“What’s a play without a woman in it?”: The Role of Women in The Spanish Tragedy

Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy¹ is not immediately striking as a play in which women play an important role. A glance towards the Dramatis Personae is sufficient to see that women are severely underrepresented, at least in terms of their number. However, in spite of the lack of female characters, women play an essential role in the unravelling of the drama and plot of The Spanish Tragedy. Furthermore, a close reading reveals myriad references to the importance, and even to the power of women in spheres which do not fall under the jurisdiction of the patriarchal organisation of renaissance society, most significantly in the enacting of revenge rather than the patriarchal justice. In  this essay I will argue that in The Spanish Tragedy, unlike in many contemporary plays, women do not play the role of subservient wives and lovers, sisters and daughters, but are instead the protagonists of revenge.

Of the two primary female characters in The Spanish Tragedy, Bel-Imperia immediately seems to dominate. Isabella is not even introduced until after the death of Horatio, and makes only three appearances during the entire play. These appearances could be summarised thus: Once to witness the death of her son, once to demonstrate her madness, and a final time to lament the lack of vengeance and commit suicide. However, to summarise and dismiss these appearances so briefly would be to underestimate their power. In two of these scenes, Isabella completely dominates the stage – in III.viii she is accompanied only by a maid, who does no more than act as a foil to emphasise Isabella’s disturbed state of mind, and in IV.ii she has a soliloquy preceding her suicide. Due to the nature of these scenes, it is hard not to question their dramatic function: Kyd is giving a seemingly unimportant character the types of speech that are normally reserved for protagonists.

One explanation of this is that Isabella provides an opposition to Bel-Imperia. A renaissance audience, steeped in the conventions of a patriarchal society (albeit a society in which “the position of women…was hotly contested”²) would expect a woman to be unable to contend with the scenario which the play offers. Since Bel-Imperia does not offer this renaissance portrayal of women as weak, Isabella is necessary in order for the play to conform to the tradition and convention of the time. However, even within this formulaic characterisation, which sees Isabella go mad with grief and then commit suicide (much like Hamlet’s Ophelia), there is reference to the “disturbing power”³ that women possess. Upon learning of the death of her son, Isabella announces her intention to “raise an everlasting storm” (II.iv.44) – more an evocation of the power of women through a traditionally feminised nature than an image of feminine impotence. In the same scene Hieronimo makes reference to the natural (and supernatural) power of women in his Latin speech, in which he refers to the “sorceress…[and] the goddess of spells…her secret power”⁴ (II.vi.72-3).

Bel-Imperia, unlike Isabella, is an obviously important character in the play. She is prevalent from the very beginning, where she is mentioned in Andrea’s prologue, to the play within a play in the final act, when she at last enacts revenge. She is witness to, or even part of, the majority of the play’s key dramatic and tragic actions. She has many long speeches and soliloquies, and is definitely a symbol of “disturbing feminine power”⁵, especially in vowing, persuading and eventually performing acts of revenge. Her character is crucial to the development of the revenge plot; whilst for parts of the play she is overtly impotent, as she is imprisoned by Lorenzo, her bloodstained letter is pushing Hieronimo into a preoccupation with revenge during this time, in which he affirms that: “I will therefore by circumstances try / What I can gather to confirm this writ” (III.ii.48-9). Indeed, Bel-Imperia can be seen to manipulate men for the purposes of revenge in the play as early as her first appearance, when in her soliloquy she says of Horatio:

“Yes, second love shall further my revenge.
I’ll love Horatio, my Andrea’s friend,
The more to spite the prince that wrought his end” (I.iv.66-8)

The rhyme at the end of these three lines acts to further emphasise the calculated nature of Bel-Imperia’s proposed actions. Throughout the play Bel-Imperia is an initiator of action, and seems to criticise those who do not share her single-minded pursuit of revenge, notably berating Hieronimo for his hesitation in enacting vengeance: “Hieronimo… /…why art thou so slack in thy revenge?” (III.ix.8). In this sense, Bel-Imperia plays a key role in Kyd’s development of the revenge plot not only by taking revenge in the final scenes, but also by spurring her counterpart revenger, Hieronimo, into action at various points during the play.

It is not fair to say that in The Spanish Tragedy revenge is an entirely feminine trait embodied in Bel-Imperia (as in Alison Findlay’s interpretation of Bel-Imperia as the “personification of feminine revenge”⁶) – after all Hieronimo and Andrea both are or become hugely preoccupied with revenge – but it seems that Bel-Imperia is less hesitant and confused in her sense of revenge than the other characters. Despite her apparent allegiance to Hieronimo and his agenda, she finally succeeds in killing Balthazar, upon whom she swore revenge during her very first appearance. What’s more, although, like Isabella, she recognises her inability to take revenge alone (“Well ,force perforce, I must constrain myself / To patience” [III.ix.12-13], “Nor shall his death be unrevenged by me / Although I bear it out for fashion’s sake.” [IV.i.23-4]), she is quick to manipulate the more influential male members of the court to suit her ends: firstly she falsely agrees to marry Balthazar in order to end her captivity, and subsequently in IV.i, her first scene of freedom, she is seen chastising Horatio in a manner which completely destroys any sense of patriarchal order, going as far as to call him a “monstrous” father (IV.i.17). It is in this careful manipulation that Bel-Imperia is presented at her most powerful – and most disruptive to the patriarchal order.

The feminisation of revenge in Kyd’s play is not as simple, however, as having vengeful female characters. Women play an important role in the mythology surrounding revenge in The Spanish Tragedy. Even the sex of the character portraying Revenge is ambiguous. In his prologue Andrea underlines the power of women in this mythology – he mentions the Furies, the female avenging demons, Ixion, who is punished for his actions towards a woman, and finally states that it was Proserpine, the wife of Pluto, rather than Pluto himself, that decides his fate (I.i.5-85); Horatio declares that it was “wrathful Nemesis…she herself” (I.iv.16-19), the female personification of divine revenge, that killed Andrea; Hieronimo too calls upon the Furies and Proserpine in III.xiii.112-121. All of these references point to the femininity not necessarily of revengers, but of revenge itself. 

Whilst there is obviously a lust for revenge displayed in both sexes throughout the play, there is a subtle difference in the motives behind this desire. Hieronimo’s revenge is always underscored by a need for justice. It is only when all normal and official recourses to justice are impossible that he takes matters into his own hands, and before doing this, he is careful to remove himself from the symbolic position as the purveyor of justice, preferring to associate himself instead with revenge and chaos:

“I’ll make a pickaxe of my poiniard,
And here surrender up my marshalship;
For I’ll go marshal up the fiends of hell,
To be avengéd on you all for this.” (III.xii.75-9)

Bel-Imperia’s revenge is immediately more personal, relating to matters of love rather than of justice:

“But how can love find harbour in my breast
Till I revenge the death of my beloved?” (I.iv.64-5)

She does not seem to understand Hieronimo’s need for certainty, fairness and justice, demanding: “Is this the love thou bear’st…are these thy passions?” (IV.i.1-4). Bel-Imperia’s feminine revenge hinges on personal vengance, whereas for Hieronimo revenge is simply “A kind of wild justice”.

The irrational, personal revenge that is championed by Bel-Imperia in The Spanish Tragedy is used by Kyd to purvey a sense of chaos in the play; Hieronimo’s justice through vengeance and logical approach towards revenge does not carry the same power to excite and bewilder an audience as Bel-Imperia’s passionate vendetta, and her disregard for patriarchal norms. Whilst Isabella may not enact any real revenge within the play, she nonetheless creates an “everlasting storm” (II.iv.44) within the minds of the audience with the savagery and fury of her grief, and her determination to completely annihilate the only thing which she can attack (“I will not leave a root, a stalk, a tree, / A bough, a branch, a blossom, nor a leaf,/ No, not a herb… Fruitless for ever… Barren the earth” [IV.ii.10-5]). Women play a powerful and crucial role in The Spanish Tragedy not only in terms of advancing the plot, but also function to add a chaotic element, acting outside the constraints of patriarchal society and subverting male authority, and this disturbing influence is essential to the atmosphere necessary for a revenge drama to succeed.

Bibliography

Bercovitch, Sacvan, ‘Love and Strife in  Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy’, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Spring, 1969) 215-229.

Briggs, Julia, This Stage-Play World, 2nd edn., (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

Findlay, Alison, A Feminist Perspective on Renaissance Drama, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999).

Kyd, Thomas, The Spanish Tragedy, ed. David Bevington, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996).

Rose, Mary Beth, The Expense of Spirit: Love and Sexuality in Renaissance Drama, (New York: Cornell University Press, 1988).

Voros, Sharon D., ‘Feminine Symbols of Empire in Thomas Kyd and Pedro Calderón: "The Spanish Tragedy" and "De un Castigo Tres Venganzas"’, Pacific Coast Philology, Vol. 27, No. 1/2 (Sep., 1992), 145-158.