Neil Bowen on
Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, written around 1586-9 is the foundation of Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy. Reestablishing the genre of Revenge Tragedy and not only with blood vengeance as dramatic action but made the topic of personal revenge far more pertinent. While the structure and the style of the play had a lot of similarity with the works of Seneca, it introduces many new features that are most notably used in Hamlet.
The protagonist is Hieronimo, a Spanish gentleman driven to melancholy from the death of his son, was a new kind of tragic hero - one on the brink of melancholic madness.
The antagonist Lorenzo was the first “Machiavellian” villain to premier on the Elizabethan stage, with the main causes of conflict originating from Lorenzo’s murderous lust for power
The ghost of Andrea, a spanish officer killed by the Portugese Balthazar, is prevalent throughout the play and along with the Spirit of Revenge they serve as the chorus of the play. This ghostly apparition spurring on the revenge becomes a motif of Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge - prevalent in John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge and George Chapman’s Revenge of Bussy d’Ambois.
A play within a play is performed, in which Hieronimo manages to achieve revenge for both himself as the ghostly Andrea, but this metatheatrical twist is obviously used in Hamlet. This scene also sets up the typical ending - the avenger killing the wrongdoer, and then dying themselves
A key theme of The Spanish Tragedy is the questioning of the relationship between divine will, retaliatory vengeance and justice. Kyd also treated revenge as a sacred blood duty within the play - a task portrayed as incredibly difficult, treated as an almost semi-religious responsibility.
Both of Shakespeare’s revenge tragedies - Titus Andronicus and Hamlet are revenge styles more in the vein of Kyd, especially as Hamlet itself was also based on another play by Kyd (we think), known as Ur-Hamlet.