tragedy. Still Lorenzo suspects no harm, for he is not present at the interview between the girl and the old man, in which she denounces his apparently weakening thirst for revenge, only to learn the secret of that gentle exterior. Unhappily, the delay of justice has preyed too grievously upon the mind of Isabella. There have been moments when she ran frantic. In a final throe of madness, having hacked down the fatal tree, she thrusts the knife into her own breast. The great day comes, and before the Viceroy of Portugal (father of Balthazar), the Spanish king, the Duke of Castile, and their train, Hieronimo's tragedy is acted. Real daggers, however, have been substituted for wooden ones. As the play proceeds, Bell'-Imperia kills Balthazar and herself, while Hieronimo slays Lorenzo. The only one left alive, Hieronimo, now explains the terrible realism behind all this seeming. Castile and the Viceroy learn that their children are dead, two of them killed to revenge the murder of Horatio. The drawing aside of the curtain at the back of the stage reveals that youth's corpse, avenged at last. Horrible scenes follow, Hieronimo being prevented from hanging himself as he intended. But, desperate, he bites out his tongue, stabs the Duke of Castile, and succeeds in killing himself. The Ghost of Andrea and Revenge, who opened the play and served as chorus to three previous acts, now close the play in triumph.
We may omit from our consideration the additions to the original supplied by Ben Jonson or some other dramatist of genius. These include the famous 'Painter' episode, part of the scene where Hieronimo finds his son's body hanging to a tree, his wonderful discourse to the 'two Portingals' on the nature of a son, and a section of the last scene. The strange hand is easily recognizable in the rugged irregularity and forcefulness of the lines. Attributable to it is the major portion of Hieronimo's madness, which accordingly occupies but a small space in our outline of the play. Structurally, the plot gains nothing by the additions; indeed, the 'Painter' episode duplicates and thereby weakens the effect of the conversation between Hieronimo and Bazulto. Nevertheless we will venture to quote a few lines from the speech to the Portingals, inasmuch as they aptly describe the underlying principle of the tragedy:
Well, heaven is heaven still!
And there is Nemesis and furies,
And things call'd whips;
And they sometimes do meet with murderers:
They do not always escape, that's some comfort.
Ay, ay, ay, and then time steals on, and steals, and steals,
Till violence leaps forth, like thunder, wrapp'd
In a ball of fire,
And so doth bring confusion to them all.
From the hour of Horatio's dastardly murder we wait for Nemesis to fall upon the murderers. We see Lorenzo fortifying himself against detection; we watch, while 'time steals on, and steals, and steals'; Isabella, tired of waiting, kills herself; Hieronimo himself threatens to fail us, so terrible are his sufferings; the crime seems forgotten by those who committed it; its reward is about to drop into Balthazar's hands; and then, at last, 'violence leaps forth, like thunder, ... and so doth bring confusion to them all'.
When we remember the date, as early as, or earlier than, Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, we may be excused if we call The Spanish Tragedy a triumph of dramatic genius. Fully to appreciate its greatness we have only to compare the plot with that of any preceding tragedy, or of any play by Lyly, Greene, or Peele. In none of them shall we find anything approaching the masterful grip upon its spectators, the appeal to their sympathies, the alternation of fear and hope, the skilful subordination of many incidents to one purpose, the absolute rightness yet horror of the conclusion (the inset play), of Kyd's tragedy. It will repay us to examine some of the details of its workmanship.
The crisis begins, for the first time, to gravitate towards the centre of the play. In Classical Drama tragedies open with the crisis. English tragedies of the Senecan type tend to adopt the same practice: Gorboduc begins with Videna's report of the proposal to divide the kingdom; The Misfortunes of Arthur begins with the king's return, referred to as imminent. Even the first scene of Doctor Faustus presents Faustus rejecting divinity for magic, while Mephistophilis enters in the third scene. By delaying the crisis, however, two great advantages are secured: the necessity of the catastrophe is more fully recognized by the spectators; and their capacity for emotion is not strained to the point of weariness before the last great scene is reached. Yet the sense of tragedy must not be entirely absent from the first part; otherwise the gravity of the crisis will come with too great a shock. Kyd's purpose in introducing the Villuppo incident is here discovered. He uses it with much skill as a counterbalance to the aspect of the main plot. Thus, immediately after the apparent satisfaction of the rival claims of Horatio and Lorenzo, he places the unsuspected treachery of Villuppo to Alexandro, as if to warn us not to judge merely from the surface: but when the wickedness of Lorenzo attains its blackest moment in the murder of Horatio, he supplies a ray of hope by the presentment of Villuppo's punishment, to let us know that justice still reigns in the world. Further, the intense (though needless) grief of the Viceroy over the supposed death of his son prepares us for the agony of Hieronimo, while the narrow escape of the innocent Alexandro excites our repugnance for hasty revenge and makes us sympathetically tolerant of Hieronimo's equally extreme caution in ascertaining that Lorenzo really is the murderer. We could wish, perhaps, that Kyd had found material for these two scenes in the Spanish Court: the transition to the Portuguese palace is a far and sudden flight. But his recognition of the artistic need of such scenes is notable and sound.
It is worth while to observe the close interweaving, the subtle irony and contrasts, the perfect harmony of the details. We must review them quite briefly. To illustrate the first, Pedringano's letter is not the 'wonderful discovery' that usually saves lost situations in weak novels: it has been referred to by him as already written before the Page takes Lorenzo's message, and its incriminating contents have been clearly indicated; nothing, moreover, could be more in order than that it should be found on him by the hangman and delivered to the judge who passed sentence. Or again, the success of Hieronimo's masque in the first act supplies the reason for Balthazar's request for a play at his wedding; that last tragedy is not suggested fortuitously to accommodate some previous scheme of Hieronimo's. The powerful nature of the meeting between Hieronimo and Bazulto was recognized by that other writer who added the 'Painter' episode in close imitation of it. But almost as bitter in its irony is the position of Hieronimo as judge, executing justice upon Serberine's murderer while his own son's murderers go scot free. Grimly ironical, too, is Castile's satisfaction in the reconciliation of Lorenzo and the Marshal, and grimmer and more ironical still the request for the fatal play by Lorenzo and Balthazar themselves, who of all men should most have shrunk from it. The most critical element in the general harmony of the play is the character of Bell'-Imperia. Kyd's women are his weak point, and this heroine is no brilliant exception. We certainly do not fall in love with her. But his sense of what is needed for the right tragic effect carries him through successfully in essential matters. Were Bell'-Imperia weak, irresolute, had she the feeble constancy of Massinger's or Heywood's famous heroines, there would be a wrecking flaw in the accumulated, resistless demand for revenge. As it is, her love for Horatio is passionate (though lacking delicacy), her responses to Balthazar's advances are cold, and her reproachful words to Hieronimo, for his delay in striking, proclaim her entirely at one with him in his final action. The part played by Isabella is also subordinated to the total effect. It may be questioned whether her madness does not weaken by exaggeration the impression made by Hieronimo's frenzy; but it must be remembered that her part was provided before the additional mad scenes, the work of the later hand, were included in the play. Kyd deliberately chose that her madness should precede and prepare us for the madness of Hieronimo, and it must be admitted that the interpolator's departure from this order has little to be said in its favour. As the weaker character, Isabella should be the first to collapse. Her frantic death, just before the 'play', emphasizes the imperative necessity that the long postponement of justice should be ended at last. With never failing watchfulness of his audience Kyd softens the tension directly afterwards with a few light touches on the staging and disguises required for the forthcoming performance. Lastly, the choice of a court tragedy as the instrument of Hieronimo's revenge is admirable alike for its naturalness and for dramatic effect as a flashlight re-illumination of Lorenzo's and Balthazar's crime in all its horror, in the very hour of their punishment. Lorenzo, under the figure of Erastus, is forced to occupy the position once held by Horatio; Hieronimo, for the time being, becomes a second Lorenzo, abettor to the treacherous guest; thus Lorenzo falls by the same fate that he visited upon Horatio. Balthazar plays his own part under a new name; he is still the stranger basely seeking the love given to another; but this time he meets the reward due to treachery, slain by the hand of Bell'-Imperia.—The death of Hieronimo, badly mismanaged, is the only real blot upon the artistry of the play. It must be passed over with a sigh of regret, in the same way as we accept, as inexplicable, the 'Out, vile jelly!' of King Lear. To seize upon it as typical of the nature of the tragedy would be very unfair.