The Spanish Tragedy and the Ur-Hamlet

by Fredson Thayer Bowers

SOURCE: Bowers, Fredson Thayer. “The Spanish Tragedy and the Ur-Hamlet.” In Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy, 1587-1642, pp. 62-100. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1959.

[In the following essay, which was first published in 1940, Bowers examines The Spanish Tragedy and the Ur-Hamlet as examples of the prototypical revenge tragedy, outlining the basic Kydian formula for creating a revenge tragedy, discussing probable sources and influences, and remarking on how the form was widely imitated by other Elizabethan dramatists.]

The tragedy of revenge has been classified as a definite, small subdivision of the Elizabethan tragedy of blood; and obviously, plays like The Spanish Tragedy, Antonio's Revenge, and Hamlet should be set apart as a specific type from Shakespeare's Lear, Marston's Sophonisba, and Nabbes's Unfortunate Mother. These represent the two extremes of the tragedy of blood: on the one hand a cluster of plays which treat, according to a moderately rigid dramatic formula, blood-revenge for murder as the central tragic fact; on the other, an amorphous group with no such definite characteristic, linked only by a delight in blood and sensationalism.

Since “tragedy of blood” is by necessity a generalized and all-inclusive term, it has been convenient to ticket certain subdivisions as revenge tragedy, villain tragedy, conqueror tragedy, and realistic or domestic tragedy. Thus set apart artificially, the revenge tragedy of the Hamlet school has been defined as “a distinct species of the tragedy of blood … a tragedy whose leading motive is revenge and whose main action deals with the progress of this revenge, leading to the deaths of the murderers and often the death of the avenger himself.”¹ Until critics applied it too rigidly, such a distinction was very usefully employed for the small group of early dramas written almost exclusively under the influence of the Kydian formula for tragedy. But such a statement as that revenge tragedy died with Webster,² reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what actually constitutes revenge tragedy and its place in Elizabethan drama.

Between the two extremes of Hamlet and Lear lies a considerable body of tragedies wherein the exhibition of revengeful action is prominent and wherein the dramatists have depended upon revenge entirely for the motivation of their tragic catastrophes. Taken point by point, Shirley's Cardinal of 1642 is as strict a revenge tragedy as The Spanish Tragedy. Revenge is as much the leading motive and the force behind the action in Heminge's Fatal Contract as in Chettle's Hoffman. Massinger's Duke of Milan works out its tragic plot only by the use of a revenge for a serious injury. However, though many plays were only slight modifications of the Kyd formula, it is still difficult to classify them rigidly as revenge plays. The leading motive of The Spanish Tragedy is revenge, but the motive does not appear as a determinant in the plot until the middle of the play, since the characters must first be set in conflict to provide the murder which is to be revenged. Many later tragedies preserved Kyd's use of revenge as the cause of the catastrophe, but so far extended the preparative action at the expense of the resulting revengeful action that it becomes impossible to say that revenge is any longer the dominant motive.

For the average Elizabethan tragedy, “tragedy of blood” must stand as a general designation for the external characteristics of violence and blood, while “revenge tragedy,” in its broader sense, defines the real dramatic motivation behind much of that blood and violence. But since this broader revenge tragedy developed by modifying a relatively pure type, the distinction of the original set form should be preserved for technical use, as formerly, by the term “tragedy of revenge.”

The blood-revenge of the protagonist distinguishes the pure type of the Kydian “tragedy of revenge.” This revenge constitutes the main action of the play in the sense that the audience is chiefly interested in the events which lead to the necessary revenge for murder, and then in the revenger's actions in accordance with his vow. The revenge must be the cause of the catastrophe, and its start must not be delayed beyond the crisis. “Revenge tragedy” customarily (but by no means necessarily) portrays the ghosts of the murdered urging revenge, a hesitation on the part of the avenger, a delay in proceeding to his vengeance, and his feigned or actual madness. The antagonist's counter-intrigue against the revenger may occupy a prominent position in the plot.

This definition holds only for the original type of The Spanish Tragedy and Hamlet in its purest form. The several types of the later modified revenge play require a broader definition. In the broader general type of the tragedy of revenge the catastrophe is brought about by a human or divine revenge for an unrighted wrong. The workings towards this revenge need not necessarily constitute the main plot, which may, instead, be concerned with developing the tragic situation which induces the revenge. Revenge, however, must be concerned in the catastrophe and must not enter the play solely as a fifth-act deus ex machina to resolve the plot without some antecedent interest in its action. To this generalized statement may be added an abstract of characteristics. The revenge may be conceived either by a hero or by a villain, who may be either protagonist or antagonist. The reason for revenge may range from blood-vengeance to jealousy, resentment of injury or insult (real or fancied), or self-preservation. The revenge must be carried out by the revenger himself or his interested accomplices. In some few plays, however, the theme of heavenly vengeance results in the destruction of the murderers or injurers either through their machinations against one another or through circumstances not consciously engineered by the revenger. When guilty the opponents of the revenger are usually killed or disgraced, and even the innocent do not always escape death. The revenger and his agents may fall at the moment of success, and sometimes even during the course of the vengeance. If the revenger is a villain he is always killed. Intrigue is customarily resorted to by one side or both sides; and since the revenge is serious, deaths are numerous and often bloody and horrible. Ghosts of the injured dead may appear to urge on the revenge or to utter forebodings, and a free use may be made of horrors. In extreme cases the interest through most of the play may be concentrated on the accumulation of various villainies and intrigues which at the last arouse the catastrophic revenge.

With the production of The Spanish Tragedy Elizabethan tragedy received its first great impetus. The immediate and long-lasting popularity of the play stamped it as a type, a form to be imitated. Thus it is of the highest significance that The Spanish Tragedy first popularized revenge as a tragic motive on the Elizabethan popular stage by using blood-vengeance as the core of its dramatic action.³ True, earlier English tragedies, leaning heavily on Seneca, had utilized revenge to a certain extent for dramatic motivation. But in Gorboduc (1562) any incipient interest in the characters' motives of revenge is stifled under the emphasis on the political theme and the general classical decorum, and the ancient classical story of revenge in John Pikeryng's Horestes (1567) is so medievalized that it loses all significance except as a basis for comedy and pageantry. Gismond of Salerne, acted at the Inner Temple in 1567/8, borrows various revenge trappings from Seneca and the Italians but the pathetic love story usurps the main interest.

Elizabethan revenge tragedy properly begins with Thomas Kyd's extant masterpiece, The Spanish Tragedy (1587-1589) which presented revenge in kind—blood-revenge, the sacred duty of the father to avenge the murder of his son—and from that sensational theme derived its popularity. Sensational though the central motive proved, it was a universal one, appealing to all classes of people and to all time. As in the law-abiding Athens of Aeschylus, the Greek audience saw enacted in the Orestes trilogy events of a more turbulent past but now outmoded, so the English spectators viewed dramatic action at once somewhat foreign to their present state of society yet still within their range of sympathy and understanding. The realism was clinched when the scene was laid in another country where, to their knowledge, the people were crueler and more revengeful, and where, as in Italy, the individualistic spirit still flourished among the nobility in despite of the law.

The Spanish Tragedy is far from a perfect working-out of a revenge theme. Kyd started to make a Senecan imitation adapted to the popular stage. Someone has been killed, and the slayer is to suffer the revenge of the ghost, presumably by becoming tangled in his own misdeeds as in Hercules Furens, or, as in Thyestes, through the malign influence of the supernatural chorus. Curiously, this Senecan ghost's reason for revenge is extraordinarily weak as seen through English eyes. The parallel with the ghost of Achilles in Troades which rises to demand vengeance for death in battle is obvious, but an English popular audience could not become excited over a ghost seeking vengeance for a fair death in the field.⁴ No very personal interest can be aroused in the early action of the play if it proceeds solely from the point of view of an alien ghost, and with Horatio as the successful avenger of his friend.

The first human note is struck when Bel-Imperia resolves to use second love, in the person of Horatio, to revenge the death of her first lover. If this resolution had furnished the plot, the sequence of events would still have revolved about the ghost but with greater logic. Bel-Imperia is more closely connected with Andrea than Horatio, and some semblance of justification is added when Balthazar begins his suit, for the audience can visualize a forced marriage with the slayer of her lover, an impossible situation. Furthermore, at the moment she was the logical revenger since women were noted for their revengefulness in Elizabethan life and the Italian novelle.⁵ The whole first act is devoted to the exposition and to the resolution of the beloved to revenge the death of her lover. The rising action is begun when Bel-Imperia starts to charm Horatio, her chosen instrument for the revenge, and some hint is given of an opposing force in the person of her brother Lorenzo who has sided with Balthazar's suit.

Still the situation is dramatically almost impossible. Horatio has no thought that Andrea's death requires vengeance; consequently, if he is intended for the revenger of blood, he will prove no more than the weak tool of Bel-Imperia, who, by her insistence in driving him to the deed, will become a villainess. And if Horatio is not to be made this anomalous revenger, Bel-Imperia's only course would be so to set Balthazar and Horatio at odds over her love that one or the other is killed. If Balthazar falls, the play is no tragedy. If, on the other hand, Horatio is killed, his position as Bel-Imperia's tool precludes the sympathy of the audience, and forces Bel-Imperia herself to kill Balthazar, a course she might have followed in the beginning without causing the death of an innocent man. If Horatio is not conceived as a mere instrument for the unscrupulous Bel-Imperia but as a real and requited lover, his position as revenger for a preceding lover grows even more anomalous, and the revenge for Andrea loses all ethical dignity.

The only solution lies in developing the strength of the opposing force. The second act, therefore, is given over entirely to showing the ascendancy of Lorenzo. Necessarily the revenge theme lies dormant while Kyd devotes himself to painting an idyllic picture of the love of Horatio and Bel-Imperia, and its fatal end. Bel-Imperia is ostensibly carrying out her avowed intention to love Horatio and thus spite Balthazar, but since her passion for Horatio (which has rapidly passed from pretense to reality) seems to have replaced her desire to revenge Andrea, the central theme of revenge is dropped in the emphasis on the happy lovers. Balthazar now has a tangible reason for a revenge: first, because Horatio took him prisoner in battle, and second because Horatio has preempted his intended bride. With Lorenzo as the guiding spirit, the two slay Horatio. The deed is presumably the revenge of Balthazar, but Lorenzo's cold determination to brush aside all obstacles to his sister's royal marriage makes him the real murderer.

At this point the tragedy has strayed its farthest from the main theme as announced by the chorus composed of Revenge and the ghost of Andrea. This time, however, a real revenger of blood appears. Hieronimo does not know the murderers of his son, but he plans to dissemble until he learns and then to strike. At the finish of the second act, with Bel-Imperia imprisoned, and a new revenger for a new crime appearing, the play actually disregards the revenge for Andrea and settles down to dramatize a revenge among men for a crime already seen and appreciated by the audience, no longer a revenge for an unreasonable ghost. From this point the ghost and his theme, which was to be the core of the play, are superfluous; and, indeed, need never have been introduced.

The third act, which begins the second half of the play, works out two lines of action: the progress made by the revenger Hieronimo, and the efforts of the murderer Lorenzo to consolidate his position in order to escape detection. The difficulty of appropriate dramatic action for the revenger posed a nice problem for Kyd. A revenger with no knowledge and no possible clues to investigate is a static figure since action is impossible. Yet a revenger with complete knowledge would normally act at once, and the play would be over. Kyd solved the problem brilliantly. The note from Bel-Imperia which gives him the names of the murderers is so startling that Hieronimo suspects a trap, for he knows of no motive why Lorenzo and the foreign prince should have killed his son. He must therefore assure himself of the truth before he acts, and since Bel-Imperia has been removed from court a delay is unavoidable. At one stroke Kyd has given the necessary information to the revenger, and then tied his hands until the plot has further unfolded.

Hieronimo's projected investigation has provided him with some dramatic action, particularly when the course of his inquiries sets the opposing force once more in motion. Lorenzo, believing his secret revealed, endeavors to destroy all proof by ridding himself of his accomplices Serberine and Pedringano. Ironically, it is this deed which finally gives the revenger his necessary corroboration in the incriminating letter found on Pedringano's dead body. The doubts of Bel-Imperia's letter are now resolved; his delay ended, Hieronimo rushes to the king for justice. It is important to note that Hieronimo first endeavors to secure his legal rights before taking the law into his own hands. Again a problem in plotting occurs. Hieronimo with his proof will gain the king's ear; Bel-Imperia will second Pedringano's letter; the murderers will be executed. Another impossible dramatic situation looms, for there would be no conflict of forces and no tragedy except of the most accidental sort.

It is evident that the revenger must be made to delay once more. Fear of deception cannot be employed again, and clearly the only possible means is either to delay Hieronimo's interview with the king or else to introduce some motive that would lead the king to discredit him. Once again Kyd brilliantly solved the problem by introducing the motive of madness. Isabella, Hieronimo's wife, runs mad, and Hieronimo next appears so stunned by grief for her and for his son that his own wits have been unsettled. He answers a request for information so wildly that his questioners think him wholly insane. Realizing that his madness has made him impotent, he meditates suicide but thrusts the thought aside before the reviving sense of his duty to revenge. His distraction, however, keeps him from gaining the king's ear, and when he recovers his senses he realizes that he can never find legal justice but must act as the executioner himself.

At this point the reasons for delay, previously logical, break down. Hieronimo says simply that he will revenge Horatio's death, but

not as the vulgare wits of men,
With open, but ineuitable ils,
As by a secret, yet a certaine meane,
Which vnder kindeship wilbe cloked best.
Wise men will take their opportunitie,
Closely and safely fitting things to time.
But in extreames aduantage hath no time;
And therefore all times fit not for reuenge. …
Remedium malorum iners est.
Nor ought auailes it me to menace them
Who as a wintrie storme vpon a plaine,
Will beare me downe with their nobilitie.

(III, xiii, 21-38)

These are scarcely valid reasons for delay in the execution of his private justice, since he admits that open and inevitable ills exist (without the necessity for delay) by which he could overthrow his enemies. Of course, his intention to dissemble patiently and to wait until he can consummate his vengeance at the right time and place heightens the interest in the inevitable catastrophe. The speech, in its entirety, would nevertheless irretrievably weaken the logic of the plot and the conception of Hieronimo's character were it not that it marks the turning point from Hieronimo the hero to Hieronimo the villain.

The fourth and last act opens with Bel-Imperia, now entirely forgetful of Andrea, swearing that if Hieronimo neglects his duty to revenge Horatio she herself will kill the murderers. Hieronimo presumably has a plan in mind, for the manuscript of the tragedy is ready when Lorenzo asks for an entertainment. Isabella, tortured by the thought of the unrevenged death of her son, kills herself in a fit of madness. Hieronimo braces himself for his revenge, and the fatal play is enacted. Even with Lorenzo and Balthazar slain and Bel-Imperia a suicide, the Viceroy, Balthazar's father, interposes for Hieronimo. Then occurs a scene which is useless except as it leads to the final culmination of horrors and the eventual conception of Hieronimo as a dangerous, blood-thirsty maniac. Hieronimo from the stage has already rehearsed his reasons for the murders, but the king orders him captured and inexplicably tries to wring from him the causes (already explained) for the deed, and the names of the confederates (already revealed as Bel-Imperia alone). Without this senseless action Hieronimo would have had no opportunity to tear out his tongue or to stab the duke, Lorenzo's father. His own suicide closes the play.

An analysis of the play reveals the basic Kydian formula for the tragedy of revenge:⁶

(1) The fundamental motive for the tragic action is revenge, although the actual vengeance of Hieronimo is not conceived until midway in the play. This revenge is by a father for the murder of his son, and extends not only to the murderers but also to their innocent kindred. The revenger is aided by a revenger accomplice, and both commit suicide after achieving their vengeance.
(2) Hieronimo's revenge is called forth by the successful revenge, conceived for a supposed injury, of the villains on his son.
(3) The ghost of the slain Andrea watches the revenge on the person who killed him and on those who hindered his love, but the action of the latter half of the play does not spring from the motive of a revenge for him nor is this revenge directed chiefly at his slayer. Consequently the ghost has no real connection with the play. This loose use of a vengeance-seeking ghost was not repeated in later plays.
(4) An important dramatic device is the justifiable hesitation of the revenger, who requires much proof, and, on the failure of legal justice, supposedly lacks a suitable opportunity for straight-forward action. Hieronimo finds his task difficult; he is burdened with doubt and human weakness and delayed by his madness. The letter from Bel-Imperia, Pedringano's posthumous confession, the exhortations of Bel-Imperia and her offers of assistance, and the death of his wife, are all required to spur his resolution to the deed.
(5) Madness is an important dramatic device. Hieronimo is afflicted with passing fits of genuine madness brought on by his overwhelming grief and the overwhelming sense of his obligation and his helplessness to revenge which saps his will. It is not probable that in Kyd's original version Hieronimo ever pretended madness. There are two scenes in which his words are too glib and flighty (the reconciliation with Lorenzo and the plans for the play-within-a-play), but in both his nerves are under pressure owing to the rôle he is acting, and his wild talk shows the intense strain on a mind already somewhat weakened rather than a pretense to lure his opponents into false security.
(6) Intrigue used against and by the revenger is an important element. Lorenzo's machinations fill a considerable portion of the play. Hieronimo secures his revenge by elaborate trickery.
(7) The action is bloody and deaths are scattered through the play. Ten characters are killed, eight of these on-stage.
(8) The contrast and enforcement of the main situation are achieved by parallels. Andrea requires revenging, as does Horatio. Hieronimo's grief for his son is reenforced by the grief of the Viceroy for the supposed death of Balthazar and later for his actual slaying. More particularly, Hieronimo is paralleled by the petitioner whose son has been killed. His madness finds a counterpart in Isabella's, and his hesitation is contrasted to Bel-Imperia's desire for action.
(9) The accomplices on both sides are killed. Bel-Imperia falls a suicide, and the villain with keen irony destroys Serberine and Pedringano in order to protect himself.
(10) Lorenzo, the villain, is an almost complete Machiavellian, as full of villainous devices as he is free from scruples.
(11) The revenge is accomplished terribly, fittingly, with irony and deceit. Once his resolution is screwed to the point, the revenger becomes exceedingly cunning, dissembles with the murderers, and adroitly plans their downfall.
(12) Minor characteristics are: the exhibition of Horatio's body; the wearing of black; reading in a book before a philosophical soliloquy; a letter written in blood and a handkerchief dipped in blood and kept as a memento to revenge; the melancholy of the revenger, who struggles with the problems of revenge, fortune, justice, and death; the sentimental but desperately revengeful woman.

A specific source is customarily presupposed for The Spanish Tragedy, but it has never been found, and very probably no detailed source for the entire story ever existed;⁷ for if this hypothetical source be disregarded, the roots of the play are found in Seneca's tragedies, the Italian and French novelle, possibly in the Renaissance Italian tragedy, and certainly in the old Teutonic story of Hamlet as told by Saxo Grammaticus and translated by Belleforest.

Senecan influence there is undoubtedly in the penning of the lines. The machinery of the ghost of Andrea and Revenge is also Senecan in construction, although the function of the two as chorus is not classical. The Spirit of Revenge is presumably influencing the actions of the characters in much the same fashion in which the ghost of Tantalus casts his malign influence over the house of Pelops in Thyestes. Such a pulling of the strings from without, therefore, is wholly Senecan, as is the parallel to Thyestes where a particular revenge enacted on the stage satisfies the debt to an unrelated crime from the past. Senecan, too, are the bloodshed and horrors, though typically Renaissance in their form. Seneca usually emphasizes one great passion; The Spanish Tragedy is a study of the overwhelming passion of revenge. Revenge either moderately forthright, as in Agamemnon, or else by secret, deceitful means, as in Thyestes, had already appeared in Seneca as a proper subject for tragedy.

To a certain extent, however, the debt to Seneca has been exaggerated. Actual insanity in Seneca is limited to the madness sent by Juno upon Hercules, a situation which has no possible parallel in The Spanish Tragedy. Somewhat closer to Kyd's conception are the divine “madnesses” of Medea and Deïanira, but the origin of Hieronimo's insanity does not actually come from the Roman tragedian. The hesitation of the revenger had appeared momentarily when Medea once falters in her resolve and when Clytemnestra requires the goading of Aegisthus. Neither of these plays, however, utilized the motive of hesitation to prolong the plot, as does Kyd, but instead merely to fillip the interest of the audience for a moment with the possibility that the revenge might be abandoned. The true source for Hieronimo's dramatically important hesitation is not there. Again, the suicides of Bel-Imperia and Hieronimo have no relation to the expiatory suicides of Seneca's characters who have caused the death of some beloved person. The most specific contribution of Seneca to the dramatic form of The Spanish Tragedy is the ghost; yet it has been noted how Kyd was gradually led away from the Senecan construction so that his supernatural chorus became superfluous and even intrusive. The interest in the play is on the revenge on Lorenzo (and only incidentally on Balthazar) for a Horatio murdered in plain view of the audience, not the revenge on Balthazar for the ghost of Andrea, with whom Hieronimo is entirely unconnected.

Yet the general influence of Seneca on the writing and the original conception of the play cannot be denied, for such an influence was unavoidable at the time. Classical tragedy had gained an enormous prestige in England because of the great value set on classical learning, of which tragedy was supposed to be the highest expression; and knowing little of the Greeks the Elizabethans came to regard Seneca as the most tragic, the most perfect of ancient writers. Senecan tragedy was dominant on the Continent; Seneca was read freely in the English schools and universities where his plays were acted, as were Latin imitations. His methods of treating tragic situations were akin to Elizabethan temperament, for the men of the time were well equipped to understand his philosophy, which held that man, the individual, was more than the puppet of medieval scholasticism and was, indeed, to some extent the master of his fate. Even the fatalistic Senecan passages found a ready echo in the breasts of Englishmen already afflicted with the melancholia which sometimes turned them to practising malcontents. Seneca's cosmopolitanism was near to the Elizabethans, who were starting an empire and were beginning to cast off their insular provincialism.

The crudity hidden beneath the superficial polish of the Elizabethans made them less sensitive to the fundamental emptiness of much of Seneca. They were delighted with his rhetoric, for they were still so intellectually young as to be impressed by bombast and flamboyance.⁸ Introspection had become a national trait, and fed agreeably on the elaborate Senecan philosophizing, with its spice of stoicism suitable to a hard-bitten age. The long Senecan descriptions were suited for imitation on the bare English stage. Finally, Seneca's emphasis on sensationalism, on physical horrors to stimulate emotion, appealed to the English taste, for blood and horror on the stage could not be offensive to the spectators at cruel executions. Ghosts were accepted as fact, and forewarnings were everyday affairs, as with Ben Jonson's on the death of his son. Except for his classical subject-matter and his rigid classical form involving the use of choruses, there was no single element of Seneca that could not be accepted immediately by the spectator in the pit.

With such a tradition it was inevitable that The Spanish Tragedy should ring with Seneca in its rhetoric. Kyd, however, was no humble slave in his dramatic craftsmanship. Admitting freely that it would be difficult to conceive The Spanish Tragedy without Seneca, we find, when details are sought for specific sources of plot and characterization, that the way leads beyond Seneca.⁹ It is highly probable that Kyd, uninfluenced specifically save by Belleforest's story of Hamlet, drew his main inspiration for the working out first of Lorenzo's and then of Hieronimo's and Bel-Imperia's revenges not from Seneca but from the ethics and incidents in the Italian and French stories and from English ideas about the Italian character.¹⁰

So closely allied with the villainous characters of the Italian novels that the two cannot be separated is the Elizabethan's creation of the Italian villain based on Machiavelli's principles. Lorenzo in The Spanish Tragedy is the first of the long line of Elizabethan villains who owe their sole inspiration to Machiavelli. Although Lorenzo is not the protagonist of the play, he is so extremely active as the opposing force that he is almost as prominent as Hieronimo, and just as necessary to the extension of the dramatic action. Except that he is not a prince relying upon the doctrines of Machiavelli to rule and hold his state, every one of Lorenzo's actions reads like a exemplum of Machiavellian “policy.” Even though the boundless Machiavellian ambition which produced the bloody Italian despot is absent, yet the ambition to raise his house by a royal marriage for his sister is the motivating spring of his murder of Horatio. His fundamental likeness to the Machiavellian comes in his ruthlessness toward all who stand in the way of his plans, in his perfect indifference to the sufferings he causes others, in his mania for secrecy and willingness to employ other men as catspaws, and in the tortuous and deceitful means he uses to attain his ends. Lorenzo is fundamentally cold-blooded and unsentimental, a practical man after Machiavelli's own heart.¹¹ What lends particular interest to his character is the weighty evidence for believing that he was partly drawn from scandalous accounts of the Earl of Leicester, who was naïvely believed by his enemies to be the foremost exponent in England of the hated Machiavellian doctrines.¹²

Although several are found in the French, the Italian novelle contain few stories of actual blood-revenge. Terrible revenges for other reasons are plentiful, however, and these influenced The Spanish Tragedy not only in incident but also in character and motivation. The type of revengeful woman exemplified by Bel-Imperia is a commonplace in Italian and French fiction, as is the brutal intriguing Lorenzo. In particular, his disposal of accomplices is partly drawn from the forty-fifth novel of the first part of Bandello. Balthazar, swearing revenge the moment he learns Horatio has won Bel-Imperia's love, fits the conception of touchy Italian pride which motivated so many tragic novelle. Above all, the atmosphere of the vendetta was unassailably Italian.

It is, indeed, the carrying-out of the vendetta tradition which turns Hieronimo from a hero to an Italianate villain. So long as he is pitiful in his grief for Horatio and in search of his murderers, so long the English audience would give him full sympathy. When, at last spurred to action by complete knowledge, he rushes to the king for legal justice, he would still be the hero whose actions, according to the best Elizabethan ethics, were those of an honorable man. But when Lorenzo foils him in his attempt at legal redress and he consciously gives up an open revenge in favor of a secret, treacherous device, according to English standards he inevitably becomes a villain. Indeed, so transparently weak is his sophistry and so open-eyed his turning from God's to the devil's means in the soliloquy opening Act III, scene xiii, that it is evident Kyd is deliberately veering his audience against Hieronimo.

Hieronimo begins,

Vindicta mihi,

and, pursuing this promise from the Bible,¹³ consoles himself with the thought that Heaven never leaves murder unatoned; therefore he will await Heaven's decree. A quotation from Seneca then comes to his mind, and, swayed by the materialistic Senecan philosophy, he reflects that one crime opens the way for another, and he should repay wrong with wrong, for death ends both the resolute and the patient man and the end of destiny for each is merely the grave. Fortified by this un-Christian sophistry, he determines to anticipate Heaven's slow justice and to revenge for himself at his own appointed hour. Having decided to cast off Heaven, he cannot now expect a divinely awarded opportunity and so must carve the occasion for himself. He scorns acting

as the vulgare wits of men,
With open, but ineuitable ils,

(the only formula with which his “vulgar” audience could sympathize) and therefore, from his Machiavellian superiority to common humanity, he chooses a secret, albeit certain, plan,¹⁴ which he will conceal under the cloak of pretended friendship with Lorenzo. Since his project is of so great weight, he cannot hasten the hour but must bide the proper time for his revenge; delay, and dissemble his true feelings, hoping by his feigned ignorance to deceive his wary opponents. He then weakly excuses his planned hypocrisy by arguing that, even if he revealed his true feelings, he is too helpless to prevail merely with threats against his enemies' high position. Therefore he must deceive until opportunity offers revenge.

Since the next scene with Bazulto shows Hieronimo led by his grief into a fresh fit of insanity, it might be held that he is not responsible for his actions, that his weakened mind has forced him into the winding channels of his soliloquy, and that the subsequent scenes of deceit leading to the final slaughter are the actions of an insane person holding himself so rigidly in check that his madness is not visible. Such a view might, to the Elizabethans, mitigate his deed,¹⁵ but it would not release him from the consequences of his blood-guilt, since he would then be merely a villainous madman. Whether Kyd had enough psychological subtlety to portray Hieronimo's conversion according to this line of thought may well be a matter of opinion. A careful examination of the text leads to the view that, except for certain well defined scenes, Hieronimo is entirely sane in his revengeful plans—as sane certainly as Shakespeare's Hamlet when he stabs Claudius—although the actor may well have chosen to play him as unbalanced.

This change marked by the soliloquy from open to dissembling action was forced upon Hieronimo by the absolute necessity for Kyd to evolve a final reason for delay, and also, one may suspect, by Kyd's leaning toward the Italianate, the sensational, for the dramatic catastrophe. Once Hieronimo adopted the Italianate Machiavellian tactics, he immediately lost the absolute admiration of his audience. The English insistence on straightforward action by open assault or formal duel, which they would be inclined to view as manslaughter, refused to tolerate treacherous Italian plots. The Bible said, “Cursed is he that smiteth his neighbour secretly,” and they heartily agreed. The Machiavellian breach of faith was not to be endured, for it led only to the total destruction of the breaker,¹⁶ and Hieronimo's pretended reconciliation with Lorenzo, with its reminiscence of Judas's kiss, was branded with the brand of Cain and of Machiavelli.¹⁷ With all allowance for the fact that, owing to Kyd's delight in wholesale slaughter, it was unlikely even an innocent Hieronimo would have survived the play, the fact that he was guilty of murder made it absolutely necessary for him to die. No slayer in Elizabethan drama escaped some penalty, and that penalty was usually death.

If the means by which Hieronimo ensnared and killed Lorenzo and Balthazar were not sufficient to label him a villain, the débâcle which ends the play (when, after promises of immunity if his cause has been just, he refuses all questions and wilfully stabs Lorenzo's father) certainly transported him beyond the pale. While collective revenge was understood in Elizabethan times, it was universally decried:

“Farre be the first from God, farther be this; to strike the godly sonne for the godlesse Sire, to punish innocencie for Iniquitie. … Man is so just, Amagias slew the men, that kill'd his Father: but their children he slew not, 2 Chron. 14. and mans law provides for it, that factum unius doe not nocere alteri, one mans fact hurt another, saith old Vlpian.”¹⁸

The act would have been serious enough if Hieronimo had wreaked his revenge on the duke alone, according to the primitive custom where, in a state of family solidarity, any member of a family is as acceptable as the criminal; but when, after killing Lorenzo, Hieronimo refuses a pardon and stabs the duke also, he is departing so far from the English sense of justice as finally to withdraw all sympathy.

Bearing on this question, the comments of John Bereblock on a play Progne presented before the queen at Oxford in 1566 are interesting. Progne truly had just cause to revenge her sister Philomel, but Bereblock in his review of the plot writes: “It is wonderful how she longed to seek vengeance for the blood of her sister. She goes about therefore to avenge wrongs with wrongs, and injuries with injuries; nor is it at all reverent to add crimes to crimes already committed.” Yet if her thoughts of revenge were, in the first instance, wrong, the treacherous means by which she achieved her revenge made her in Bereblock's eyes an absolute villainess. “And that play was a notable portrayal of mankind in its evil deeds, and was for the spectators, as it were, a clear moral of all those who indulge too much either in love [Tereus] or in wrath [Progne].”¹⁹

Hieronimo's act is, therefore, either the culmination of his villainy (mad or sane), or else Kyd, swept away by a passion for violence, wrote the scene with no motive in mind but the wish to portray more bloody deeds. It is faintly possible that the duke's death satisfies in some roundabout manner the justice demanded by the ghost of Andrea—long since forgotten in the play's action—for the duke had apparently discouraged with considerable emphasis Andrea's love-affair with Bel-Imperia. It might be argued that Kyd was possibly following too closely his hypothetical source with its different morality, and so confused the ethics of the play. But the theory that Kyd followed one main source is very uncertain, and there is hardly a doubt that, mad or sane, Hieronimo was a villain to the English audience at the end and was forced to commit suicide to satisfy the stern doctrine that murder, no matter what the motive, was never successful.

Bel-Imperia shares the blood-guilt with Hieronimo, but the audience probably viewed her with a more lenient eye. Her suicide, thus, was not so necessary to satisfy morality as it was the usual move of the woman in romantic fiction who refused to outlive her slain lover after seeing vengeance done. The women of Elizabethan drama did not bear the guilt of blood, as did the men, unless they were portrayed as unmistakable villainesses from their position in the plot. That they, too, often perished after staining their hands with blood or assisting in the revenge, is owing more to their refusal to live after their slain lovers than to the demands of contemporary ethics.²⁰ When the reason for their revenge is not romantic, they customarily enter a convent to purge themselves.

The characters of Lorenzo, Hieronimo, and Bel-Imperia, the whole atmosphere of brutal and Machiavellian vendetta, together with part of the Pedringano incident, thus were the outgrowth of the Italian and French novelle and the Elizabethan's hostile view of Machiavelli and the Italian character. Of the most important influence from the novelle—the story of Hamlet—more will be said shortly.

There is no definite proof that Kyd had ever read an Italian tragedy. Indeed, with the exception of the translation of Jocasta from Dolce by Gascoigne and Kinwelmarsh, and some borrowings by the author of Gismond of Salerne from Dolce's Didone (not omitting the debt to the Italian of the academic Progne and Roxana), no direct relationship between Italian and English tragedy has been established.²¹ Dubious parallels there are, to be sure, to indicate that early Elizabethan tragedy was perhaps following Italianate Seneca more than Seneca himself in the elaborate use of dumb shows, the rejection of the traditional Latin and Greek stories, and the extension of the scope of the action and of the list of characters. The motive of sexual love, the intensification of physical horrors and their performance on the stage, all had been paralleled in Italian tragedy; and in Gismond of Salerne and its later revision had been deliberately adopted from the Italian. With The Spanish Tragedy and Locrine the mingling of classical and popular traditions ended with the fixation of the English form of tragedy. The most suitable elements of Seneca were completely naturalized by incorporation with the main stream of popular drama, and henceforth Seneca or his Italian and French derivatives had really nothing more to teach.²²

Moreover, even the few early parallels were all the work of men of the Inner Temple or of the universities, and, being learned performances, were no true indication of a diffused knowledge of the Italian tragic art. In Italy itself Neo-Senecan tragedy was not a popular form, and there is no evidence that more than a handful of Englishmen were at all familiar with Italian tragedies. Certainly the typical sixteenth century Italian tragedies were not of a type to exercise any especial influence on The Spanish Tragedy, although certain rough parallels may be drawn. The Italian tragedy interested itself chiefly in the depiction of villainy and horrors. Horrors are emphasized in The Spanish Tragedy and Lorenzo is extremely important as a villain. The sources for Lorenzo's character, however, have been noted, and he bears little relation to the bloody tyrants of Italian tragedy. Furthermore, the horrors of The Spanish Tragedy are honest English horrors based on the copiousness with which blood is shed and the resulting emotional response of the audience, and have little to do with the unnaturalness of the crude Thyestean banquets and elaborate dissection and poisoning scenes of the Italian.

The most important point of similarity to Italian tragedy lies in the ghosts. In none of Seneca's plays does the ghost of the recent dead rise to demand vengeance for his own murder, as Andrea does, although such a demand is common in Italian tragedies like Cinthio's Orbecche (1541) and Decio da Orte's Acripanda (1591). The rather important parallel between the spirit of Revenge in The Spanish Tragedy and the spirit of Suspicion in Groto's La Dalida must be noticed, and there may possibly be an authentic borrowing here. For the rest, Seneca's tragedies, while bloody, are not the slaughter-houses of the Italian, where hardly a character remains alive. In this respect Italian tragedy is paralleled in Kyd.

Here the general resemblance ceases, for the action of Italian tragedy and The Spanish Tragedy is vitally dissimilar. No Italian play depends for its plot, like The Spanish Tragedy, upon blood-revenge for a person slain on the stage. The Italian usually revolves about a villain protagonist and a heroine, with lust ever in the foreground.²³ This villain is usually a tyrannous king, who is portrayed in some incident of his private life (like a love-affair where he is either the lover or the father of the lover) in which he exercises the powers of his kingship for a terrible revenge. “Tragic error” is expanded to include even the ordering of a Thyestean banquet.²⁴ There is little in common between such a type and The Spanish Tragedy. Possibly a detail or two in Kyd came from the Italian, but there is no argument for any general, thoroughgoing influence.

The chief foreign influence on The Spanish Tragedy, rivalling and probably even surpassing Seneca in the importance of its details, is the story of Hamlet which Kyd found in Belleforest, who had borrowed it from Saxo Grammaticus. To the Senecan, Italian, and French, is now added a primitive Teutonic influence on the nascent revenge tragedy.

Without going into the various arguments for and against, the belief may be stated that a play by Kyd, written on the subject of Hamlet's revenge, was in existence at some time before 1589. This play is not extant, and there is no reason to believe that it was ever printed. The first quarto of Shakespeare's Hamlet was entered on July 26, 1602, and published in 1603. This is an incomplete and bungled version when compared to the second quarto published in 1604/5, but it does contain material not present in the later edition, material which seems to point to an earlier state of the play. Another text which must be considered is a German play, Der Bestrafte Brudermord, which bears obvious relations to the two quartos of Hamlet. Although the manuscript cannot be traced farther back than the early eighteenth century, the play is always thought to be of considerably earlier date.

In order to evaluate Kyd's Ur-Hamlet properly the major features of the plot and characterization must be surmised, and, if the connection with The Spanish Tragedy is to be of benefit, the date must be conjectured. The only clues to these questions can be sought in Shakespeare's Hamlet in its two quarto editions and in Der Bestrafte Brudermord. Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany, an anonymous tragedy of about 1597, may perhaps be included. A vast amount of learning and much ingenious conjecture have been brought to bear on the problem of the exact relation between the Ur-Hamlet, Der Bestrafte Brudermond, and Hamlet.²⁵ There is little reason here to venture into the conflicting theories of this criticism. For the purposes of this work it is postulated that Der Bestrafte Brudermord was drawn from the Ur-Hamlet either in its original form or in a somewhat revised version of 1594-1595, and that the Ur-Hamlet did not differ materially from the main outline of the story as represented in the German play and in the first quarto of Shakespeare.

Belleforest's account in Les Histoires Tragiques, from which Kyd drew, follows in the main the incidents as narrated by Saxo Grammaticus with the omission of the more primitive portions as in the details of the attempt to seduce Amleth, and with a considerable expansion of the speeches. Some few incidents are altered. Thus in Belleforest, Fengon has committed incest with Geruthe before the murder of Horwendille, and the murderer bolsters his excuses for the deed by the assertion that Horwendille had threatened her life. Furthermore, he procures false witnesses to prove it, and so convinces the court. Belleforest, accordingly, paints Geruthe as a deep-dyed, lascivious villainess, and emphasizes her evil character by having her deliberately abandon Amleth to his fate. Still, the ground is prepared for her repentance when he (where Saxo is vague) makes clear that she knew nothing of the scheme to conceal the courtier under the quilt to overhear her conversation with Amleth. Whereas in Saxo the repentance of Geruthe comes only after Amleth's reproaches and is baldly described, in Belleforest the shock of the slayings brings her to remorse while Amleth is disposing of the body. Consequently, instead of being greeted at his return, as in Saxo, with reproaches for his folly, he finds her in a mood to listen to his harangue, and she afterwards promises to help him with his revenge. The course of Amleth's revenge follows that in Saxo except for the addition of a long speech after the slaying in which Amleth consigns Fengon to hell, there to tell his brother's spirit “que c'est son fils qui te faict faire ce message, à fin que soulagé par ceste memoire, son ombre s'appaise parmy les esprits bien-heureux, et me quitte de celle obligation qui m'astraignoit à pursuivre ceste vengeance sur mon sang.”

The difference in spirit between the two narratives, however, is distinct. Saxo, telling his primitive tale, is never in doubt about the justness of the revenge, or, indeed, of any other revenge in his history. Belleforest, not at all influenced by the pagan Scandinavian tradition, is divided between his Renaissance French appreciation of a bella vendetta and the Christian doctrine that all revenge must be left to God. Moreover, he is apprehensive lest his tale of tyrannicide be censured as treasonable. At the start he grafts Christianity on revenge by asserting a moral purpose for his story and placing Amleth in the position of an agent of God, so that the long delay is explained in a sidenote as owing to “la tardiue vengeance de Dieu.” After some quibbling over the ethics of feigning madness to procure revenge, Belleforest in Amleth's speech over the body of Fengon writes a final justification for the particular revenge, which is solely for the murder of a father, prefaced by the sidenote, “Vengeance juste, ou est ce que doit estre consideree.” Amleth, after praising himself for his well considered and courageous plan of revenge, cries: “Si jamais la vengeance sembla avoir quelque face et forme de justice, il est hors de doute, que la pieté et affection qui nous lie à la souvenance de nos peres, pursuivis injustement, est celle qui nous dispence à cercher les moyens de ne laisser impunie une trahison, et effort outrageux et proditoire.” Thus Belleforest follows Christian ethics on the one hand in denouncing private revenge for injuries, except that he is in perfect accord, on the other, with the pagan classical belief in the duty of the son to revenge the murder of a father. In his opinion such a crime exempts the revenger from following honorable means of revenge and justifies any mode of procedure, such as Amleth's trickery. Only king-killing is barred to the just revenger of a father's murder. Here Amleth's act is justified as no treason since Amleth is the rightful heir, and Fengon then, properly, his subject.

Kyd, with Belleforest's narrative for a source,²⁶ was forced to make wide changes to adapt the action to the stage and to the tragic form. First of all, to be suitably tragic the play must end with death to the avenger as well as to the victim, and they must drag down with them all other guilty persons concerned. As the first step, the incidents following Hamlet's revenge must be omitted, as well as those occurring during his first stay in Britain. At this stage the story would be: Hamlet's father has been killed and his mother incestuously married to the murderer, who now occupies the vacant office of prince-governor. Hamlet is bent on revenge and pretends madness in order to preserve his life. This madness is suspected by the prince-governor and his courtiers, who test him by tempting him with a young girl and eavesdropping at an interview with his mother, during which Hamlet kills the spy. His mother repents and promises to aid Hamlet in his revenge. He declares he will meet trickery with trickery. The prince sends him to England with false messages intending his death which Hamlet discovers and rewrites to apply to his companions sent to guard him. He returns to Denmark to find the court celebrating his funeral feats, fires the hall and burns his enemies, and then kills the prince with his sword.

With this simple story Kyd begins the dramatization. At the very start, however, he confronts the most serious problem of the play. For there to be any play at all, the revenger must delay. The reasons for delay must also fulfil two requirements: they must be dramatic, and they must not prejudice the character of the revenger either by imputation of cowardice or of Machiavellism. The audience can have no sympathy for a craven in the most desperate situation that can well face a man. On the other hand, luring a victim to destruction by deceit is not the rôle of a hero, for it carried with it the imputation of Machiavellism. For this reason delay cannot be caused by a long and elaborate plot against the king. Belleforest was of little help. His Amleth delays, it is true, but only for the undramatic reason that he is awaiting the best opportunity.

Kyd, as is shown by The Spanish Tragedy, was a brilliant inventor of dramatic incident. He realized that the solution for his problem lay in the contrivance of positive obstacles through which Hamlet must cut for his revenge. And as the primary obstacle, Hamlet must find his path barred not by a hostile court in full possession of the fact of his father's murder, but by a court which had never dreamed that his father had been murdered. Since proof is completely lacking, Hamlet must act alone and in constant danger.

But if the murder is unrecognized, the problem arises how to introduce Hamlet to the truth. Kyd, the ever-spectacular, broke wide with tradition and introduced into the action of the play itself a ghost who acquaints his son with the true facts of his death. The classical drama had employed ghosts as omens of disaster and, as in Agamemnon and Troades, to demand vengeance; but, it must be emphasized, never as actors to reveal the murder to the unsuspecting revenger-to-be.

Amleth's pretense of madness in Belleforest is the real starting-point for the story, and, indeed, its most integral feature. It was the common Scandinavian practice for a murderer to endeavor to wipe out all possible revengers as well, and Amleth, rightly fearing for his life, pretends insanity only to preserve himself by lulling Fengon into the belief that no revenger for Horwendille will appear. The secrecy of the murder in the Ur-Hamlet automatically disposes of any reason for Hamlet's instant plan to play the madman, since Claudius, believing the murder unknown, can have no strong motive for slaying Hamlet also. Indeed, it turns out ironically that Hamlet's madness is the very thing that excites Claudius's fatal suspicions. Whether Kyd realized the logical uselessness of the device is impossible to determine. What we do know is that he retained Hamlet's feigned madness, for to discard it would have been to ruin the play.²⁷

The Elizabethan audience would instantly recognize Hamlet's revenge as just, for a revenge for murder either by legal or extralegal means was still felt as a bounden duty. That Hamlet cannot secure legal justice forces him to rely on personal justice; this distinction would be recognized by the audience which would thereupon approve his ends and await with interest his procedure. The feigning of madness was a clever trick but the audience would reserve judgment on Hamlet's character until it was shown he did not intend to use treachery and hypocrisy, or the hated Italianate devices, to secure vengeance.

As the first scenes close Kyd has provided for dramatic effects by the madness motif and has introduced the first step in the necessary delay in Hamlet's search for an opportunity. The strict guard kept about Claudius discourages Hamlet as the play proceeds and his emotional frustration drives him to thoughts of suicide. It is impossible for him to make a direct assault on Claudius. Such a disclosure of his secret means the end of the play. From Hamlet's own point of view, it is a poor revenge which leads to the death of the revenger; since he wishes to ascend the throne himself, he must take proper precautions for his own safety, and so continue his delay. But this delay very shortly ceases to be dramatic, and additional reasons must be sought which yet will mark some sort of forward step. This problem was ingeniously solved by the doubt of the ghost, necessitating the play-within-a-play. Simultaneously the opposing action—which becomes of increasing importance as the play progresses—is started when Claudius takes steps to discover the reasons for Hamlet's madness. From this point the future action is indicated as a stirring duel of wits between Hamlet and the king.

The rising action, with Hamlet on the offensive, sweeps through the mousetrap play and into the prayer scene. The meeting of the two under such conditions is a daring though necessary move. Hamlet has lamented that he can never find the king without his guards. Yet the king must have some private life, and the audience may well begin to wonder why Hamlet cannot find an accidental opportunity. Kyd daringly presents this opportunity but under such circumstances that Hamlet cannot accept it. Probability of incident has been affirmed, a little crisis has developed and subsided, and the audience has been momentarily put upon edge. The religious scruples Hamlet advances combine ill with his bloodthirsty thoughts, but actions speak louder than words and the audience has been assured that Hamlet is no villain.

It is obvious from The Spanish Tragedy that Kyd had a fondness for balancing incident. The crisis of the tragedy has been cleverly formed from an elaboration of the relatively unimportant murder of the eavesdropper in Belleforest. Now the strength of the opposing action forces delay on Hamlet. The English voyage affords a period of rest, and on Hamlet's return he is met by a parallel revenger seeking his life. For this device Kyd is directly indebted to the maxims of Machiavelli which advised a prince to give the performance of cruel acts to another in order to escape the blame. One peg was best to drive out another, and enemies should be set at odds to destroy themselves.²⁸ The primitive revenge of the Belleforest story was unsuitable for the stage since it contained no real conflict, and also since it offered no means of drawing the play to a close with the death of Hamlet. Kyd therefore plans to create his catastrophe in the meeting of revenge and counter-revenge which will engulf all the principals in disaster.

The poisonings which end the play are interesting as showing how Kyd drew on the gossip of the period for a catastrophe which would involve the king. The backfiring of a poison upon the poisoner, the method by which Leonhardus is killed and the queen poisoned, is of considerable antiquity. Occurring as early as the ancient tale of Deïanira and the centaur's poison, it is also found in romances, as in the Tristram story, and was a standard piece of Renaissance gossip. Kyd may have drawn on a scandalous tale current about the Earl of Leicester (one of his alleged practices was used in The Spanish Tragedy) which recounted that Leicester prepared a poisoned draught for his wife Lettice which she was to drink whenever she felt faint. She, not suspecting its properties, gave him the drink a short time later when he returned from a fatiguing journey. But two other famous examples were at hand in the stories about the death of Pope Alexander VI and the accidental poisoning of her husband by Bianca Capello.²⁹

Since, legally, the king was guilty of the murder of his wife as well as of Hamlet, his death was not only the culmination of a just revenge for a past murder but also a judgment for two present ones. Leonhardus, too, must die, for he has been the knowing agent in a murder by particularly treacherous means. He was not so culpable as the king, however, because his motive was purer and he was merely the agent, not the principal on whom the chief guilt lay. It is significant that Hamlet, realizing the dupe the king has made of Leonhardus, forgives the unlucky revenger of Corambis. The queen, only doubtfully innocent of the murder of her first husband, is stained with the guilt of incest.

If, as seems probable, the catastrophe of Der Bestrafte Brudermord is roughly that of the Ur-Hamlet, the slaughter of Phantasmo by Hamlet is at first sight a particularly brutal and unnecessary piece of business; but Hamlet at the time does not know that he himself is doomed and in his royal capacity he is meting swift justice to an accessory before the fact to the poisoning of his mother.

The lengths to which Kyd went to maintain the audience's sympathy for his protagonist make Hamlet one of the least guilty of all Elizabethan stage revengers. Because he was no Machiavellian, Hamlet's sole actions toward revenge had consisted only in the play-within-a-play to establish the king's guilt, his refusal to murder a man at prayer, and the mistaken slaying of Corambis. His dissimulation had never overstepped the allowable bounds of “policy”³⁰ and if ever a revenger were blameless in his plots it is Hamlet.

It is probably true that Kyd's Hamlet was a more bloodthirsty person in his speeches than Shakespeare's. It is also true that a certain amount of brutality is shown in the stabbing of Phantasmo who might better have been left to his certain legal execution, as was usually the practice with guilty minor characters in later plays. But what puts Hamlet definitely over the borderline is the killing of Corambis. Kyd had probably taken some pains to make Corambis innocent of the plot laid by the king against Hamlet, and his slaying, no matter what the circumstances of ironical mistaken identity, seals Hamlet's eventual doom, for the religious teaching of the day held that revenge by murder was never allowable: “That vengeance appertaineth vnto God only. … Therefore it followeth, that whosoeuer doth reuenge himselfe, committeth sacrilege. … That seeing the wrong that our neighbour doth, happeneth not without the prudence of God, it is not lawful for vs to resist and withstand it by oblique and sinister meanes, and such as displease God.”³¹ Hamlet cannot even plead manslaughter, for his intent was to kill the king, and it is still murder if he mistakes Corambis for his intended victim.

The Elizabethan audience always insisted on seeing eventual justice, and one who stained his hands with blood had to pay the penalty. That no revenger, no matter how just, ever wholly escapes the penalty for shedding blood even in error, is borne out by subsequent plays and is emphasized especially in Thomas Rawlins's Rebellion. Very likely Kyd would have killed off Hamlet anyway in order to end with a holocaust of pity and terror; but it seems probable that, as with later playwrights, he subscribed to the doctrine that a shedder of blood should not live.

One can imagine an Elizabethan sympathizer pointing out that Hamlet was justified since he could not appeal to legal justice. But the inevitable and unanswerable reply would come that Hamlet must therefore await God's justice. If he anticipates divine vengeance, he must pay the penalty: given his sympathetic characterization he is a hero, but he must die. But God sometimes uses human instruments as the agents for the heavenly vengeance. If Hamlet is such an agent, does he not operate under God's favor? That question was answered in such later plays as The Atheist's Tragedy, The Maid's Tragedy, and The Unnatural Combat. Heaven may be using Hamlet—and even Hieronimo—as its agent, but that does not remove guilt, for, as The Maid's Tragedy states,

Unlooked-for sudden deaths from Heaven are sent;
But cursed is he that is their instrument.

This question outlines in sharp relief the fundamental problem facing every writer of a revenge tragedy whose protagonist is a hero. The audience is sympathetic to his revenger so long as he does not become an Italianate intriguer, and so long as he does not revenge. At the conclusion the audience admits its sentimental satisfaction with the act of personal justice but its ethical sense demands the penalty for the infraction of divine command.

It seems most probable that the Ur-Hamlet preceded The Spanish Tragedy, chiefly because the parallels between the two plays would originate more logically in the Ur-Hamlet to be copied in The Spanish Tragedy. A major parallel is the play-within-a-play. The idea for this device in the Ur-Hamlet without question came from current stories of the involuntary fear of criminals at the playhouse when viewing their crimes acted on the stage, and as such it has a vital and apposite part in the plot. Such an origin is not possible in The Spanish Tragedy where there is no source but a vague resemblance to the diversions of the Emperor Nero. The device for the final bloodshed in each play seems to have originated in the Ur-Hamlet. Hamlet's stabbing of Phantasmo was partially warranted as the disposal of the last of the conspirators, but in The Spanish Tragedy the unwarranted stabbing of the Duke of Castile seems merely a reminiscence of the earlier scene.

If the Ur-Hamlet came afterwards it is most surprising that the German play does not give any indication that Hamlet is actually insane, a part of Hieronimo's success which Kyd would have been sure to emphasize after its first proved popularity. This is not to say that Kyd's Hamlet could not have been slightly unbalanced on occasion. It seems very possible that Hieronimo's more complete emotional insanity, so extremely original if The Spanish Tragedy preceded the Ur-Hamlet, was an expansion of hints in Hamlet. Burton the Anatomist wrote, “Many lose their wits by the sudden sight of some spectrum or divil, a thing very common in all ages, saith Lavater part I. cap. 9. as Orestes did at the sight of the Furies, which appeared to him in black.”³² Given the precedent of Orestes and the popular belief, it seems almost inevitable that Kyd with his dramatic genius portrayed Hamlet's feigned madness as at times merging into real distraction, not only from excessive grief and frustration but from the effect of the ghost's appearance. On the evidence of Der Bestrafte Brudermord, as well as the evidence of the relative unpopularity of the early Hamlet, one may infer that this characterization was not emphasized as was Hieronimo's, and that it was not until he came to write The Spanish Tragedy that Kyd realized the full latent possibilities in such a dramatic device. Even this emphasis was insufficient for Elizabethan taste, for another dramatist had to be employed subsequently to expand the mad scenes.

The two chief breaks with Senecan tragedy in The Spanish Tragedy involve the madness of the revenger and his delay. To believe that Kyd conjured these important points out of his imagination without a source,³³ wrote The Spanish Tragedy, and then stumbled on them as an integral part of the Amleth story in Belleforest and later wrote his Hamlet, is asking too much of coincidence. The view must be accepted that Kyd at least knew Belleforest's account before he wrote The Spanish Tragedy. But if Kyd knew Belleforest's account beforehand, it is curious he should abstract the two best dramatic features to create an original plot instead of dramatizing Belleforest's story where they were native. It must be emphasized that Kyd was forced to invent certain dramatic conventions by the very exigencies of dramatizing the Amleth story, and that these are also found in The Spanish Tragedy. Merely to have known Belleforest cannot explain them; they could have been evolved only by a person transferring the Amleth material to the stage, and the lessons learned thereupon being transferred in turn to The Spanish Tragedy. Again, the seeming lack of popularity of Kyd's Hamlet, with its superior plot and more intrinsic interest of character and situation, is difficult to explain unless it were a first crude attempt at tragedy which was bettered in The Spanish Tragedy.

Lastly, the Belleforest narrative as it stood, even without its tragic ending, bore a nearer relation to the standard elements of Seneca's dramas than The Spanish Tragedy: fratricide as in Thyestes with a parallel to the husband-murder in Agamemnon; cunning revenge as in Agamemnon, Thyestes, and Medea; and the conflict between revenge and the forces that would put it down as in Medea. Slight and obvious changes made the play even more Senecan, such as the creation of the confidant Horatio and the actual appearance of a speaking ghost demanding vengeance as in Agamemnon. The likeness of Belleforest's story to the Orestes legend, the first part of which was dramatized by Seneca, must have been apparent to Kyd. Horwendille was Agamemnon; Geruthe, Clytemnestra; the king, Aegisthus; Hamlet, Orestes. The revenge of a son for his father was nearer the classical tradition than Hieronimo's revenge for a son.

With these considerations the date of the Ur-Hamlet may be set with fair certainty as approximately 1587, with The Spanish Tragedy following in 1587-1588, prompted by the increasing interest in Spanish affairs at the threat of a Spanish invasion.³⁴ If one accepts the priority of the Ur-Hamlet, the material from which Kyd built The Spanish Tragedy becomes so evident that it is likely Kyd had few other sources than his earlier Hamlet play and various pieces of information about Spain and Spanish affairs. The story of a father's revenge for a son is merely the reversal of Hamlet's for his father. That it is prefaced by the Andrea story is only an indication that Kyd, realizing from his experience in Hamlet the difficulty of filling a play with the simple revenge theme, endeavored to avoid repetition by substituting a full account of the prior action. In addition, since Kyd was still to a certain extent under the influence of Seneca, the ghost of some previously murdered man was essential to start the action of revenge.

Hamlet's reasons for delay are only two: his doubt of the ghost, and his inability to conceive a plan for a safe revenge on a guarded enemy. There are indications that Hamlet becomes extremely discouraged and blames himself unjustly for his delay. Just as Hamlet doubts the ghost, so Hieronimo doubts Bel-Imperia's letter. As Hamlet is not certain that he has grounds for revenge until after the mousetrap play, so Hieronimo needs Pedringano's letter to fortify his conviction.

After a delay caused by Hieronimo's distraction arising from an over-burdening yet impotent sense of wrong, he is next balked by his failure to secure legal justice. Thereupon his character changes, for he attempts to excuse the treacherous acts which are to follow by the statement that he is otherwise unable to revenge himself on men in superior stations. This excuse is modelled on Hamlet's real problem, for Hamlet knows the king is suspicious, but Lorenzo does not realize that his guilt has been revealed to Hieronimo. Thus when Lorenzo thwarts Hieronimo's attempts to gain the king's ear, his sole motive is to hush the fact that Horatio has been murdered. It has been indicated how this excuse and the actions to which it led finally turned Hieronimo into villainous courses. His reconciliation with Lorenzo is a Machiavellian extension of Hamlet's with the king before the fencing match. His double-edged remarks are drawn from Hamlet's, which in turn came direct from Belleforest. The play scene utilizes Hamlet's mousetrap but with a gory conclusion, and finally the murder of Castile parallels senselessly that of Phantasmo.

The weak points in Hamlet's revenge have been strengthened. Hamlet, despite his firm purpose, is actually helpless except for the contrivance of the play to reveal the king's guilt, and so, without the saving genius of Shakespeare's philosophical characterization, tends to be too static a figure. Only the faith of the audience that a scheme for revenge will eventually come to him, and their confidence in his personal character—largely gained from the daring of his supposedly mad remarks—keep him a figure strong enough to balance the rising force of the opposing action. Since he is portrayed sympathetically throughout, he cannot be given too much to do, and yet he cannot be given too little. Circumstances force him unwittingly to slay an innocent man, but these are so arranged as not to alienate the sympathy of the audience, although the tragic error is recorded and must later receive payment. Fate provides the dénouement in Hamlet; conversely, in The Spanish Tragedy a change of character, through which the driving necessity for revenge corrupts the hero, affects the action more materially. The difference enabled Hieronimo to give the audience more positive action for its money, but by that action he became a faulty character.

As for the rest, Lorenzo is a villainous extension of the king: both are villains who oppose the revenger by Machiavellian sleights. Isabella's largely spectacular madness and suicide is based on Ofelia's, which was more essential to the plot. In like manner, Bazulto's demand for justice is only of emotional significance, whereas Leonhardus's is rooted in the action. Each of these minor parallels, owing to the derivative nature of the simpler story of The Spanish Tragedy, is not so closely linked to the main plot as in Hamlet. Finally, from the hints of Machiavelli and Gentillet, from Italian and French novelle, from Seneca, and—as with the action between Lorenzo and Pedringano—from contemporary English life, Kyd built up, in a timely setting, the framework of incidents for The Spanish Tragedy.

Notes

A. H. Thorndike, “The Relations of Hamlet to the Contemporary Revenge Play,” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, Vol. XVII (1902), p. 125.
E. E. Stoll, John Webster (Cambridge: Harvard Cooperative Society, 1905), p. 118.
In speaking in this manner of The Spanish Tragedy I am not forgetting my later thesis that the Ur-Hamlet preceded The Spanish Tragedy. Although it is true that the Ur-Hamlet influenced such plays as Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany and Antonio's Revenge, which may have appeared before the Shakespeare version of Hamlet, Shakespeare's play shortly outshone the Kydian work and was taken by later dramatists as their model. To all intents, therefore, The Spanish Tragedy was the earliest main line of influence, later combined with Shakespeare's Hamlet.
Andrea was killed by Balthazar in fair battle. True, a feeble effort is made to put Balthazar in a bad light by having his soldiers unhorse Andrea before he is slain (Act I, sc. iv, ll. 19-26), but that is not sufficient to justify a vengeance-seeking ghost. This demand and situation closely parallels the reported ghost of Achilles in Seneca's Troades; but it is a piece of Senecan ethics undigestible to English audiences.
See especially, Two horrible and inhumane Murders done in Lincolnshire, by two Husbands upon their Wiues. … Anno Dom. 1604, Thomas Cash, Iohn Dilworth (1607); Tell-Trothes New-yeares Gift, ed. Furnivall (New Shakspere Society, 1876), p. 27; Thomas Nashe, “The Unfortunate Traveller,” Works, ed. McKerrow, II, 263; Phillip Stubbes, Anatomie of Abuses, p. 101.
This analysis leans heavily upon A. H. Thorndike's admirable study, already mentioned, in PMLA, Vol. XVII (1902), pp. 142-8.
If Kyd actually drew upon some story, it must have been far less complex than the action of the play would indicate, since various important incidents can be traced to diverse sources. See F. T. Bowers, “Kyd's Pedringano: Sources and Parallels,” Harvard Studies and Notes, Vol. XIII (1931).
F. L. Lucas, Seneca and Elizabethan Tragedy (Cambridge at the University Press, 1922), p. 57.
The question of Seneca's influence in Elizabethan Tragedy receives careful examination in Howard Baker's recently published Induction to Tragedy (Louisiana State University Press, 1939), which reaches conclusions substantially the same as those expressed above.
“The cases in which the English dramatists have woven individual features culled from this novel-literature [the Italian] into dramatic plots invented by themselves are innumerable. Particularly in the ‘blood and vengeance’ tragedies we can constantly realise how the poets' imaginations had been fired by those tales treating of a ‘bellissima vendetta,’ which Bandello especially relates with such grim enjoyment.” Wilhelm Creizenach, The English Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (London: Sidgewick & Jackson, 1916), p. 95. See also p. 219: “The classic apparitions of ghosts were, of course, too valuable to be foregone, but it is in the tales of revenge carefully prepared with a refinement of cunning and cruelty that the dramatists seek most strenuously to emulate their Italian models.”

That the scene is laid in Spain is of no importance, since no Elizabethan playwright strove overmuch for local color, and the contemporary Englishman lumped the Spaniard and the Italian together in the vicious and deceitful character of their revenges.
For a full discussion, see C. V. Boyer, The Villain as Hero in Elizabethan Tragedy (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1914), pp. 31-9, 40-3, 241-5.
F. T. Bowers, “Kyd's Pedringano: Sources and Parallels,” Harvard Studies and Notes, Vol. XIII (1931), pp. 247-9.
Boas in his note to this passage (Works of Thomas Kyd [Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1901], p. 408) describes this line as coming from the pseudo-Senecan Octavia: “Vindicta debetur mihi.” However, the context of the following lines indicates that the reference is rather to the well-known “Vindicta mihi,” “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord” (Romans XII: 17, 19. See also Deut. XXIII: 25). See F. T. Bowers, “A Note on the Spanish Tragedy,” Modern Language Notes, Vol. LIII (1938), pp. 590-1.
Here again, it seems, Boas makes too much difficulty over this line when he comments, “We should expect a contrast between the open and therefore by no means ‘ineuitable ills’ employed by vulgar wits, and the secret yet certain method which Hieronimo contemplates.” Yet if the analysis of Hieronimo's change in character be correct, he is casting himself off from the ordinary run of humanity and their forthright though effective methods of retaliation, and knowingly entering on a villainous course with its deeper satisfaction. No one with a knowledge of Elizabethan duelling assassinations can deny that “open,” the characteristically English method, did not invariably have an “inevitable” success. The contrast comes rather in the next line, where “secret” is juxtaposed to “certain,”—with the meaning that secrecy with its accompanying tortuosity of action could, by his plan, still become as certain as an open offensive would have proved.
“Cruel Orestes bath'd his ruthlesse sword,
Estrang'd from strangers, in his mothers blood,
So little pittie did the child afford
To Her, that was the parent of the brood;
Yet some excuse for this Orestes had,
Mad men exemption haue, and He was mad.”

Richard Brathwaite, Natures Embassie [1621] (Boston, Lincs.: Privately Printed, 1877), p. 119
See especially, Gentillet, trans. Patericke (1608), Part III, §21, p. 264; Daniel Tuvill, Essayes Morall and Theologicall (1609), pp. 133-5; Joseph Hall, “Heaven Upon Earth,” Works, ed. Wynter, Vol. VI, p. 10.
John Manningham, Diary, ed. J. Bruce (Camden Society, 1848), p. 115.
Richard Clerke, Sermons (1647), p. 392.
W. Y. Durand, “Palaemon and Arcyte, Progne, Marcus Geminus, and the Theatre in Which They Were Acted, as Described by John Bereblock (1566),” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, Vol. XX (1905), pp. 515-16.
“If a woman therefore, replied Lady Tarquina, should committe a theft, manslaughter, or faile in any other part of Iustice, should she not for such a fact be infamous? And Gualengo: Although such offences, in men and women, are by the laws equally punished, yet as often as in a woman they are not accompanied with the act of dishonestie [unchastity] they make her not infamous.” Kepers, The Courtiers Academie (c. 1598), p. 126. See the story of Camma told by Pettie, and the play Gismond of Salerne.

Legally, according to Coke, suicides were not accountable if they were suffering from loss of memory at the moment “by the rage of sickness or infirmity or otherwise” (Third Institute, cap. 8). Burton admits that suicide for noble reasons is much admired by pagan classical authors, but refutes them with Christian laws, excepting only “that in some cases, those hard censures of such as offer violence to their own persons … are to be mitigated, as in such as are mad, beside themselves for the time, or found to have been long melancholy, and that in extremity, they know not what they do, deprived of reason, judgement, all” (The Anatomy of Melancholy (Bohn Library, 1923), Vol. I, p. 504). Bel-Imperia, as Gismond before her, by her clearly premeditated suicide cast herself from the Christian to the pagan and romantic morality, but there is little doubt that she, as well as later tragic heroines, was viewed sympathetically by an audience sentimentally close to pagan ethics.
J. W. Cunliffe, “The Influence of Italian on Elizabethan Drama,” Modern Philology, Vol. IV (1904), pp. 597-604.
The Poetical Works of Sir William Alexander, ed. Kastner and Charlton (Manchester at the University Press, 1921), Vol. I, p. clxix.
The best illustration of the increasing interest of Italian dramatists in the depiction of villainy is found in two tragedies of Albovine and Rosamund separated by sixty-six years. In the Rosmunda of Rucellai (1516) Rosmunda is an innocent pure woman who takes no part by word or deed in the assassination of Alboina; Almachilde is merely a disinterested lover who executes vengeance on the king from generous and patriotic motives while Rosmunda is in a fainting spell. In Antonio Cavallerino's Rosimonda Regina (1582), however, Rosmunda is guilty of both prostitution and assassination, and, with her lover, is a fair specimen of the character interest Italian dramatists took in illicit passion and its frequent twin, murder.
Kastner and Charlton, op. cit., Vol. I, pp. xc-xci.
See particularly Charlton Lewis, The Genesis of Hamlet (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1907); Wilhelm Creizenach, “‘Der Bestrafte Brudermord’ and its Relation to Shakespeare's ‘Hamlet,’” Modern Philology, Vol. II (1904), pp. 249-60; M. B. Evans, “‘Der Bestrafte Brudermord’ and Shakespeare's ‘Hamlet,’” Modern Philology, Vol. II (1905), pp. 433-9; J. D. Wilson, The Copy for ‘Hamlet’ 1603 and the ‘Hamlet’ Transcript 1593 (London: De la More Press, 1918); E. E. Stoll, Hamlet: An Historical and Comparative Study (Research Publications of the University of Minnesota, 1919); H. D. Gray, “Thomas Kyd and the First Quarto of Hamlet,” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, Vol. XLII (1927), pp. 721-35; G. B. Harrison, The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke 1603 (London: John Lane, 1923); E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare (Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1930); F. T. Bowers, “Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany and the Ur-Hamlet,” Modern Language Notes, Vol. XLVIII (1933), pp. 101-8.
M. J. Wolff, “Zum Urhamlet,” Englische Studien, Vol. XLV (1912), pp. 16-18, suggests that Kyd may have known the Merope of Pomponio Torelli written in 1589, and lists ten resemblances of plotting between Merope and Hamlet. It seems more probable that the parallels between the two plays are accidental, since it seems practically certain that the Ur-Hamlet was written before 1589.
This feigning of madness for ulterior motives appears elsewhere in Saxo Grammaticus and was known to the Elizabethans from David's example in the Bible, from Livy's account of Brutus, and from various miscellaneous stories. As an example, Saviolo digresses from his advice on duelling to recount a tale he has read in the history of the last wars in Persia, in which Mahomet Bassa, general of the Turkish Empire, took a pension from a soldier who had deserved it and bestowed it on another. The soldier feigned madness until he secured an opportunity to murder Mahomet. Vincentio Sauiolo his Practise (1595), sig. Q3.
See especially Gentillet, Part III, § 34, pp. 349-50.
Francis Guicciardini, The Historie of Guicciardin, trans. Geoffrey Fenton (1579), p. 227; Fynes Moryson, Shakespeare's Europe, ed. Hughes, pp. 94-5, 406-7; G. F. Young, The Medici (London: John Murray, 1920), Vol. II, pp. 68, 334-5.
William Perkins, Cases of Conscience (ed. 1651), pp. 284-5, discusses the methods of “policy” which may justly be used: “1. Nothing must (in policy) be said, done, or intended, to prejudice the truth of the Gospell. 2. Nothing is to be said, done, or intended against the honour or glory of God, either in word, in deed, or in shew. 3. Nothing must bee wrought or contrived against justice that is due to man. 4. All actions of policie, must be such as pertaine to our calling, and be within the limits and bounds thereof. … These Caveats observed, it is not unlawfull to use that which we commonly call Policie.”
John Eliot, Discourses of Warre and Single Combat, by B. de Loque (1591), p. 52.
The Anatomy of Melancholy (Bohn Library, 1923), Vol. I, p. 387.
The hypothetical source of The Spanish Tragedy never having been discovered, cannot well be claimed to have first furnished both madness and delay. The coincidence would still be too startling. Furthermore, if the hypothesis be accepted that the Ur-Hamlet preceded The Spanish Tragedy, there seems to be no reason to posit a definite source for the full Spanish Tragedy.
Boas dates the Ur-Hamlet in 1587-1588, or shortly after The Spanish Tragedy, influenced by the theory that dramatization of the Hamlet story was prompted by the visit of English actors to the Court of Helsingör in 1586 but chiefly by their return in the latter part of 1587 or in 1588 (Works of Thomas Kyd, p. xlvi). The passage in Der Bestrafte Brudermord (Vol. III, p. 10) in which Hamlet, about to be sent to England, remarks that he should be ordered to Portugal instead, has been taken as a reference to an ill-fated English expedition in 1589. If this be true, it may well be a later addition, of course. Sarrazin gives 1588 as the latest possible date, and tends to Boas's ascription of 1587-1588 (Thomas Kyd und Sein Kreis [Berlin, 1892], pp. 95, 111). On p. 113 he notes a slight verbal parallel between The Misfortunes of Arthur (Feb. 1588), Der Bestrafte Brudermord, and Shakespeare's First Quarto, which if it is to be taken seriously would place the Ur-Hamlet in 1587. Sarrazin's views of the order of the two plays are complicated by his theory that The Spanish Tragedy as we know it is a reworking of earlier material. Evans finds the germ of Hieronimo's assumption of madness in the avowed purpose of Belleforest's Amleth, which he takes as proof that the Ur-Hamlet came first (MP, Vol. II [1905], p. 445). T. W. Baldwin, “The Chronology of Kyd's Plays,” Modern Language Notes, Vol. XL (1925), pp. 348-9, on the basis of rather dubious reasons argues for a date of 1582-1585 for The Spanish Tragedy, and 1589 for the Ur-Hamlet.

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History and Tragedy: Italianate Tragedy of Intrigue