“Make me curse,” he cries, “make me rave, make me cry, make me mad, make me well again, make me curse hell, invocate heaven, and in the end leave me in a trance—and so forth.
Painter. And is this the end?
Hieronimo. O no, there is no end: the end is death and madness! As I am never better than when I am
mad; then, methinks, I am a brave fellow; then I do wonders; but reason abuseth me, and there’s the torment, there’s the hell. At the last, sir, bring me to one of the murderers; were he as strong as Hector, thus would I tear and drag him up and down.”[65:1]
Hieronimo’s wife, Isabella, who is similarly afflicted by Horatio’s murder, though she plays a much smaller part in the play, first “runs lunatic” in a short scene with her maid. Here her talk is mere nonsense:
“Why did I not give you gowns and goodly things,
Bought you a whistle and a whipstalk too,
To be revenged on their villanies?”[65:2]
She seems sane enough, however, in the “Painte Scene,” and only appears once again,[65:3] when she cuts down the accursèd arbour and, after a long soliloquy, stabs herself.
The comparatively rough sketches of Greene and Kyd—the first, in order of time, of those under consideration—have been introduced thus early into this chapter for the sake of contrast with the figures that follow.[65:4] Kyd, in “The Spanish Tragedy,” almost certainly inspired “Titus Andronicus,” and we may be fairly sure of his influence on “Hamlet.” Now that we have