Product Description

The first fully-fledged example of revenge tragedy, the genre that became so influential in later Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, The Spanish Tragedy (1589) occupies a very special place in the history of English Renaissance drama. Hieronimo, Knight-Marshal of Spain during its war with Portugal, fails to obtain justice when his son is murdered for courting Bel-Imperia, the Duke of Castile's daughter, and decides to take justice into his own hands. In a scene replete with meta-theatrical implications, Hieronimo and Bel-Imperia stage a playlet with Portuguese and Spanish nobles as actors, stabbing them with real 'fake' daggers before they kill themselves. This edition, which appends the scenes that were added in 1602, discusses Elizabethan attitudes to revenge, the Senecan features of the play and the significance of the Anglo-Spanish conflict in the 1580s.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #99054 in Books
• Published on: 2003-08-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 140 pages

Customer Reviews

Alright but not an uber classic, yeah?
I read this because I heard that it was a pretty influencial book in terms of the great tragedies that were written after it by the likes of Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe. This is no where near as good as anything either of those two produced though.

The plot is this: Horatio is murdered by Lorenzo and Prince Balthazar so that Balthazar is clear to marry the woman that Horacio loves, Bel-Imperia. Hieronimo, father of Horatio is understandably upset at these events, and swears revenge upon the two murderers. This he eventually achieves, and in the age old tragic tradition almost every character ends up dead by the final scene.

The plot is decent enough, but for me it's all rather crude. With the exception of Hieronimo, none of the characters are really developed, and the language seems rather flat and even clumsy at times. If you read this and then any Shakespeare it would make you appreciate just how beautiful the poetry of Shakespeares writing is, and also how life like his characters are when compared to those of Kyd.

All in all I can't strongly recommend this to you, it's alright and it's entertaining enough, you probably wont hate it, but there are lot better plays from the time you can be reading, like King Lear or Dr Faustus, this is average, nothing more.

Dazzling Elizabethan play
This is a really clever play. A bloodthirsty revenge play, involving stabbings, hangings, and the biting out of tongues, its climax is a theatrical tour de force in which the bad guys act in a play written by Hieronimo, the man who seeks revenge on them. At the end of Hieronimo's play the protagonists are unexpectedly killed with real knives. As they sink to the ground, bleeding and crying, the onstage audience laughs and applauds, not realising that the carnage is real. We the audience are asked to ponder how we'd feel if the actors in a play didn't get up and bow, but remained bloody and still on the stage. It's a fascinating play about theatre itself, in which there are plays within plays within plays, and the ultimate suggestion is that we're all actors within the theatre of God. Our tragedy is that nobody's given us the script.