The Spanish Tragedy

The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The first big hit of Elizabethan drama, and still absolutely captivating. The scene constructions and rhetorical flourishes may strike some readers as offputtingly artificial. I thought they were impressively thought out, and rich in interpretative possibilities. Kyd gives us a play within a play within a play. The personification of Revenge orchestrates the action, coming to embody the protagonist Hieronimo who in turn stages a play that enacts his revenge. The pivotal scene in which he discovers the letter revealing the murderers of his son, which can feel quite arbitrary, can be staged in such a way that has Revenge come in to press his thumb on the scale and kickstart the revenge plot. The guiding hand of providence makes good in the end, delivering a sense of poetic and dramatic justice. It must have felt powerfully cathartic to an audience who were used to burying their children to have a figure embody and enact extra-worldly justice on the stage, although the disaster that ensues might complicate the response of a modern audience. Anyone interested in Shakespeare or the theatre of his day needs to read this play.

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