You can determine how your life plays out by deciding where you live.

What a sobering idea. What if really, rather than who we want to be, what we want to be, or how we want to be, all we need to decide is where we want to be?

This question is particularly pertinent to me at the moment because I am currently living in Spain. I am returning to England in August, and I’m looking forward to it, but I have come to consider that Home (with a capital H) for me has become fluid and elusive. Whilst many of the English people I know here still refer to going Home, to how things are at Home, and in many cases to how much they prefer Home, I simply can’t find such a strong link within me. Home has become undefinable, and being away from it, wherever it may be, has become the norm.

So let’s take step one of deciding where you want to be as finding out where Home is. This is not as easy as it might seem. The old adage goes that ‘Home is where the heart is’; but my family is in Birmingham, my best friends are in Leeds, my girlfriend is in Copenhagen, and I am in Oviedo. And I can safely say that I feel ‘at home’ in Oviedo, but I still miss all of these things which aren’t here with me. Much Colonial and Post-colonial literature draws a clear distinction between home and Home, the former being where you live, where you return to every night, and where you have built your life, and the latter being a more spiritual, cultural or social baseline: not the place that you are, but the place that you are from. Unfortunately in real life such a line is not so easy to draw.

For me, and I imagine for many people in a world where travel and mobility is the norm, there are parts of Home scattered all over the world. Journeys we make, people we meet, and things we see all make up who we are as much as where we do these things; and all of these things are now so much more easily accessible due to modern communications and media. In the world we live in, there is no longer such a clear definition of what is ‘Home’.

But people do not always want to be ‘Home’. I can recognise that most of my cultural DNA is 100% British, from how I dress to the music that I like and the food that I enjoy. However, for me, one of life’s greatest pleasures is stepping out of this comfortable ‘Home’ and into the wider world. Seeing, smelling and tasting new things, meeting new people, and the more that they clash with what I have grown to see as the norm the better. There is nothing more exciting than a new and original experience. Some people, like me, take great pleasure in keeping that warm, comfortable and familiar ‘Home’ as a backup, somewhere to fall back on, whilst we forge ahead, in varying degrees, into the unknown. And so we come, perhaps, to step two: Are you a ‘Home’ person, or do you prefer to be somewhere else?

Once all that’s decided, step three is the hardest of all. If you fall into the same category as me, the person who is as comfortable being away from Home as being there, then you have to make the hardest choice of all. If not Home, then where? This is the real choice, and the real problem. The quotation at the top of this page, seems, to me, to be correct: for a person with sufficient cultural awareness and an ability and willingness to learn and embrace new cultures, choosing where you live can have a huge impact on how your life will pan out. I have always loved to travel, and in the last four years I have lived in three countries. I am, currently, most definitely not one for staying ‘Home’; I only have the vaguest notion of where ‘Home’ might be. As such, I’m already starting to think about where I might want to live after I finish university in England the year after next. Will that decision change the rest of my life? Almost certainly, in ways I cannot begin to imagine. But realising this is not the hard part. The hard part is the choosing.

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1. Abortion

The book is structured as a series of interlinked ‘real life’ plots, interspersed by this new creation myth. The real and the magical are intrinsically intertwined, and often the surreal and real sections are linked by sharing the same words in the last lines of one section and the first lines of the next (e.g “Well, for one thing, what happened to them?’ / ‘What happened to the trees’” [pp. 21–2], “‘Have we made another mistake?’ / Lionel had made only three mistakes in his entire life” [pp. 29–30]). This magical realism further confuses the already muddled creation myth with the novel’s ‘real’ plot, which forces the reader to accept a view of the world where the divine or magical can, and does, affect every day life.

King imposes Native American mythology upon Christianity as Christian mythology was forced upon the Native Americans during the colonisation. The very beginning of the book serves to demonstrate how ridiculous, not to mention sacrilegious and insulting, this practise must have seemed to Native Americans by reversing the process. King chooses the holiest of holies, the all seeing Christian ‘God’, as his first point of attack, reducing this omniscient, omnipotent being to nothing more than a dream (thus refuting the traditional Christian notion of God as an all powerful being, apart from and above human experience), and further more a dream of a dog, traditionally an animal used in western cultures to represent an inferior being. By casting God as little more than a petulant, confused animal King immediately trivialises and insults the basis of all Christian belief in the same way that early Christian settlers in the Americas brushed aside belief systems as established, if not more so, than their own as primitive or ridiculous: “I am god, says that Dog Dream. ‘Isn’t that cute,’ says Coyote. ‘That Dog Dream is contrary. That Dog Dream has everything backward’”(p. 2). This could also be seen as a direct contradiction of Genesis, in which God gives man dominion over animals; within this revision of the creation myth it seems that an animal — Coyote — has dominion over God. Even an attempt to categorise Coyote as a God figure fails, as the nameless narrator affirms later in the book that “[t]his world is full of Coyotes” (p. 272).

The author similarly dispenses with other quintessential biblical figures. Noah is portrayed as a sex-starved misogynist, who follows a perverted set of Christian rules (amongst which, for example, is “Thou Shalt Have Big Breasts”[p. 147]). The Angel Gabriel (A. A. Gabriel) we see as a stereotypical politician figure, “a little short guy with a big briefcase” (p. 269), trying to coerce Thought Woman into signing a contract for the immaculate conception, but constantly revealing himself to be not who he seems. First he shows a business card which has two sides (on one “A. A. Gabriel, Canadian Security and Intelligence Service.” [p.269] on the other “A. A. Gabriel, Heavenly Host” [p. 270]), then instead of the contract he pulls out some papers containing the phrase “as long as the grass is green and the waters run” (p. 271), a phrase often used in contracts between settlers and natives when Canada was colonised – contracts that were frequently broken. This depiction of the Angel Gabriel as a sort of double-agent also serves as a metaphor for how religion has been used by colonisers for far more self-serving purposes than simply ‘enlightening’ Native Americans, and parodies modern political machinery and the deceptions that are made through manipulation of Native Americans and of the media: “No problem, says A. A. Gabriel. Sign this paper… We’re going to need a picture” (p. 271).

Even Jesus Christ himself is mockingly portrayed, in one of Kings several versions of the creation story, as “Young Man Walking on Water” (p. 350). Far from the kind, gentle, benevolent Christ of the Bible, this Christ is angry and self-important. He portrays his biblical qualities of omniscience, omnipotence and omnipresence as more “Christian Rules… And the first rule that is no one can help me. The second rule is that no one can tell me anything. Third, no one is allowed to be in two places at once. Except me.” Coming from the mouth of an angry young man, instead of a mysticised messianic figure, these three cornerstones of Christian belief sound ridiculous, and the tone of their delivery is almost childish. After Old Woman saves the disciples on the boat, and Christ takes the credit, King also mocks another of Christianity’s failings: its inherent misogyny. When one of the men in the boat points out that it was Old Woman that saved them, and not Christ, Christ replies: “Nonsense…That other person is a woman.”

King further dilutes the importance of the Western creation myth by including several incongruous characters, all from books largely regarded as colonialist (the same characters as which First Woman, Thought Woman, Changing Woman and Old Woman disguise themselves, and as which these four women are present in the real world as the four escaped Indians). These characters are archetypal colonialists, and there are many examples of this (in fact, nearly everything these characters say is verging on cliché in its portrayal of colonialist ideals). One such striking example would be the dialogue between Thought Woman and Robinson Crusoe, which epitomises the colonialist destructively patronising ideology of bringing a superior style of life to inferior people: “as a civilised white man, it has been difficult not having someone of color around whom I could educate and protect”.  King expounds this point in each of the sections relating to a character from Western fiction, the final of which is Nasty Bumppo. Here, King makes the point in the most blunt and obvious dialogue in the text, as Bumppo lists what he calls “Indian gifts” and “white gifts” (p. 393), and King continues:

“So, says Old Woman. Whites are superior, and Indians are inferior.Exactly right, says Nasty Bumppo. Any questions?‘Oops,’ says Coyote. ‘We have a problem.’‘Only if you’re an Indian,’ I says.” (p. 393)

Ultimately by juxtaposing Western and Native American mythologies, King deconstructs the Christian creation story, and shows us that through the eyes of a Native American, it is as primitive and ridiculous as Native American traditions seemed to the colonists that settled in Canada and tried to displace and ‘educate’ the American Indians who lived there. Instead, he reconstructs a world where everyone, and everything is fallible, and even the mythical characters who created the world are prone to mistakes – King’s characters even describe the great flood and Christ’s birth as mistakes, appropriating Christian biblical events into King’s invented muddle of Native and Christian mythology:

“‘The last time you fooled around like this,’ said Robinson Crusoe, ‘the world got very wet.’
‘And we had to start all over again,’ said Hawkeye […]
‘But I was helpful, too,’ says Coyote. ‘That woman who wanted a baby. Now, that was helpful.’
‘Helpful!’ said Robinson Crusoe. ‘You remember the last time you did that?’ […]
‘We haven’t straightened out that mess yet,’ said Hawkeye.” (p. 416)

King’s humour, though, throughout the novel, means that this de/reconstruction of mythologies is not as aggressive or destructive as it could be. This is a book of many messages, with an enormous number of possible interpretations, and there are certainly a few direct criticisms of the way that Western settlers treat Native Americans and their traditions. In some respects, though, by mixing and muddling the two mythologies to create a single mythology which is universally absurd, King is demonstrating the similarities, as well as the differences, between the two cultures. Not only does he mock the Christian creation myth, but by using this comic style, also the Native American one. He makes fun of Native American oral traditions with his constantly restarting narrative of the creation as much as the western written literary idiom with his depiction of Moby-Jane, the black lesbian whale, and his stereotyped and exaggerated literary figures. By creating a world in which all traditions and cultures are ridiculous, King demonstrates that it is impossible to impose a predetermined set of cultural signifiers onto another culture and another culture’s mythology, in either direction. Perhaps this is best summed up by Kings narrator, when Coyote interrupts with a series of suggestions for where Old Woman fell when she fell from the sky, trying to impose images from several different cultures into the narrator’s story. The narrator finally tells the Coyote to abandon this tactic of trying to make different cultures to conform to each other’s ideologies, and replies:

“‘Where do you get these things?’ I says.
‘I read a book,’ says Coyote.
‘Forget the book,’ I says. ‘We’ve got a story to tell.’” (p. 349)

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2. “What’s a play without a woman in it?”: The Role of Women in The Spanish Tragedy
3. Structuralism, Post-Structuralism and The Death of the Author

A literary tradition in a folkloric idiom, from the Icelandic Saga to the Basque contest-poetry of bertsolaritza has many key differences from a written one. These stories, passed down from generation to generation and often with some degree of improvisation create a literature in constant evolution. It is also a literature which, apart from a very few respected storytellers, does not elevate the author to the revered position that he occupies in modern written literature — in fact, there is no real concept of author in a story told for so many years that it simply becomes ‘a story’ rather than ‘a story by x’. It is a literature which applauds deviating from the original, improvising, improving, forgetting and remembering. It is a literature which thrives on constant innovation. Even in the act of transcribing Sagas and other primarily oral traditions we are irrevocably altering the dynamic of a literature which previously existed in a state of constant evolution and flux. It is also a literature in which any evolution is gradual, there are few paradigm shifts, since the basic stories stay more or less the same for decades if not centuries.

There is no solution to this problem. Oral storytelling and tradition (and by this I more specifically I mean the skill of remembering and telling stories that are never written down) is all but dead in first-world western culture. In written stories, and even in recordings of stories being told we are creating a subtle but crucial change in how these stories are transmitted: we are giving the listener the ability to re-read, re-listen, and therefore learn much more closely the stories being told. That is to say, the re-teller of a story no longer has to gloss over or make up the parts of the story that he doesn’t remember. However, it seems ridiculous not to record a tradition that is so obviously on the decline. These opposing points of view are equally valid, and I find it almost impossible not to agree, however hypocritically, with both statements. I cannot deny that the written word, and in most cases modern media, is supremely beneficial to society: it allows the development and retention of complex ideas and fantastic levels of creativity through development and revision; it allows us to learn and transmit knowledge in a way that is all but impossible within a society with no knowledge of the written word; it allows the dissemination of this knowledge to previously unthinkable numbers of people.

But part of me really misses being told a good story.

Related posts:

1. Structuralism, Post-Structuralism and The Death of the Author
2. Subversion / Reversion: The deconstruction and reconstruction of the Western cultural narrative through a Native American idiom in Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water

I love Malcolm Gladwell!

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In Guillén’s poetry, ‘négritude’ signifies the need to recognise the role that African culture plays in Cuban national identity. Whilst he does not strive for a shared black identity in the same way as many contemporary négritude poets such as Aimé Césaire, he highlights the importance of African culture within Cuba, but without denying the importance of Hispanic influence. He is, because of this, deemed by some critics not to be a true proponent of négritude. However, in his first three collections, Guillén repeatedly affirms an equal place in society for black Cubans, commenting not only on their cultural influence, but also on their physical beauty. He seems to share, at times, Langston Hughes’s concern that black people are “ashamed of it [beauty] when it is not according to Caucasian patterns”, or that “The whisper of ‘I want to be white’ runs silently through their minds.” In response to this, a number of Guillén’s poems not only highlight ‘negro’ beauty (“la fuerte gracia negra”) but even go as far as to chastise those who don’t recognise that beauty in themselves or others (“¿Por qué te pone tan bravo, / cuando te dicen negro bembón / si tiene la boca santa / negro bembón?”).

Guillén emphasises the importance of not judging beauty by Caucasian standards in his use of provocatively sensual language, and in his references to the African continent. This is never more obvious than in his poem Madrigal, from the collection Sóngoro Consongo. Guillén starts by describing the physical and more sexual beauty of the woman in the first two lines: “Tu vientre sabe más que tu cabeza / y tanto como tus muslos”, and continues to praise her sensual form with the words “la fuerte gracia negra / de tu cuerpo desnudo.” The latter lines, though, belie a movement towards the less physical side of her beauty, which culminates in the finishing couplet: “y ese caimán oscuro / nadando en el Zambeze de tus ojos.” The final couplet is distinctly different to the rest of the poem in that it is the first and only imagery employed. This new complexity of language in the final lines suggests that “la fuerte gracia negra” extends beyond the physical, especially as the eyes are traditionally symbolic of the soul, whilst the reference to the Zambeze draws the reader’s attention back to the African origin of the subject’s beauty. 

Another feature of Guillén’s poetry which is characteristic of négritude is his use of language to suggest the rhythmic, African music. This has been termed jitanjáfora by critics, and adds an obviously African element to his poetry. He uses this technique to great effect in his more folkloric poetry such as ‘Sensemayá’ and ‘Canto Negro’, which (overtly at least) describe afro-cuban ritual, music and dance. In using jitanjáfora to translate African musical rhythm (for example with the words “Mayombe – Bombe – Mayombé” into a Hispanic tradition and idiom, Guillén conveys the sense of the mesitzaje between African and Hispanic culture that is his vision of Cuban national identity.

Guillén’s poetry, especially in his earlier work, is hugely concerned with the creation of a Cuban national identity, taking influence from its African and Hispanic roots, but at the same time distinct and separate from these origins. This identity, which Guillén called Cubanía, is epitomised in the poem ‘La Canción del Bongó’, from Sóngoro Consongo: 

“En este tierra mulata
de africano y español
(Santa Bárbara de un lado
del otro lado, Changó)
siempre falta un abuelo
cuando no sobra algún Don
y hay títulos de Castillla
con pareientes en Bondó.”

 Guillén refers to familial ties to emphasise the intimacy of the relationship between “africano y español” in Cuba, and uses the humour in the lines “siempre falta un abuelo / cuando no sobra algún Don” to purvey the ridiculousness of racial prejudice within the context of Cuban society, which is already so mixed. The careful positioning of the symbols of Africa and Spain (“Santa Bárbara de un lado / del otro lado, Changó”) at the beginning and end of a couplet suggests that the essence of Cubanía lies somewhere between the Spanish and the African.

Perhaps the most striking example of Cubanía in Guillén’s poetry is in his first collection, Motivos de Son. Guillén employs two clear, stylistic devices to give a sense of ‘Cubanness’: firstly, he imitates the rhythm of the Son, a traditional Cuban musical form, descended from African music, which therefore also stresses the importance of African culture; secondly, his poems are written in the patois of the Cuban working class, for example featuring apocope, using slang (such as “plata” to mean money, or “santa” to mean sexually alluring) and often replacing the letter ‘v’ with the letter ‘b’ in earlier editions. This serves not only to lend a sense of social realism to Guillén’s poems by creating a very specifically Cuban context, but also to legitimise and elevate the literary voice of the working class within Cuban culture.

It would be impossible to examine Guillén’s ideology (or that of any caribbean poet) without broaching the subjects of colonialism and postcolonialism. Guillén’s most obvious exploration of the effects of colonialism and postcolonialism is in his collection of poems entitled West Indies Ltd. Indeed, the title itself points to the capitalist industrialisation of developing nations that is the hallmark of a neo-colonial society, by placing the suffix “Ltd.” after “West Indies”, suggesting that many people view this country as no more than a business to be profited from. Guillén emphasises the fact that black people remain oppressed despite the abolition of slavery in many of the poems in this collection, for example in the title poem, ‘West Indies Ltd.’ he describes the subservient sycophancy of the dock workers: “Puertos que hablan un inglés / que empieza en yes y acaba en yes. / (Inglés de cicerones en cuatro pies.)” The parenthetical line makes specific that which the two preceding lines imply, by describing the language spoken by the people as the port as being “en cuatro pies”, suggesting almost bestial subservience, and implying that the lower classes are treated like animals by the English speaking masters. The sibilant repetition of the ‘yes’ sound in “Inglés…yes…yes…Inglés…pies” serves to further emphasise and imitate the fawning behaviour of the dock workers. Other poems contain strong images of slavery, such as ‘Balada del Güije’: “Salió del agua un mano… / e hizo un nudo con las piernas / y otro nudo con los brazos”, obviously referring  to the ‘monster’ of slavery, and the imprisonment and bondage which it implied. 

Whilst Guillén’s poetry runs on a parallel track to conventional négritude, his portrayal of Cuban national identity seems to clash with négritude on a crucial issue: the rejection of colonial European culture (in Guillén’s case Spanish, but just as easily French or British) which is so critical to the négritude put forward by the likes of Aimé Césaire and Leopold Senghor, is incompatible with Guillén’s afro-Hispanic Cubanía. Guillén himself addressed this in various interviews, saying that to pursue an agenda of négritude in post-revolutionary communist Cuba was “a kind of racism”. Guillén’s brand of négritude strives to transcend race barriers, creating a single culture of equality, whereas conventional négritude creates two equally valid but separate black and white cultures. The former is what Guillén and other Hispanic-american theorists refer to as mestizaje, and in Guillén’s poetry it is plain to see this idealised view of the complete destruction of racial boundaries in poems such as ‘Balada de los Dos Abuelos’. This poem, from the collection West Indies Ltd. begins with a series of contrapuntal comparisons between the black and white abuelos: 

“Lanza con punto de hueso,
tambor de cuero y madera :
mi abuelo negro.
Gorguerra en el cuello ancho,
gris armadura guerrera :
mi abuelo blanco.”

The second stanza initially continues this separation of the two abuelos, giving each their own voice, speaking in alternating tercets. However, half way through this stanza Guillén interrupts these voices and unites with “Qué de barcos, qué de barcos…”, the repetition of this line and the following showing his exasperation at the emphasis on separation between blacks and whites in Cuban society. He finally states “Yo los junto”, affirming that in Guillén’s mind, nothing separates the abuelos. By describing them (repeatedly) as “del mismo tamaño” in the final stanza, Guillén stresses once more that there is no difference physically between these men besides their skin colour, and implies that there should be no social or economic difference either.

Guillén’s expansion to consider imperialism in West Indies Ltd. was the beginning of a broadening of scope in his poetry to encompass not only Cuba, but also the Caribbean, and eventually to address  issues of inequality and human suffering throughout the world; his poetry evolved from the national to the universal. This accompanied a shift in Guillén’s ideology to emphasise discrimination on the basis of class rather than of race. In ‘’Mi Patria es Dulce por Fuera”, from El Son Entero, the subject has shifted from the “negro” or “mulata” of Motivos de Son to “hombre de tierra” and “pordiosero”; furthermore, Guillén recognises the renewed threat of neocolonialism from the USA, and embeds it into the idiom of class divisions: “Hoy yanqui, ayer española”. In juxtaposing the two imperialistic powers which have dominated Cuba, Guillén also underlines the fact that it doesn’t matter who the ruling class is, be they Spanish or American; the divide is not primarily racial, but socio-economic. The idea that people are united by social standing, rather than by race, is explored in ‘Dos Niños’, in which a black child and a white child are described as “ramas de un mismo árbol de miseria”.

This broadening of scope continued, and was to an extent forced by his exile, which led Guillén to travel widely – an experience that had clear reflections in his subject matter. In his later works such as Elegías Guillén’s poetry not only has global scope, but even takes foreign affairs as subject matter in poems such as ‘Tres Canciones Chinas’, and España. Poema en cuatro anguistas y una esperanza, These later poems are often almost prescriptive of revolutionary politics. This emphasis on politics is the beginning of an increasingly communist rhetoric which pervades Guillén’s later work, culminating in the collection entitled Tengo, which was published five years after the Cuban communist revolution, and almost seems to verge on propaganda. The poem ‘Crecen Altas Las Flores’ explicitly mentions McCarthyism, and Guillén describes the new liberties and freedom that he associates with communism, and the absence of material wealth in the title poem ‘Tengo’: 

“no country,
no high-life,
no tennis y no yacht,
sino de playa en playa y ola en ola,
gigante azul abierto democrático”

The language and length of the final two lines suggests a more fulfilling existence under communism: the first three lines quoted, with their abruptness and use of English words, imply a suppression of Cuban culture, indeed a lack of art or culture altogether; the following lines, which describe Cuba under communism, are much more evocative and lyrical, suggesting the supposedly expanded possibilities offered under the new government, and emphasise this with the language used, such as the words “gigante”, “abierto” and “democrático”. 

An often neglected aspect of Guillén’s poetry is its use of very mundane and quotidian subject matter. Critics rush to define Guillén as a political poet, or a poet of négritude, without referring to his frequent treatment of the everyday in his poetry. The majority of Guillén’s poems use this setting to explore issues such as discrimination and poverty, for example in ‘Búcate Plata’, which describes the strains which poverty can put on relationships (“pero amor con hambre, viejo, / ¡qué va!”), however in poems such as ‘Bares’, Guillén it is the very simplicity of the setting, it’s complete lack of political implications, which Guillén praises: “una amistad de pueblo, sin rétorica, / un ola de ¡hola! y ¿cómo estás?” It is unfair to categorise Guillén so definitively as political, negrista or communist when his poetry is not only quintessentially Cuban, but ultimately universal.

From his beginnings as an unconventional proponent of négritude, through his development of a mestizo Cuban national identity, to his final satirical political poems, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that Guillén’s poems, whilst often political, are deeply rooted in human emotion and experience. To classify Guillén as so many critics have tried to do does disservice to his broad appeal and wide cultural relevance. I have not had opportunity in this essay to critique many of Guillén’s later poems, notably omitting El Gran Zoo, which demonstrates a further evolution of Guillén’s poetry into sharp, witty political satire. To describe négritude as a central theme in Guillén’s poetry is misleading: He essentially rejects conventional négritude in favour of his own brand of Cubanía. This preoccupation with national identity is strong, but even this is not an immutable feature of Guillén’s work: the central underlying theme of Guillén’s poetry is social injustice, and its causes. It is the fight against social injustice which leads Guillén to examine the position of black Cubans within their society, but also to continue to examine the issues which affect the working and lower classes throughout the Caribbean in West Indies Ltd., and finally throughout the world in his later works. What truly defines Guillén’s style is his ability to use language and imagery to translate working class, Cuban, or African experience and culture into the universal cultural idiom of poetry.

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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.