by Tod Davies
Thomas Kyd wrote THE SPANISH TRAGEDY sometime in the late 1500’s, in an Elizabethan London that was busy reinventing English culture. The legitimate and regionally oriented Plantagenets had been defeated by the bastard Henry VII (bastard on both sides of the family, literally, mum and dad), who quickly moved to establish a centralized, grandiose, imperial state, which his descendants, Henry VIII and Elizabeth I expanded and consolidated. The Commons suffered, as the Commons always do under these circumstances. It lost many a right, and many a space that had been public became part of some lord’s domain. What it got in return was the chance for some of its sons — some, mind you, and certainly none of its daughters — to climb up the social ladder and partake of crumbs from the imperial table.
Kyd, the son of a scrivener, was one of those crumb takers. And THE SPANISH TRAGEDY is the tragedy of a naive and hardworking man at the table of the rich, who is robbed of everything he loves — including justice.
Now if that isn’t a reason to adapt the play for a modern audience, I don’t know what is.
The usual reason to adapt an older play is that it is of historical interest, or, more importantly, of artistic relevance, to a modern audience. Now, by artistic relevance, I mean that it has something to offer to the endless debate about who we are and why we are here that is at the root of all art.
When you consider the problems of adapting any play (how to prune the action so that everything left goes to point out the theme) of course, the main issue is to decide which theme is the dominant one. In FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS, for example, the book’s main theme was obviously the impossibility of being anything but brutalized in a brutal world…it was not how much fun two wacky guys on drugs could have in Las Vegas. And in adapting that book to the screen, I pruned the action and dialogue to fit the theme that had emerged as the dominant one in the book.
In Spanish Tragedy, the biggest technical problem in the adaptation is pruning away all the extraneous bits, and, perhaps, leaving in some of the additions, if they go to pointing out the theme the adaptor has determined has the most relevance for the audience: in this case, the theme of the tragedy of a well-intentioned, honorable man who believes in the justice of an unjust society — until it takes away the thing he loves most in the world.
In talking this over informally, a modern history don of my acquaintance protested, “But surely, to adapt The Spanish Tragedy — it’s just a waste of time for modern audience!”
But the adaptor is drawn to certain pieces of work just because they are NOT a waste of time for the modern audience — just because they are strangely relevant to the present day discourse, and have something to add — and this is the case with THE SPANISH TRAGEDY.
Now THE SPANISH TRAGEDY is the story of Hieronimo, a hard worker at the table of the King. His son, Horatio, a war hero, has the balls to fall in love with the King’s niece. This infuriates her perverse brother, Lorenzo, who wants her to marry a prince he has a particular crush on, and he and the prince kill Hieronimo’s son. Being rich kids, they get off, of course. And then Hieronimo takes his revenge.
There were two speeches that immediately stuck out at me on first read of the play — two speeches that are filled brim full of feelings I can directly understand as relevant: one poignantly so, and one in a depressingly familiar base sort of way.
The first is Hieronimo’s speech after finding Horatio’s body, when he is so overcome with shock that he denies it is his son at all. He remembers how favored Horatio was by the higher ups, and seems to see no irony in the fact that this was shown by Horatio being allowed to wait on them at table. He says:
“Besides, he is so generally beloved,
His Majesty the other day did grace him
With waiting on his cup! These be favors
Which do assure me he cannot be short-lived!”
And then Lorenzo — the king’s nephew, dissolute, selfish, perverse, a recognizable type to me, in my youth we called his type a “messed up rich kid”, and we all knew enough to stay away from them…he says this, when he decides it’s better to betray one of his underlings to keep his own skin safe:
“And better ‘tis that base companions die,
Than by their life to hazard our good haps.
I’ll trust myself; myself shall be my friend.
For die they shall. Slaves are ordained
to no other end.”
This is the messed up rich kid par excellence. His perverse desire to control his sister, his weird relationship with the prince, Balthazar, his spoiled assurance that no matter what evil thing he does, he’ll be protected…I kept being reminded of a kid I knew in high school, hugely rich, who murdered his sister by battering her with a typewriter. He sells real estate now, in San Francisco, though they mention his jail term now and again when he shows up in the business section of the local newspapers. Lorenzo par excellence…
But to get back to the play. When you look at it closely, there is so much about the world depicted that is easily understood in the context of today — and therefore takes very easily to a modern adaptation that places the action in a modern setting.
First off, all the characters speak in languages that no one understands. Everywhere in the play there is cacophony, too much stimuli, too much politicking, not enough calm or everyday life…sound familiar?
And then, in the play, globalization is a feature. John Ralston Saul has pointed out that today’s elites are tied more by loyalty to each other than to their own countries — the rich in one country can relate to the rich in another more than they can to the poor or the middle class in their own. And so it is here. Balthazar is given more honor at the Spanish court than Horatio, a soldier who has worked, along with his family, for the country’s interests.
The whole court reminds us of what the critic Robert Hughes calls the International White Trash Set. Read the court scenes. Can’t you just see Castile having Andy Warhol to paint Bel Imperia’s portrait?
And then there is the character of Hieronimo himself, a character that is immediately recognizable as a modern one: the decent man betrayed by an indecent society.
Kyd obviously related to Hieronimo. I don’t stress this in my own adaptation, but Hieronimo is the DIRECTOR OF PLAYS for the king’s banquets…and he is the AUTHOR OF A TRAGEDY. And, of course, he is the director of the final play, and the author of the whole of the Spanish Tragedy. Just like Thomas Kyd. And it is Hieronimo’s anguish — the madness produced by the frustrations of the world around him — that I think is behind the incredible popularity of the piece in its own time, as well as accounting for its extreme relevance in ours.
It’s a universal sorrow that everyone can relate to– the unjust loss of an only child. (Cindy Sheehan, in our own day, could tell us much about that kind of anguish.) But it gets its special charge from the circumstances, its special force from the shared experience of the author and the audience in a world that was becoming increasingly polarized in terms of class, and increasingly — indeed, terrifyingly so, if you were without protection — authoritarian.
This is very modern. And it was easily adapted to a modern setting, with a modern actor. The perfect actor, in fact, to play Hieronimo, is Derek Jacobi, whose best performances are of the sane man in the insane society — think of Claudius in I, CLAUDIUS.
Hieronimo is driven mad by unjust authority. He hates this authority, and goes from considering authority to be the top, and himself its loyal agent, to believing all its offspring should be slaughtered. And I believe Kyd felt this deeply himself, and that the audience, even if unconsciously, felt it deeply too.
Perhaps the special torture for Hieronimo — and I think for Hieronimo we can read Kyd, as well — is being put in a position of thinking that society has been changed so that merit can make a good man or woman rise to the top. No holds barred! Good behavior will bring justice and an inevitable rise…and then to discover that it is not so, it is the same old slavery but with a happy face on it, that what it really means is being put down ruthlessly if one is in anyway inconvenient to one’s betters.
Those who are underneath in this world are given the illusion that they can rise, which keeps the in service to those above. But of course they can’t. They are INVISIBLE, MUTE, GHOST LIKE. Even after Hieronimo has explained in great detail why he has killed Lorenzo and Balthazar, he is still asked to explain himself! No one hears. This is why he spits out his own tongue.
Of course, no one understands anyone else anyway — they’re constantly speaking in different languages!
As to why he Hieronimo kills Castile (Drew Scofield in the clips), brother of the king and father of Lorenzo (Marc Warren), while this has always been a problem for scholars, the reason for it would be particularly clear to a modern audience — it certainly was, anyway, to a modern adaptor. Because Castile has a glimmer of understanding that Lorenzo has wronged Hieronimo, but he tamps it down as too inconvenient for himself. He chooses class loyalty and family convenience over justice, and so comes in for his share of the revenge.
Hieronimo shows the hatred of the author for an unjust authority… and the rage that comes with the understanding that the same old shell game is still in place — and the hatred of the audience that suffered under this same system but felt powerless to do something about it. This rage is a powerful thing. And don’t let anybody think it’s not still with us. I felt some of it a while ago when I read in the Guardian an article by a woman whose son has died in Iraq. She pointed out that the troops there don’t have adequate body armor to deal with the kind of mines they encounter there — too pricey. But that Cherie Blair drives around London in an armored car. And this two-tiered protection isn’t even in favor of a king, but the wife of a ‘public servant’. And why is Tony Blair’s family more important, of more worth, than the family of that woman who lost a son in Iraq? That is a real question. There’s nothing even cynical about it. Why is one person’s child considered to be worth more than another? Why should one person’s child have safety and security that another’s lacks? Why should there be one standard of justice for the rich and elite and another for the rest of us? Hieronimo asked that question in the sixteenth century. He’s still waiting for an answer. That frustration is still around, very much so.
And so to answer the Oxford modern history don’s question: isn’t the study of these old plays just a waste of time? I have to say: it is important that we not lose sight of the fact that culture is not just about entertainment, not just about providing a haven from an overly complex, unjust world. It is about explaining that complexity, that injustice…Culture is about knowing who we are — not just as individuals, but as a society as well. And we can’t know who we are unless we know where we come from. If you deny people the access to the knowledge of their past, you’ve cut off all knowledge at the root, just like Isabella does to the tree on which Horatio is murdered. And the knowledge that Hieronimo was driven mad, in the late sixteenth century, by circumstances that could easily drive a loving father mad today — that is knowledge that people need to have in order to understand their own lives and the world around them.
To highlight that knowledge from the past is the adaptor’s art. And it is what makes working on a play like THE SPANISH TRAGEDY, and on a character like HIERONIMO so deeply satisfying.