THE SPANISH TRAGEDY Two Shrews

The Induction of Sly: The Influence of The Spanish Tragedy on the Two Shrews

Frank Ardolino

Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1587–91) was, as Boas (lxviii–ciii), Freeman (131–37), and Dudrap (607–31) have demonstrated, the most cited, imitated, and parodied play in the Jacobean and Caroline periods. Knapp has stated that The Spanish Tragedy exerted “a compulsive force . . . which ran to . . . innumerable partial imitations . . . while simultaneously inspiring scorn and parody” (147).1 On the one hand, Kyd’s play was perceived as a monument of rhetorical and sentimental excesses. Its highly ornate language was parodied by Jonson, Dekker, and Greene, among others, and Hieronimo became a fa- vorite character whose impassioned speeches and excessive violence were both celebrated and ridiculed. The Spanish Tragedy was also famous for its combina- tion of supernatural and Senecan elements, primarily the depiction of the ghost of Andrea and Hieronimo’s bloody revenge playlet followed by his biting out his tongue rather than revealing “The thing which I have vow’d inviolate” (4.4.188). As Brown (38–41) and Ewbank (410) have explained, Hieronimo’s revenge play- within-the play provided other dramatists with a method for their depictions of the climactic accomplishment of revenge. But, on the other hand, The Spanish Tragedy also served for Kyd’s contem- poraries and successors as an effective model of metadramatic complexity and sophistication. Kyd opened the play with an induction scene that allowed Andrea and Revenge to serve as an onstage audience commenting on the action taking place before them.Further,Hieronimo’s revenge playlet was used not only to re- solve the plot but also to provide important parallels with the framing play by creating images of onstage audiences with different levels of awareness. In sum, Kyd provided his contemporaries with a formative and inclusive theatrical expe- rience, deftly combining Senecan action and ornate rhetoric, symbolic staging, patterned language, and themes of revenge/justice and art/reality to create what McAlindon has called “the most important . . . play in the history of English drama” (55). Critics have concentrated on tracing Kyd’s role in the development of re- venge tragedy, citing, among others, Woodstock (c. 1591–94), Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge (1599) and The Malcontent(1604), The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), Robert Tailor’s The Hog hath lost his pearl (1613), Middleton’s Women Beware Women (c. 1625), and Massinger’s The Roman Actor (1626).2 Shakespeare’s borrowings from Kyd are also well-documented. Hamlet is indebted to The Spanish Tragedy for

EIRC 40.1&2 (2014): 164–81 164 Frank Ardolino 165 its revenge themes and presence of the ghost. Kyd’s influence is also evident in the themes and revenge motifs of Titus Andronicus, which Bate has analyzed as Shakespeare’s attempt to prove he could “match, even outdo, the most successful play of the age” (268). Another debt to Kyd is found in 3 Henry VI 1.4.79–83, 157–59, where Queen Margaret offers the Duke of York the napkin stained with his son Rutland’s blood, which parallels Hieronimo’s dipping Horatio’s “bloody handkerchief” into his murdered son’s blood in 2.5 (Boas lxxxii). In addition, Sofer maintains that Hieronimo’s bloody handkerchief “anticipates Desdemona’s exotic handkerchief” (144). Finally, Thompson has listed some of the stylistic and verbal parallels between The Shrew and The Spanish Tragedy, but she did not develop the comparison. I would like to expand Kyd’s influence to include the anonymous The Taming of a Shrew and Shakespeare’s related play The Taming of the Shrew. Shakespeare and the author of A Shrew did not imitate The Spanish Tragedy in order to impart a darker hue to their comedies or to capitalize on its Senecan qualities; rather they drew upon Kyd’s less sensational methods to create comic adaptations in the context of their shrew and Supposes plot materials. The critical history of the two Shrews can be summarized in three alterna- tives: 1. A Shrew is the source of The Shrew or vice versa; 2. A Shrew is a “bad quarto,” either a memorial reconstruction or a defective imitation, of The Shrew; 3. both plays are derived from a lost play, which may have been written by Shake- speare, and represent different versions or aspects of that original source (Aspinall 7). These theories have produced intricate arguments and refinements primarily concerning the nature of memorial reconstruction. Most critics believe A Shrew is too inferior a play to be anything but a pale adaptation of The Shrew, yet at the same time some critics believe that A Shrew is too much different from Shake- speare’s play to be a reported or a pirated version. Overall, the current scholarly consensus is that the anonymous play succeeded Shakespeare’s play and is inferior to it.3 However, these arguments have produced a scholarly cul-de-sac in which the order of composition and the respective merits of both versions are endlessly debated. Rather, it is better to combine the assessments of Marcus and Dessen to arrive at an effective paradigm for more productive analyses. Instead of evaluat- ing Shakespeare’s play as prior and superior, Marcus reminds us that during the sixteenth century the two plays were not distinguished from each other, and therefore it is better to treat them “intertextually—as a cluster or network of re- lated texts that fruitfully can be read together and against each other” as alternate viable versions of the shrew and Supposes material (124). Similarly, Dessen argues that the question of priority can never be resolved without further bibliographic evidence because in certain instances one play seems to be prior to the other but at other times it’s vice versa. He recommends analyzing them as “different tra- jectories or strategies” to gain interpretive insights into the choices the respective