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'THE SPANISH TRAGEDY.

487

jectured that he received a fair academical education. He makes free use of classical mythology in the style of Greene, and interrupts his English declamation with Latin verses. For many years Kyd occupied a prominent place among the London dramatists. His two epoch-making plays were ridiculed by Shakspere and Jonson, proving their popularity with the common folk long after the date (earlier than 1588) of their original production. Jonson in his lines on Shakspere gave to Kyd the epithet of 'sporting,' apparently with the view of scoring a bad pun, rather than with any reference to the playwright's specific style.

Hieronymo' and 'The Spanish Tragedy' are practically speaking one play in two parts. Andrea, a nobleman of Spain, is sent to claim tribute from the King of Portugal. During this embassy a Portuguese, Balthazar, defies him to single combat. When the duel takes place, Andrea falls; but he is avenged by his friend Horatio, son of Jeronymo, Marshal of Spain. During life Andrea had enjoyed the love of a lady, Bellimperia, whose brother, Lorenzo, is a Court villain of the darkest dye. After Andrea's death, Horatio makes Balthazar his captive, and brings him back to Spain, where he, Horatio, pledges his troth to Bellimperia, and is beloved by her instead of the slain Andrea. Lorenzo, however, chooses that she shall be married to Balthazar. He therefore murders Horatio, and hangs him to a tree in his father's garden. Old Hieronymo discovers the corpse, is half crazed by grief, and devotes the rest of his life to vengeance on the assassins. With this object in view, he presents a play at Court, in which he and Bellimperia, Lorenzo and Balthazar, act several parts. The kings of Spain and Portugal

assist at the performance. At the close of the tragic piece, Hieronymo and Bellimperia stab the two traitors in good earnest, and afterwards put an end to their own lives upon the stage.

This outline of The Spanish Tragedy' will give a fair notion of the stock ingredients of a Tragedy of Blood. There is a ghost in it-the ghost of Andreacrying out, Revenge! Vindicta!' as it stalks about the stage. There is a noble and courageous lover, young Horatio, traitorously murdered. There is a generous open-hearted gentleman, old Hieronymo, forced to work out his plot of vengeance by craft, and crazy with intolerable wrongs. There is a consummate villain, Lorenzo, who uses paid assassins, broken courtiers, needy men-at-arms, as instruments in schemes of secret malice. There is a beautiful and injured lady, Bellimperia, whose part is one romantic tissue of love, passion, pathos, and unmerited suffering. There is a play within the play, used to facilitate the bloody climax. There are scenes of extravagant insanity, relieved by scenes of euphuistic love-making in sequestered gardens; scenes of martial conflict, followed by pompous shows at Court; kings, generals, clowns, cutthroats, chamberlains, jostling together in a masquerade medley, a carnival of swiftly moving puppets. There are, at least, five murders, two suicides, two judicial executions, and one death in duel. The principal personage, Hieronymo, bites out his tongue and flings it on the stage; stabs his enemy with a stiletto, and pierces his own heart. Few of the characters survive to bury the dead, and these few are of secondary importance in the action.

'TRAGEDY OF HOFFMANN?

489

III.

A contemporary and anonymous tragedy, 'Soliman and Perseda,' illustrates the same melodramatic qualities of unfortunate love and wholesale bloodshed. It hardly deserves notice, except as showing how the Tragedy of Blood took form. I may also mention that it was selected by Kyd for the play within the play presented by his hero Hieronymo. The Induction to this piece is curious. Love, Death, and Fortune dispute among themselves which takes the leading part in tragedies of human life. They agree to watch the action of the drama; and at the end, Death sums his triumphs up, proving himself indisputably victor :

Alack! Love and Fortune play in Comedies!
For powerful Death best fitteth Tragedies.

Love retires, beaten, but unsubdued :

I go, yet Love shall never yield to Death!

One more of the earlier melodramas, written to glut the audience with bloodshed, deserves mention. This was the work of Henry Chettle, produced before the year 1598, and styled 'The Tragedy of Hoffmann ; or, a Revenge for a Father.' The scene is laid on the shores of the Baltic. The hero is son to Admiral Hoffmann, who had been executed unjustly for piracy, by having a crown of red-hot iron forced upon his head. The son hangs up his father's corpse as a memento of revenge, and by various devices murders

in succession six or seven of the enemies who were instrumental in his death. At the end he, too, dies by imposition of the fiery crown. This grisly drama of retributive cruelty, enacted in a remote region of the Northern seas, combining the most violent incidents of torture and assassination, has no beauty of language, no force of character, no ingenuity of plot, to excuse its violation of artistic decencies. It relies upon fantastic horror for effect.

IV.

Enough has been said to indicate a species which took firm possession of the stage. Marlowe, finding it already popular, raised it to higher rank by the transfiguring magic of his genius. The Jew of Malta' marks a decided step in advance upon the plays which I have noticed. Two dramas of superior merit, clearly emanating from the school of Marlowe, may also be reckoned among the Tragedies of Blood in this second period of elaboration. These are Titus Andronicus,' which, on the faith of an old anecdote, we may perhaps infer to have been the work of an amateur, dressed for the theatre by Shakspere; and 'Lust's Dominion; or, The Lascivious Queen,' a play ascribed to Marlowe, but now believed to have been written by Dekker, Haughton, and Day. Both in Titus Andronicus' and in Lust's Dominion,' Marlowe's sanguinary Jew is imitated. Barabas, Aaron, and Eleazar are of the same kindred. I shall have occasion to study Barabas closely in another chapter of this book. Aaron, since he rests beneath the ægis of Shakspere's

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Moor, with

name, may here be left untouched.' But Eleazar,
and the play of 'Lust's Dominion,' in which he takes
the leading part, demand some words of passing
comment. This is strictly a Tragedy of Blood; yet
the motive, as its title implies, is lawless appe-
tite leading to death in various forms. The Queen
Mother of Spain loves Eleazar, the
savage passion. King Fernando loves Maria, the
Moor's wife. Cardinal Mendoza loves the Queen.
Each of these personages sacrifices duty, natural affec-
tion, humanity itself, to ungovernable desire. Eleazar
alone remains cold and calculating, using their weak-
ness to attain his own ambitious ends. Pretending
love to the Queen, he forces her to kill her son Philip,
and then schemes her murder. In order to check-
mate the Cardinal, he betrays his young wife to Fer-
nando, albeit she is chaste as the white moon.' His
designs, at the last, prove unavailing, and he dies in
stubborn contumacy. Ambition was his devil; the
strength of intellect, the physical courage, possessed by
him in no common measure, he concentrated on the
end of climbing to a throne through blood.

The

1 Aaron seems to me as inferior to Barabas in poetic and dramatic pith, as he exceeds him in brutality. But the play of Titus Andronicus is interesting, independently of this villain's character, for its systematic blending, and in some sense heightening, of all the elements which constitute a Tragedy of Blood. We have a human sacrifice and the murder of a son by his father in the first act; in the second, a murder and the rape and mutilation of a woman; in the third, two executions and the mutilation of the hero; in the fourth, a murder; in the fifth, six murders, a judicial death by torture, and a banquet set before a queen of her two dead sons' flesh. The hyperbolical pathos of Lavinia's part, the magnificent lunacy of Titus (so like to that of Hieronymo in quality), and the romantic lyrism which relieves and stimulates imagination, belong to the very essence of the species. So also does the lust of Tamora and the frantic devilishness of her paramour.

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