Features of Elizabethan tragedy in The Spanish Tragedy
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The Spanish Tragedy, or Hieronimo is Mad Again[1] is an Elizabethan tragedy written by Thomas Kyd between 1582 and 1592. Highly popular and influential in its time, The Spanish Tragedy established a new genre in English theatre, the revenge play or revenge tragedy. The play contains several violent murders and includes as one of its characters a personification of Revenge. The Spanish Tragedy is often considered to be the first mature Elizabethan drama, a claim disputed with Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine,[2] and has been parodied by many Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights, including Marlowe, William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson.
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2. Revenge in the Elizabethan World
Revenge is a topic mankind has been familiar with for many centuries. Formerly, when no states and laws existed, the primitive people regarded violent acts against themselves not as a crime and a public matter, but as a personal injury and therefore a private affair. Therefore, revenge was the only means of justice those people could stick to. Since the bounds within a families were very close ones and solidarity was an important value, blood revenge taken by the family of the victim on any member of the opposed family was quiet common.[4] Even in the development of the English nation and its laws, vendetta was not sued and not illegal for a very long time, and even Christianity did not have any influence on it at first. With King Edward I, however, a law against blood revenge was first established. Despite of this law, vendetta was still privately used. Even though the legal system developed more and more over the centuries, avengers could often avoid punishment. Henry VII developed the indictment to simplify the prosecution of murderers on a public level, which was supposed to reduce private approaches.[5] The development of a legal condemnation of revenge was developed late and slowly, but the more strict it became the more ethically immoral also blood-revenge became. Since the preceding years had been full of national quarrels and disorder in the country, which were due to private struggles, not only the church but also the state of the highly Christian Elizabethan England condemned private revenge.[6] In the Elizabethan times, private revenge was officially forbidden and was punished severely, as only God himself was supposed to have the power to take revenge.