1. The Spanish Tragedy: or, Hieronimo is Mad Again(e) by Thomas Kyd (1592/1602)
2nd year
Themes: Grief, vengeance, justice, corruption, the state v the individual
HIERONIMO:
Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, ed. by Clara Calvo and Jesus Tronch (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016) 3.11.4-33
My son – and what’s a son? A thing begot
Within a pair of minutes, thereabout;
A lump bred up in darkness, and doth serve
To ballast these light creatures we call women,
And in nine moneths’ end creeps forth to light.
What is there yet in a son
To make a father dote, rave or run mad?
Being born, it pouts, cries and breeds teeth.
What is there yet in a son? He must be fed,
Be taught to go, and speak. Ay, or yet?
Why might not a man love a calf as well?
… a son,
The more he grows in stature and in years,
The more unsquared, unbevelled he appears,
Reckons his parents among the rank of fools,
Strikes care upon their heads with his mad riots
Makes them look old before they meet with age.
This is a son.
And what a loss were this, considered truly?
Oh but my Horatio grew out of reach of these
Insatiate humours. He loved his loving parents.
He was my comfort and his mother’s joy,
The very arm that did hold up our house;
Our hopes were stored up in him.
None but a damned murderer could hate him.
The play:
Off-stage, Spanish nobleman Don Andrea is killed in battle by the Portuguese prince Balthazar. Don Andrea’s ghost now seeks revenge against Balthazar, who has been taken as a prisoner of war by the Duke of Castile, brother to the King of Spain. (This revenge is sought out with the aid of a personified Revenge, who oversees the play’s events.) Balthazar desires Bel-Imperia, who does not desire him in return. To spite Balthazar for his killing of Don Andrea, who she was previously engaged to, Bel Imperia chooses to love Horatio, a low-born soldier with privileges in the Spanish court of his father’s high position as Knight Marshal of Spain (the person responsible for executing justice for the state). Jealous of the love affair between Horatio and Bel-Imperia, Balthazar plots with Bel-Imperia’s brother Lorenzo, who is literally evil for evil’s sake, to murder Horatio. When Horatio is murdered, Hieronimo and Bel-Imperia seek revenge – Hieronimo for his son’s murder, and Bel-Imperia for the murders of her former lovers.
My thoughts:
What I found most powerful about The Spanish Tragedy was its representations of grief and jealousy and its commentary on the double standards in hegemonic societies. In the play, Hieronimo is a civil servant and is the figure entrusted with ensuring that justice is served in the state. It’s not said outright but the implication is that this is something he seems to do quite well in the eyes of the Spanish nobility until his own son Horatio is brutally murdered by two noblemen for having an illicit affair with a noblewoman and, finding no justice for this murder, he takes matters into his own hands. Hieronimo acts because the state, in its apathy to Lorenzo and Balthazar’s crime, fails to value Horatio’s life as equal to those of the nobles whose sundry cases he has presumably presided over for more than a hot minute and he is vilified for this. (I say more than a hot minute because Hieronimo is not a young man in this play; before things go awry, he is highly esteemed by the Spanish nobility for his role as Knight Marshall and he has a son who is old enough to be fighting in battles and romancing gentlewomen in gardens, which leads me to think that he’s been around for a while.)
I found it telling of the elite’s notions of their own natural superiority to people of lower classes that it would be offensive to them that a man for whom the majority of his working life has centred on notions of justice and fairness would be incensed to the point of violence about an injustice done in the state. Moreover, Hieronimo’s grief is exacerbated by the fact that the victim of the state’s freshest violence is his own son. Kyd’s depiction of the ruling class’ reaction to Hieronimo’s own, which is laden with the grief of a loving and extremely dedicated father, therefore carries the suggestion that familial bonds and whatever they may require of a person should not take precedence over allegiance to the state. This is not a standard that they adhere to themselves as the play begins with the foreign-born (but noble) prince Balthazar being given privileges within the Spanish court–even as a prisoner of war–that Horatio, who arguably has more claim to preferential treatment within the court by way of his father’s good and long relationship to the Duke of Castile, is not.
The play makes it clear that Hieronimo’s central crime isn’t killing, because the state continues to do this pretty casually (Pendringano is eventually hanged for his mischief in scene that’s pretty cavalier about this act of capital punishment); it’s that someone of his position dares to take personal retribution against someone of Lorenzo and Balthazar’s as doing so implies that the lives of the avenged and the lives of those murdered in revenge are equal. Maus calls Hieronimo’s revenge “radically levelling” in that through the murders of Balthazar and Lorenzo in retribution for the murder of his son, he destroys the difference between aristocrat and subject by positioning them as equals in the flesh (if not equals socially through theatre in the play he puts on for the royal court).1
In so many ways, The Spanish Tragedy highlights the power of institutions over individuals, which in the play is represented primarily in terms of class. Horatio is infinitely more noble than Lorenzo in character but Lorenzo’s class allows him to prevail over him in the sense of denying justice for Horatio’s death through the legal channels. Practically speaking, his class also provides him with the means for his villainy (he is able to pay Pedringano, a servant to his sister, to reveal her private information, for example). I also found it interesting that Balthazar considers it “revenge” (2.1.115) to murder Horatio, implying that he views Horatio’s relationship with Bel-Imperia a personal affront to him that must be accounted for as though it were a more serious transgression.
I found Bel-Imperia a really interesting character because she enters into a relationship with Horatio as revenge against Balthazar for killing Don Andrea, saying outright “I’ll love Horatio, my Andrea’s friend, | The more to spite the Prince that wrought his end” (1.4.67-68). Despite her uncle the King’s comments about what “young virgins” such as Bel-Imperia are like and should do (2.3.43), Kyd does not present Bel-Imperia as particularly chaste or unworldly. In fact, in several ways, Kyd depicts Bel-Imperia as a woman who is in no way a stranger to the ways of the world, both in matters of sexuality and generally. One of the ways he does this is through her resolve to create some kind of satisfactory justice for herself, placing herself in the play’s revenge-economy alongside the male characters, and her willingness to manipulate Horatio’s romantic feelings for her through the use of her feminine wiles to achieve her aim. That her name roughly translates to “beautiful Empire” is fitting given her position in the world of the play as a site of contestation for various men who desire to subjugate her, which is what empires were doing at the time of Kyd’s writing.
Love is no more sacred to her father and uncle, who want her to marry Balthazar to forge an alliance between Spain and Portugal. What makes Bel-Imperia a proto-feminist character is that rather than mourning Don Andrea’s death and yielding to he father, brother, and uncle’s choice of new spouse for her, she chooses to also be an actor in the family politics where she should, by societal expectations, be passive, even going one further than her male relatives in their mockery of love. Where they say ‘you will love this Portuguese prince so that we can advance our kingdom’, she says ‘Not only will I not do love him who killed my fiancé, I will love his inferior to spite you all’, which is quite the power move for a female character given the play is set in the sixteenth century.
2. The Merchant of Venice* by William Shakespeare (1600)
3rd year
*features antisemitic stereotypes and language
Themes: Prejudice, revenge, justice, familial duty
SALARINO: Why, I am sure if he [Antonio] forfeit, thou wilt not take his flesh. What’s that good for?
William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, ed. by John Drakakis, (London, The Arden Shakespeare Third Series, 2010), 3.1.46-65
JEW2: To bait fish withal; if it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge. He hath disgraced me and hindered me half a million, laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies, and what’s his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? … If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge! If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge! The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.
The play:
In Venice, a Christian naval merchant called Antonio takes a loan from Jewish moneylender Shylock in order to help his friend Bassanio who wishes to court a woman called Portia. Antonio regularly harasses Shylock with antisemitic taunts so Shylock agrees to lend Antonio money on the condition that should he fail to pay him back, he will owe Shylock a pound of his own flesh. Confident that his ventures will not fail and he will have the money in time, Antonio agrees to this. When he is unable to pay the loan back, he asks for leniency from Shylock who refuses to grant it and insists on his promised pound of flesh. The case goes to court and the day is saved (for Antonio) by Portia, now married to Bassanio, dressing as a man to argue Antonio’s case.
My thoughts:
I found it upsetting that after all the violence Shylock has suffered at the hands of the Christian state, which continually goes unpunished, he is forced to convert to Christianity at the end of the play to receive pardon for his crime of trying to get a Christian killed. I found this to be such an act of violence not just because of the deplorability of forcing anybody to convert to any belief they do not hold, but because in Shylock’s case, this is a man who has lived a life harassed and humiliated by Christians for being a Jew and who is humiliated in court by his wager with Antonio (which Antonio freely entered into out of arrogance, by the way, no matter how bizarre it was) is undermined by what is in my opinion a really bad loophole presented by somebody acting as a judge without the authority to do so.3
As if all of that were not enough, he is then denied freedom of conscience and this is presented to him as a kindness by the “benevolent” Christians. While I don’t find it pleasant that Shylock insisted to the very end that Antonio essentially die for failing to give him the money owed him (because how does one give nearly 500g of their flesh to somebody else and live to tell the tale?), I really did not enjoy the suggestion by the play’s Christian characters that Shylock was infinitely more brutal than them and their government for being hell-bent on this when they had, in effect, killed him countless times with their antisemitic bullying.4
He’s not here for me to ask him directly but from his unfavourable portrayal of the Christian characters in the play, I get the impression Shakespeare was trying to highlight the hypocrisy of Christians viewing themselves as the moral superiors of Jews despite the extreme persecution they inflicted on Jewish people. For example, in Act 4 Scene 1, completely unprovoked, Bassanio (Christian) says that he would offer up his wife to Shylock (to do what with is unclear) in exchange for Antonio’s freedom, which is a really weird thing to say when absolutely nobody has brought up the idea of anybody needing to become prisoner to anybody else. This mirrors the scene in Genesis 19 when Lot offers up his daughters to be raped by the citizens of Sodom to protect the angels visiting him, who the men of Sodom wish to rape instead. To Bassanio’s suggestion, Shylock replies:
These be the Christian husbands! I have a daughter:
Would any of the stock of Barabbas
Had been her husband rather than a Christian
Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, 4.1.291-93.
which is one way that Shakespeare subverts the immoral-Jew, moral-Christian dichotomy held by the Christian characters of the play and possibly held by his contemporary Christian audience.
3. Titus Andronicus* by William Shakespeare (1623)
3rd year
*This play features a rape that is depicted off-stage but planned and alluded to on-stage. It also has allusions to infanticide. (It’s a very violent play in general – limbs are cut off and people are baked into pies and fed to their mothers unknowingly.) Just proceed with caution.
Themes: Revenge, barbarism, nobility, masculinity, womanhood
TAMORA:
William Shakespeare, Titus Adronicus, ed. by Jonathan Bate (London: The Arden Shakespeare Third Series, 2018), 1.1.455-6
I’ll find a day to massacre them all,
And raze their faction and their family,
The cruel father and his traitorous sons
To whom I sued for my dear son’s life,
And make them know what ‘tis to let a queen
Kneel in the streets and beg for grace in vain.
The play:
Titus Andronicus is a Roman warrior of the Andronicus family who returns from war with the Goths having captured Tamora, Queen of the Goths, and her three sons Alarbus, Chrion, and Demetrius. Alarbus is killed by the Romans in the first scene of the play as an act of revenge against the Goths, despite Tamora begging them to spare his life. After this, Tamora plots to bring down the Andronici, a decision that sets off a very bloody chain of events. Throughout this, Tamora begins a secret affair with Aaron, a Moor living in Rome as a slave.
My thoughts:
Despite its extreme violence, I found this a fascinating play. It’s the play that contains the iconic line “Villain, I have done thy mother”, which means exactly what it sounds like it means. That’s not why I found it fascinating though. Titus Andronicus made an impression on me because of the sheer scale of its brutality, which is almost to the point of farce. This isn’t because I love violence (I’m actually quite a squeamish person), but because all of the violence that takes place in the play is because of the strength of the characters’ desire for revenge, so maybe Shakespeare was trying to say something about how an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind…
I found Tamora an extremely compelling character because of her ruthlessness and her seeming lack of identification with her womanhood. Not only is she not stereotypically feminine, instead embodying traits that have historically been associated with men (strength, assertiveness, sexual aggression etc), the choices she makes in the play also undermine all notions of sisterhood or shared commonality among women. When her two remaining sons are encouraged by her lover Aaron to rape Titus’ son Lavinia, Lavinia begs Tamora to entreat her sons to change their minds as she’s being led away and Tamora’s response is to instruct her sons to “use her as you will” (2.3.173). She also tells them that the worse they are in their treatment of Lavinia, the more she will love them (2.3.174), which is a very disturbing thing for anybody to say, even more so for a mother to say to her sons.
I found it interesting that when Lavinia specifically appeals to Tamora’s womanhood to influence her sons to relent by saying “O Tamora, thou bearest a woman’s face” (2.3.136), she does not say something to the effect of “Tamora, you are a woman”. She instead says that Tamora “bears”, or has, a woman’s face, which is not quite the same thing as actually being a woman. While Tamora is a woman, by using the verb “bear”, which, when used to refer to someone’s appearance can have connotations of deception (like the shapeshifting of gods in Greek mythology), Shakespeare suggests that her capacity to behave as stone-heartedly as she does is because she is something other than woman. In this way, she reminded me of Lady Macbeth, who famously called on the gods to “unsex” her and fill her with “direst cruelty” so that she could do the evil that needed to be done without her ‘natural’ feminine inclinations interfering with her actualisation of her objective.
In her attitude to Lavinia’s rape by her sons, Tamora is an inversion of Procne in the story of Procne and Philomela, who went as far as murdering her own child to avenge her sister when her husband had raped her younger sister and cut out her tongue to prevent her from speaking out about what he’d done, which is what Chiron and Demetrius do to Lavinia. Despite this coolness, she is clearly capable of maternal and feminine feelings, or at least playing the part of having them, because she pleads for her son to be spared at the beginning of the play, and the fact that he is not is what begins her campaign against the Andronius family (“Sweet mercy is nobility’s true badge: | Thrice noble Titus, spare my first-born son.” (1.1.122-3)). Yet, when she gives birth to her baby with Aaron, she plots for the baby to be killed because his dark skin would expose that he is not the child of Saturninus, the emperor of Rome who Tamora marries at the beginning of the play. I’ll leave you to decide what that difference suggests.
It probably goes without saying that Aaron is the embodiment of anti-black stereotypes but I’ll say it anyway. He’s the one who introduces Demetrius and Chiron to the idea of raping Lavinia to “achieve” her when Chiron initially speaks of winning Lavinia’s affection by romance. This specific difference between the two men marks Aaron as the sexual brute to Chiron’s gentleman, an image of black men and Moors that was prevalent in Shakespeare’s time. (The sexuality of black people in general was thought of as savage in nature. One reason for this is because of the discovery made by Europeans during the Age of Exploration that people in warmer climates tended to wear fewer/looser clothes than those in cold climates, which led them to make false connections between nudity and modesty/immodesty and sexual availability. This is one of the reasons black African women came to be perceived as sexually permissive compared to their white English counterparts.)
Tamora’s willingness to align herself with a Moor, entering into a sexual relationship with him that results in a child, also establishes her as a woman on the fringe of society (compare her to Portia in The Merchant of Venice, for example, who is positioned in the play as a respectable woman and is also very racist). This makes it ironic when Bassianus says in Act 2:
Believe me, queen, your swart Cimmerian
Doth make your honour of his body’s hue,
Spotted, detested, and abominable.
Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, 2.2.72-4.
because Tamora’s “honour” seems to be spotted and abominable before she even becomes involved with Aaron.
There’s more to Titus Andronicus than Tamora and Aaron and racial prejudice but these are the parts of the play that stood out to me. What Titus does to Tamora as revenge for what Chiron and Demetrius do to Lavinia is also very unpleasant and my not discussing it isn’t because I think it’s a perfectly appropriate and reasonable thing to do because it’s very, very dark. You just can’t talk about all the things all the time.
4. Light Shining on Buckinghamshire by Caryl Churchill (1976)
3rd year
Themes: Individual and national identity, social upheaval, religion
SEXBY: It was said that if those in low condition were given their birthright it would be the destruction of this kingdom. I think the poor and meaner of this kingdom have been the preservation of this kingdom. Their lives have not been held dear for purchasing the good of the kingdom.
Caryl Churchill, Light Shining on Buckinghamshire, (London: Nick Hern Books, 2015), p. 34.
The play:
Light Shining on Buckinghamshire imagines the lives of a diverse group of English people during the English Civil War. The play takes place in the 1640s before the execution of Charles 1 and voices the thoughts of ordinary people expectant for revolutionary change. A large part of the Republic’s failure was because of conflicts within the New Model Army, the most contentious being the issues of property ownership and suffrage for all men (as opposed to just the property-owning ones), which was advocated for by some of the “radical” factions and opposed by the moderates who felt it would lead to anarchy. In her introduction to the play, Churchill writes that the play shows “the amazed excitement of people taking hold of their own lives, and their gradual betrayal as those who led them realised that freedom could not be had without property being destroyed.”5
My thoughts:
I found this play really moving because Churchill expresses so much in it without saying very much. Save for a section that presents the conversation of high-ranking soldiers during the Putney Debates, which were real debates held to discuss the rights of citizens in a newly emerging English republic, the play voices the thoughts and feelings of men and women of no or little renown. Through the words of preachers, working men, army officers, and women so ordinary they are literally called ‘Woman with baby’ and ‘Her friend’, Churchill shows the sentiments of various groups of people at the time. What I really loved was how Churchill depicted the feelings of people like butchers and ex-soldiers through plain and irreverent language to reflect the spirit of despondency and disillusionment that had begun to settle over people at the time. The play is not only short – my edition is only 65 pages long – it is also unostentatious and actually slightly austere in style, which is fitting for the theme. I found this a very pleasant deviation from back to back reading of Renaissance plays, which, as much as I love them, are not known for their restraint. With no line numbers or scene divisions, the play’s format is also atypical, reflecting the experimental, unstable nature of the period itself.
Throughout the play, Churchill also uses the many, many manifestations or interpretations of Christianity that were present in England at this time to cast aspersions on the motives of the leading revolutionary figures, as well as to critique the religion itself, which she does open-handedly. If you’re a Christian who is sensitive to their faith being insulted, I really wouldn’t recommend this play. If you can read the things you believe in being presented not entirely favourably without combusting, you’ll be fine. In two Acts, Churchill conveys the overwhelming mood of a cross-section of English society during a period of unprecedented change, as well as the sober reality of the impact of the Civil War on ordinary people with little power.
- Maus, The Spanish Tragedy, 101.
↩︎ - The speech heading ‘Jew’ is how Shylock is designated in the Arden Theatre edition of the play. This varies across editions.
↩︎ - (I think Portia is an interesting character when it comes to female representation in Shakespeare but the freedom she achieves through cross-dressing becomes Shylock’s death-knell. Because she is restricted in what she can do by virtue of her sex, she disguises herself as a man to act as Antonio’s defence in court and by so doing, acquits him of his duty to Shylock and levies further punishments on Shylock.)
↩︎ - In the Bible, Jesus equates hating a person with physically killing them so the ideological violence done to the Jews by the Christians in the play is murder by the standards of their own faith. See Matthew 5:21.
↩︎ - Caryl Churchill, Light Shining on Buckinghamshire, (London: Nick Hern Books, 2015), p. vii.
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