Beyond The Spanish Tragedy: A Study of the Works of Thomas Kyd.

Beyond The Spanish Tragedy: A Study of the Works of Thomas Kyd, by Lukas Erne. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2001, Pp. xix + 252. Cloth $74.95.

Without risking overstatement, we can say with reasonable certainty that Thomas Kyd was the author of one extraordinarily generative play. (1) Within a decade and a half of its initial appearance, The Spanish Tragedy had been produced and performed, prefaced, and parodied, printed and reprinted, amended and printed again. All the while, the play was inspiring Kyd's better-known contemporaries, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson, along with a host of lesser dramatic lights, who freely cribbed lines and allusions from a work they realized had become fixed in the imaginations of contemporary theatergoers. Whereas earlier commentators have "reduced" Kyd to this "most famous" of his plays, in Beyond the Spanish Tragedy: A Study of the Works of Thomas Kyd, Lucas Erne sets out to prove that the dramatist "can be identified with some confidence as the author of at least five plays: The Spanish Tragedy, Soliman and Perseda, Corelia, Don Horatio ... and the lost Hamlet" (xi). As his ten chapters "present a comprehensive scholarly and critical introduction to Kyd's works that reviews, amends, and updates previous work on Kyd" (9), Erne seeks to demonstrate that when we push "beyond" Thomas Kyd's seminal tragedy, a coherent body of work emerges.

To place the Kyd canon at five major works is to set the playwright on a plane with his famous "roommate" Christopher Marlowe, which Erne does at the outset by establishing Kyd's "place in the history of the Elizabethan two-part play" (9). (2) This attempt, in turn, rests upon affirming the relationship between "the spanes comodye donne oracioe," which, according to Henslowe, was playing in rotation with The Spanish Tragedy by February of 1592, and the farcical First Part of Hieronimo, not printed until 1605. (3) In order to persuade us of their connection--and of the forepiece's "dialectical relationship" with the tragedy--Erne parses the short play's two textual layers, discerning them both stylistically and in terms of dramatic symbol. Here, as elsewhere in the study, Erne positions himself against Arthur Freeman, who regarded the style of 1 Hieronimo as "unquestionably ... not Kyd's." (4) Where Freeman saw crude imitation, Erne discovers a stylistic "harmony," which inspires him to claim that Kyd's "diptych" stands with Marlowe's Tamburlaine "at the head of the Elizabethan vogue for two-part plays" (10). (5)

Enre's opening analysis gives rise to a problem that will return to trouble later moments of the study. For while dividing the text's "political" and "private" layers, Erne maintains that any apparent discontinuities may be "explained by the limitations of stage realism, imperfections which members of an audience are asked to piece out with their thoughts," while inconsistencies between Horatio's account of Andrea's death in the forepiece and the event as reported in the tragedy must have seemed "a petty detail" that would not "have mattered much to Kyd" (27). Such a claim may suggests that in his determination to "prove" that Kyd should be regarded as having written a diptych in the mode of Marlowe's far more coherent Tamburlaine cycle, the author is led to make more of his evidence than ought to be deduced by construing "intention." Indeed, this effort to establish congruence through an insistent focus on continuity of form leaves under-examined significant divergences in content. For discernible in the forepiece are several discursive formations minimally present (if at all) in the tragedy it presumably prefaced. Among these are the "Armada tone" most critics have found lacking in the original (which enters 1 Hieronimo via a new character, the Duke of Medina's son), a discourse of Portuguese patriotism (also largely absent in the original), and "low" Hispanophobic and anti-Semitic discourses that are quite out of keeping with the Senecan, Vergilian, and Petrarchan codes that energize the tragedy. (6) While it is possible that we can attribute these new discursive features to textual "corruption," they would seem to permeate both layers of the extant 1 Hieronimo as Erne defines them.

Chapter 2 opens an extended discussion of The Spanish Tragedy itself, taking up problems of "authorship, sources, date, language, and the nature of the play's text" (47). While showing that Kyd's play, as distinct from many others of the period, does not depend upon a single narrative antecedent, Erne reviews the play's known partial sources. Recounting moments of contemporary parody in works by Beaumont, Heywood, Shirley, Rawlins, and Jonson, Erne also observes--in line with much recent commentary--that if Kyd "thrust Elysium into Hell" as Nashe suggested, he probably did so in order to emphasize themes "growing out not only of Seneca but also of contemporary theological controversies" (53-54), a matter to which he will return in more detail in chapter 3. (7) Weighing the linguistic characteristics of The Spanish Tragedy, Erne notes "verbal parallels" in The Jew of Malta that "evidence ... Marlowe's indebtedness" (58). Granting that "Marlowe's verse is justly praised above Kyd's," he argues that we have "underestimated" the latter's "independent contribution" because it is so "finely in tune with character and situation" (69). Thus we find in Kyd a "language [that] is eminently theatrical, subtly growing out of action, character, and situation, a quality which lies on the straight road to Shakespeare" (73). Readers acquainted with the play's poetic innovations will not find much to disagree with here, though at this point in the study, it remains to be shown whether Kyd's other works are as effectively wrought.

Erne is not quite ready to respond to this challenge, however, as his introduction is followed by a series of three more chapters on The Spanish Tragedy. These consider the play's "origins," its development of the "revenge" theme, and its publishing and performance history "after Kyd." Locating the play in theater history, Erne briefly charts the development of English drama from "Mystery and Morality plays via the moral Interludes" to "secular plays" and "romantic comedies" (79). Observing that these antecedents--along with "various classical and neoclassical plays in Latin" and in combination with French and Italian "vernacular neoclassical drama"--may constitute the play's "origins," Erne suggests that it is finally The Spanish Tragedy's "fusion, reconciliation, and transcendence" (79) of these traditions that accounts for the play's richness, an assessment that will probably generate a nod of recognition among the initiated.

As it lists the "firsts" that make The Spanish Tragedy so important--"[t]he first modern revenge tragedy, the first Machiavellian villain, the first play which successfully mixes tragic and comic elements, the first play-within-a-play" (96)--Erne's fourth chapter turns to the play's thematics, especially as they relate to its famous staging of "Revenge." Having cautioned against reading the play in terms of contemporary "anti-Spanish prejudice" (91), (8) Erne argues that The Spanish Tragedy's appearance at a moment when the institution of the theater was relatively new made it well situated to investigate "the power of theatrical illusion" (96). Erne is certainly right to suggest that the play's utilization of multiple perspectives sets it apart from the other drama of its historical moment. Suggesting that this strategy points the way toward the more complex point of view we associate with Shakespeare, Erne accurately describes Kyd's framing devices as being "constituted by the allegorical figure Revenge and the Ghost of Andrea," who stand "in sharp contrast to theatrical activity which constitutes the second frame" represented by the "spectacles presented by Hieronimo" (97-98). Viewed in relation to the formal attributes of The Spanish Tragedy proper, Erne's insights about the way the play's multiple frames work to unfold its argument in such as way as to "mirror and comment on each other" (97) are articulated in a way that will help readers new to the text negotiate its complexities. But these observations may also suggest a slight lapse in the book's overarching argument. For if a major contribution of this study is to establish Kyd's place in the development of the two-part play, and if we are to think of 1 Hieronimo as standing in "dialectical relationship" with The Spanish Tragedy as its intended prelude, this would seem to suggest that we should factor in the perspective of the forepiece--with its focus on "The Warres of Portugall"--as presenting yet a third framing device.

In some respects chapter 5, which reviews virtually everything known about The Spanish Tragedy's printing and performance history, may prove one of the more useful in the study. The problem of the play's additions is addressed here, along with the evidence for advancing Jonson and a range of other authorship candidates. Though Erne does us the service of cataloguing the known Continental editions and adaptations "printed between 1618 and 1729," reviewing the verifiable performances that "took place from Holland to Bohemia and from Denmark to southern Germany" beginning "as early as 1601" (127), a troubling undercurrent also runs through this discussion. For as he laments the play's having "suffered from being deprived of its true medium: the stage," Erne also appeals to what he believes has been learned by way of its return in recent years to the live performance medium. Implicit in the argument seems to be a distinction between those who have actually seen The Spanish Tragedy performed and those who have not, as if theatrical production were somehow less an interpretive enterprise than literary criticism.

Chapter 6 finally moves "beyond" Kyd's most famous play. Erne takes up the problem of the storied Ur-Hamlet by re-sifting Nashe's allusions to "the Kidde" in his "famous 'Preface' to Greene's Menaphon" and offering ca. 1588/89 as "the best guess" for dating the lost masterpiece. Observing from a passage in Lodge's Wit's Miserie (1596) that "[o]ne of the few things we know about Kyd's Hamlet is that ... it featured a ghost" (150), Enre discusses the passages in Q1 of Shakespeare's Hamlet that have been thought to contain traces of Kyd's earlier version. While concluding that, in "all probability, the play to which the arguably most famous piece of English literature is heavily indebted is thus indeed his" (150), Erne also raises the suggestive possibility that Kyd's Hamlet could have contained sensitive topical matters, which might account for its not having been printed.

Turning away from specter of the Ur-Hamlet, chapters 7 and 8 address the more material Soliman and Perseda (1592). As in his analysis of The Spanish Tragedy, Erne reviews the play's printing history while also drawing attention to resonances among several other contemporary dramas. Most significantly, and in line with his continuing emphasis on the Kyd-Marlowe connection, he points out that Soliman and Perseda seems to share a common source with 2 Tamburlaine in Francois de Belleforest's 1578 edition of Munster's Cosmographie Universelle. While acknowledging that "[s]ource studies are not in vogue today," and that there are "obvious hermeneutic limits to an analysis of an artist's sources" (168)--caveats that may, by this point in the study, seem to come a bit late--Erne discusses the relationship between Kyd's play and the tale from Henry Wotton's Courtlie Controversie of Cupids Cautels (1578) upon which it is based. While providing a helpful plot summary, Erne also shows how Kyd departs from the "basically linear" narrative of his source in order to create "a tight dramatic structure strictly based on cause and effect dealing with intrigue and passion" (176-77). As in the earlier treatment of The Spanish Tragedy, Kyd's debt to Latin and Italian comedy is considered, this time by way of Soliman and Perseda's miles gloriosus, Basilico, whose antecedents in commedia dell'arte and commedia eriduta allow Erne to suggest comparisons with Shakespearean characters such as Pistol and Falstaff.

Erne's penultimate chapter takes up Cornelia (1594), Kyd's translation of French dramatist Robert Garnier's Cornelie (1574). Discussing the dearth of criticism on a work that, though virtually unknown to modern readers, was excerpted at length in two literary anthologies published within six years of Kyd's death, Erne considers "why critics have failed to do the work justice" (209). Before closing with a short chapter on Kyd's "Other Works and Apocrypha," Erne suggests that the influence of Garnier's play on Kyd "may have been of greater importance than that of any other play of his century"--that he may have "looked to Cornelie when writing The Spanish Tragedy and to The Spanish Tragedy when writing Cornelia" (215).

Lukas Erne is adept at articulating the positions of previous critics in relation to one another and to the various works he attributes to Kyd. He is also to be commended for conceiving this study as an international conversation; included throughout are Continental voices sometimes neglected by critics writing in English. But in spite of Erne's will to read Marlovian breadth into plays as various as The First Part of Hieronimo, Soliman and Perseda, Cornelia, and a Hamlet we can never really know, this reviewer remains not quite convinced that Kydian range is what we have been shown. Indeed, to bring the less familiar plays out from under the long shadow cast by The Spanish Tragedy serves equally to underscore the singularity of that seminal play. So although the volume can be recommended as an updated "companion" to Kyd's works, readers should also be encouraged to consult Beyond The Spanish Tragedy in dialogue with Arthur Freeman's aging, but more measured, Thomas Kyd: Facts and Problems. Somewhere between the two studies lies a solid assessment of this important playwright's dramatic oeuvre.

Notes

1. Though now slightly dated, Jose Ramon Diaz-Fernandez, "Thomas Kyd: A Bibliography, 1966-1992," Bulletin of Bibliography 52:1 (1993): 1-13, charts the steady critical interest in Kyd and The Spanish Tragedy.

2. For a concise discussion of this relationship see Arthur Freeman, "Marlowe, Kyd, and the Dutch Church Libel," English Literary Renaissance 3 (1973): 44-52.

3. R. A. Foakes and T. T. Rickert eds. Henslowe's Diary (Cambridge, 1961), 16-19; Andrew S. Cairncross, The First Part of Hieronimo and The Spanish Tragedy (Lincoln, 1967), xii-xix.

4. Arthur Freeman, Thomas Kyd: Facts and Problems (Oxford, 1967), 176.

5. Previous critics have dismissed 1 Hieronimo as "spurious," an "incubus," and even an "abortion." See Frederick S. Boas, ed., The Works of Thomas Kyd (Oxford, 1901 [reprint 1967]), xliv-xlv; Philip Edwards, ed., The Spanish Tragedy (London, 1959), 137-38; and Freeman, Thomas Kyd: Facts and Problems, 175-77.

6. On the early modern England's Hispanophobic discourses see Eric Griffin, "From Ethos to Ethos: Hispanizing the Spaniard in the Old World and the New," CR: The New Centennial Review 2:1 (2002): 69-116; Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Travel, and Colonial Writing in the English Renaissance (Oxford, 1998), 85-104.

7. See S. F. Johnson, "The Spanish Tragedy, or Babylon Revisited," Essays on Shakespeare and Elizabethan Drama. Ed. R. Hosley (Columbia, Missouri, 1962), 23-36; Ronald Broude, "Time, Truth, and Right in The Spanish Tragedy. Studies in Philology 68 (1971): 130-45; Huston Diehl, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England (Ithaca, 1997), 112-20; Eric Griffin, "Ethos, Empire, and the Valiant Acts of Thomas Kyd's Tragedy of 'The Spains,'" English Literary Renaissance 31 (2001): 192-229.

8. See William Empson, "The Spanish Tragedy," Nimbus 3 (1956): 16-29; Stephen Justice, "Spain, Tragedy, and The Spanish Tragedy," SEL 25 (1985): 271-88; Eugene D. Hill, "Senecan and Virgilian Perspectives in The Spanish Tragedy," English Literary Renaissance 15 (1985): 143-65; J. R. Mulryne, "Nationality and Language in Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy." Langues Et Nations Au Temps de la Renaissance, ed. M. T. Jones-Davies (Paris, 1991), 68-91; Frank Ardolino, Apocalypse and Armada in Kyd's Spanish Tragedy (Kirksville, 1995).

Reviewer: ERIC GRIFFIN