Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 16 Number 3, December 2015
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Theatrical Corpses in The Spanish Tragedy: Props or Protagonists
by
National Autonomous University of Mexico
Abstract
The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd is remarkable for its particularly gruesome approach to the construction of dramatic imagery, which heavily relies on the portrayal of dead and mutilated bodies. Several theoretical studies of death and its representation have suggested that the theatrical corpse is an antitheatrical image in its essence, since it prompts awareness of the performative nature of the play. As dying lacks empirical reference and cannot be evoked by means of memory, the character perishing on stage embodies an attempt to depict the unrepresentable. This is why spectators, when observing a sentient body that struggles to signify an insentient one, fail to suspend their belief that the represented death is not real and instead centre their attention on how well loss of life is acted. I argue that in the tragedy of Thomas Kyd, the corpses, far from being mere theatrical props or unsignifiable images, represent powerful dramatic tools in their own right that transform the theatre into a place where contemplative immersion reduces the aesthetic distance between spectator and stage. This paper discusses the construction of dramatic imagery in The Spanish Tragedy, with the role of the imaging process in the recognition and understanding of the theatrical corpse being the focal point of my critical approach. I will analyse how the perceptive gap induced by the image of the dead body is overcome through a close link between the theatre and reality, namely penal spectacles of hangings known for their established, widely-recognized and culturally-defined poetics. I will also consider the interstitial nature of Kyd’s cadavers that dangle on the edge of life and death in order to examine how human remains able to communicate from the rope on which they swing and capable to laugh derisively at their own fate give rise to conceptual ambiguity that induces the need to cover the decaying body with meaning.
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The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd (1587) is often considered as a highly influential revenge tragedy, even canonical in a certain sense, due to its commercial success and the impact that it had on Shakespeare and his contemporaries. No doubt, much of its triumph was owed to its first-time representation of numerous assassinations, dismembered corpses and other kinds of graphic violence, all in plain view of audience. In his final speech, the spirit of Don Andrea brings the complete list of these atrocities before the public:
Horatio murdered in his fathers Bower:
Vile Serberine by Pedringano slaine:
False Pedringano hang’d by quaint deuice:
Faire Isabella by her selfe mis-done:
Prince Balthazar by Belimperia stab’d:
The Duke of Castile, and his wicked Sonne,
Both done to death by old Hieronimo:
My Belimeria falne as Dido fell:
And good Hieronimo slaine by himselfe. (Kyd, 1623, IV)
Don Andrea’s discourse not only recapitulates the chain of tragic events and emphasizes the key role of macabre rhetoric in the plot development of The Spanish Tragedy but also reveals Kyd’s interest in the portrayal of corpses per se. It would seem that in spite of his constant efforts to convey tragic experiences and the drama of death by means of rituals and iconography, his intentions often were not achieved without the repeated use of graphic representations of lifeless bodies on stage. I argue that in The Spanish Tragedy the corpse is not used only as a theatrical prop or source of striking imagery but that it also constitutes a carefully-elaborated aesthetic posture. The staged dead body, at once object and symbol, represents the central element in the process of creation of the aesthetic experience, given the multiple meanings that this image offers within the sociocultural context of the period. In this article, I attempt to analyse the representation of the corpse in The Spanish Tragedy of Thomas Kyd as an aesthetic posture that is realized within a space derived from the interaction of culturally determined subjectivities.
As a matter of fact, Kyd’s most vivid representations of dead bodies are related to quite celebrated aspects of Renaissance popular culture, namely penal spectacles of hanging known for their well-established, widely-recognized and culturally-defined poetics. Kyd’s concern with the image of a hanged man is so remarkable that Molly Smith, when analysing cultural practices of public punishment in The Spanish Tragedy, reaches the conclusion that “no other play of the Renaissance stage dwells on the spectacle of hanging as Kyd’s does”. (Smith, 1992, 218) Indeed, while many Renaissance plays are renowned for their bloody grandiloquence, dramatists who lived and created during that period of human history tended to avoid accurate representations of state punishment such as hangings, beheadings or other acts of bodily mutilation. By contrast, Thomas Kyd extensively explores the similarities between theatrical and judicial violence through placing theatrical corpses within the context of contemporary punitive practices, this being especially true in case of the representation of Horatio’s and Pedringano’s murders.
Even though T. S. Eliot in his work “Four Elizabethan Dramatists” concludes that the insistence of Renaissance authors on bringing reality to theatrical fiction is their main defect (Eliot, 1932, 111), I suggest that the mimetic nature of The Spanish Tragedy constitutes a source of vivid imagery, since cultural experiences shared by a group of people structure the strength of their perceptions. (Parret, 2008, 163) In other words, the predetermined nature of these events evokes in the viewers’ minds images and emotions, which are deeply familiar, immutable and common to each individual. Life in the community represents intersubjective cultural transmissions in which feelings and experiences are shared and different subjectivities are synthesized to create one way of interpreting images that is global in nature and inherent to the majority of the members of the community. Thus, the representations of hangings that nourish the plot development of The Spanish Tragedy do not only form part of the group of shocking images aimed at satisfying the extravagant tastes of Renaissance viewers but also emerge as a dramatic medium that brings the spectacle into community life, enabling the audience to identify with the presented events through their own memories, experiences and knowledge.
A clear comprehension of the dramatic importance of death in Kyd’s tragedy requires the knowledge that the image of a condemned man swinging at the end of a rope was the most common penal spectacle of late Medieval and Renaissance Europe. William Harrison has even argued that due to the high costs of more spectacular forms of public punishment such as beheadings, burnings, breakings on the wheel and different kinds of dismemberment, the majority of people in early modern England only had the opportunity to witness the execution of a convict by means of a public hanging. “For of other punishments used in other countries we have no knowledge or use”, (Harrison, 1994, 187) was the conclusion the author reached after analysing these social practices in the Tudor epoch. Through the examination of court records in England, Germany, Italy and France from 1300 to 1600, Robert Mills, in his turn, not only has demonstrated the widespread popularity of hangings but has also highlighted the symbolic importance of this penal imagery for the early modern society. From his point of view, the sight of a man swinging on a rope, suspended “between life and death, heaven and hell” (Mills, 2005, 31) represented an effective rhetoric medium for obliterating the imagined remoteness of death. The figure of a hanging body brought the reality of death to the viewer in all of its immediacy, endorsed the brevity of life and stressed the importance of leading a sinless existence.
The viewpoints of Harrison and Mills provide the groundwork for suggesting that Kyd’s determination to explore the penal imagery of hanging in his tragedy is not accidental and is linked to the dramatic efficiency of this method of public punishment. The culturally acknowledged nature of this disciplinary action creates an implicit relationship between theatre and penal spectacle, a proximity that eases the process of meaning construction to a great degree. An understanding of existing punitive conventions not only promotes effortless identification with the events represented on stage but also instigates and even governs to some extent the emotional response of the audience.
Two hangings take place in The Spanish Tragedy: the execution of Pedringano and Horatio’s murder. The latter represents by far the most crucial episode of staged violence in Kyd’s play due to its influence on plot development and the consequences it has on the fate of the majority of the characters. Hieronimo’s son is hung in the garden where he and his beloved Belimperia are keeping their tryst. While the lovers declare eternal love for each other, Pedringano, Serberine, Balthazar and Lorenzo unexpectedly attack Horatio:
Bel. Who’s there, Pedringano? We are betraid.
Enter Lorenzo, Balthazar, Cerberin, and Pedringano disguised.
Lor. My Lord, away with her. Take her aside.
O sir, forbeare: your valour is already tride.
Quickly dispatch my Masters. They hang him in the Arbour.
Hor. What, will ye murder me?
Lor. I thus & thus these are the fruits of loue. They stab him. (Kyd, 1623, II)
Besides describing how the assassination actually happens, this brief account of the tragic events also reveals an astonishing fact: Horatio seems to escape the condition of silent oblivion proper to someone who is dead. “What, will ye murder me?” he inquires after being hung. The image of a speaking corpse makes allusion to its interstitial nature, one that invites the viewer to transgress the limits of the visible through a journey to the grave where the voice survives the demise of the body.
What lies behind this shocking representation of a dead body as an interstitial entity that blurs the difference between the inner and the outer, the tangible and the intangible, the continuous and the discontinuous? Surprising though it may seem, Kyd’s portrayal of Horatio’s dead body dangling from the rope as a semi-dead, sentient organism trapped in the threshold between life and death and capable of communicating from beyond the grave relies on Renaissance cultural codes concerning the conception and depiction of hanged men as well as of corpses in general. In fact, fantasies of the living dead filled to overflowing late Medieval and Renaissance gallow folklore. Analysing penal imagery and motifs of suspension in hangings pertaining to the epoch, Mills comments:
The custom of leaving the malefactor hanging for weeks or even months after execution testifies to the belief that the dead body continued to suffer the humiliation exacted at the original penal spectacle. Depictions conveying psychological states of ‘betwixt and between’ thus connect with images that attempt to convey, in narrative terms, the intervals where life and death may be said to meet. (Mills, 2005, 37)
In the same fashion, Susan Zimmerman, in her study of the role of a cadaver on the early modern stage, brings to light this cultural tendency to assume the existence of life in dead matter:
In the north […] death was envisaged ‘as an extended and gradual process’, more or less concomitant with putrefaction. It could take up to a year or more for the corpse to decompose, to become a skeleton, during which time it was perceived as ‘active, sensitive, or semianimate, [and] possessed of a gradually fading life’ or ‘personhood’. (Zimmerman, 2005, 130)
The above-mentioned studies make it evident that Horatio’s sentient corpse in addition to representing an uncanny prop in Kyd’s tragedy also emerges as the point where a whole set of associations between theatre and reality converges. Within this context, the image of a semi-dead body dangling from a rope is quite an appealing image to the Renaissance public, since it belongs to collective cultural memories, namely knowledge and related emotions stored in its consciousness that allow the spectators to immediately interpret perceived information and impressions as part of their own reality. It is precisely these predetermined experiences, a system of necessary and obvious truths always present in memory, which permit the viewers to recognize things previously unknown to them or not personally lived through. (Parret, 2008, 99) This is exactly the reason why Horatio’s semi-dead corpse enjoyed a vivid presence in the minds of Kyd’s audience. Despite the fact that the lifeless body did not belong to the everyday empirical experience of the great majority of his viewers, this culturally-constructed notion was a persistent component of their cultural memory, always at hand and ready to be perceived. Even though the corpse disappeared from the stage, it remained present in the viewers’ imaginations.
In this regard, the lifeless body of Horatio “positioned within the symbolic register of the reality principle” (Bronfen, 1992, 52) ceases to remain a mere prop, a signifier devoid of any empirical reference, and introduces events that lack a sensory dimension and possess no referential context regarding the materiality of the real world. Horatio’s voice attempting to escape the shroud evokes the traces of collective cultural memory in which the image of a sentient lifeless body stands at the core of Renaissance beliefs related to death and dying. As a result, a speaking cadaver, an interstitial entity, defined by its illusory, disjunctive and culturally-constructed aspects, stimulates the creative capacity of the imagination to blur the boundaries between life and its end. In this brief, fragile moment, the public gaze penetrates the invisible, the forbidden, and ventures beyond the space inhabited by meaning. This is how the audience discovers a void open to interpretation, a space where the spectators gain the capacity to create new meanings through the constant movement between affective and cognitive aspects of representation, to cloak something that lacks interiority with subjectivity, and to explore ways to materialize the image of Horatio’s cadaver within their own sociocultural context.
Remarkably, in The Spanish Tragedy Horatio’s dead body not only escapes annihilation post mortem by refusing to remain silent, but also manifests its interstitial nature through an optical exchange with the viewer:
Isa. And Ile close vp the glasses of his sight,
For once these Eyes were chiefly my delight. (Kyd, 1623, II)
Isabella’s lament reveals that the lifeless body of her son is swinging on the rope with his eyes open. From the Renaissance perspective, this fact granted the sentient corpse the ability to affect the existence of living beings. The gaze-returning dead person represents quite a disturbing image, since the violence of this penetrating eye, able to immobilize, silence and suffocate the other, destroys the aesthetic distance between the stage and the public. Horatio’s eye looks through the spectator, threatens the boundaries of the latter’s self and transforms the experience of death into one of hyperreality. Given the lack of substance in this look, the viewers feel constrained to recognize its illusory nature and to become a participant in this optical exchange, in the course of which they attempt to neutralize the deceptive, horrifying identity of the cadaver.
Kylie Rachel Message in her study “Watching Over the Wounded Eye of George Bataille and Andres Serrano” states that this ability of the cadaver to oscillate between life and death, to join fiction and reality, turns out to be strangely compelling. The spectator, though petrified by such a strange visual exchange with an inanimate eye, cannot help but stare at it in an attempt to bring the situation back to normal and overcome the horror that this optical interchange induces. This harrowing scene allows the viewers themselves to approach the inert state proper to a dead body. Given this undesirable proximity of an inanimate eye, the human body ceases to represent itself and surrenders to a new dimension where the construction of meaning occurs beyond the tangible, beyond established and widely-recognized knowledge. Since people are only capable of interpreting images and events within the limits of their own existence, this uncanny condition is what forces the viewers to contextualize the unknown, to discover new meanings through the use of their own emotions and cultural knowledge. According to Message, when conceptual borders are destroyed and established meanings are obliterated, there appears to be no solution other than to create a new system of signs and taboos, in order to avoid falling into the void ruled by the unsignifiable. While trying to clothe the gaze of a corpse with meaning, the spectators are forced to link this unsignifiable image to their own feelings and perceptions in order to make it part of their own empirical experience. (Message, 2004, 119).
So far I have briefly discussed how the subjectivity of Horatio’s hanging corpse is constructed in Kyd’s tragedy; however, this disturbing image is not the only one that nourishes the plot development of The Spanish Tragedy. Violence appears on stage again in a mimetic representation of Pedringano’s public punishment, where the dissolution of boundaries between festivity and the promulgation of terror emphasizes the symbolic value of death as entertainment. Indeed, the hanging of Pedringano represents a spectacle of semi-comic justice, since the condemned, sure of his prompt salvation, comes to the scaffold with a mocking smile on his face. This insolent behaviour contradicts the modus operandi of a Renaissance convict, who, instead of challenging authority, was expected to reflect on the moral aspect of his punishment (Sharpe, 1985, 144), a possibility that this character in Kyd’s play rejects without regret in his last speech. It seems that Pedringano’s arrogance transgresses the limits of reasonable conduct when he abstains from praying for the salvation of his soul, a paramount ritual for any condemned person during the Renaissance, which, according to popular belief, brings the doomed one nearer to the realm of the Creator. "For now I have no great need", (Kyd, 1623, III) is how he explains the cause of his unusual reluctance to the audience.
Pedringano's insolence when facing death turns the execution into a farce as well as demystifies and parodies the ritual of public punishment, a solemn ceremony aimed at bolstering the authority of the state. His terrible laughter frees the judicial practices represented in The Spanish Tragedy of all dogma, mysticism, and religious and ecclesiastical fears as well as releases the theatrical representation from all the hierarchical relationships, privileges, norms and prohibitions that govern society. Under these circumstances the hanging of Pedringano can no longer be called an execution. Instead, as Molly Smith has properly suggested, it rather resembles a carnival. (Smith, 1992, 227)
It is my deep conviction that Kyd’s choice of a carnival as the means for representing the execution of Pedringano is not accidental. On the one hand, such a juxtaposition of celebration and mourning constituted the cultural core of Medieval and Renaissance rituals of public punishment. Michel Foucault, for instance, in his well-known work Discipline and Punish explains that traditional carnival celebrations nourished these macabre spectacles of corporeal mortification on an almost subconscious level:
The public execution allowed the luxury of these momentary saturnalia, when nothing remained to prohibit or punish. Under the protection of imminent death, the criminal could say everything and the crowd cheered. […] In these executions, which ought to show only the terrorizing power of the prince, there was the whole aspect of the carnival, in which the rules were inverted, authority mocked and criminals transformed into heroes. (Foucault, 1977, 61)
On the other hand, carnival is known for its ability to invert rules and erase distinctions of all kinds. In his study of Rabelais’ work, Bakhtin emphasizes the potential of this popular celebration to join fiction and reality, life and art:
In fact, carnival does not know footlights, in the sense that it does not acknowledge any distinction between actors and spectators. […] Carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people. While carnival lasts, there is no other life outside it. (Bakhtin, 2008, 7)
Thus, by presenting the hanging of Pedringano as a carnival, Kyd introduces materiality into fiction and invests this figure with a new symbolic meaning. The death throes of the convict that happen in full view of an audience transform his insolent laughter on the brink of death into the contemptuous sniggering of a sentient corpse that continues to mock the frightening reality of his death. Akin to the grinning skull of the Totentanz, the malefactor of Kyd’s tragedy not only warns human beings of the vanity of life but also invites the viewer to contemplate the place where the boundary between the real and the imaginary worlds vanishes. Therefore, Pedringano’s sentient corpse, which refuses to be encapsulated within the margins of conceptual rigidity, emerges as a unifying element that “[is] never clearly differentiated from the world but is transferred, merged, and fused with it”. (Bakhtin, 2008, 35) In other words, in this scene the hanged man no longer appears as a disembodied figure or unsignifiable image but represents a sentient corpse whose vivid presence forces those who are looking at it to recall the living being he used to be. The somatic presence of a corpse that has retained the ability to smile hints at the possibility of an afterlife and turns the figure of the dying Pedringano into a tangible symbol of immortality, one ingrained in the minds of and understandable to the majority of the Renaissance population.
Once again, Kyd transforms the subjectivity of the dead body into the subjectivity of the audience through the culturally-based representation of a corpse, thus closely linking the theatre and reality. The scene of Pedringano’s hanging makes it clear that despite the fact that the selfhood of the other never possesses the same degree of presence as objective reality, there is always a possibility of discovering the subjectivity of alterity through the process of the attribution of an ego, of a life to it. In order to achieve identification with the character and events represented on stage, Kyd’s spectators have no choice but to transpose their own memories, experiences and feelings into those of an agonizing actor. The process perception within the cultural margins of a given society, linking the present and the past, a real and a fictional self. Unable to literally transpose their flesh into the figure of Pedringano, the spectators modify their own feelings and personal experiences, as well as their own experiences of the world within their own culture, in order to discover the inner life of the stranger whose death is being represented on stage. In other words, empathy arises when the viewer lets himself be seduced by the fictional world of the play. When the public succeeds in identifying the otherness in its imagination, the flow of cultural memories that embrace the past, determine the present and influence the future links the subjectivity of other to the subjectivity of the audience.
When seen from this perspective, the speaking corpse of The Spanish Tragedy, dangling between heaven and earth and capable of communicating from beyond the tangible world, appears to be more a protagonist than a mere prop. The dead bodies that emerge as interstitial entities on the border between life and death, between fiction and reality, reduce the aesthetic distance between the spectators and the stage due to the cultural proximity of this image to the Renaissance audience. The dead body emerges as the noema of perceptual experience, imposing a culturally-constructed notion of a corpse on the spectator’s consciousness and on the production of meaning. As a result, this culturally-based depiction of cadavers transgresses representational limits and introduces the unrepresentable into reality. In the same manner, the ritual of hanging that nourishes the plot development of The Spanish Tragedy is not only employed to impress the audience with events of an uncanny nature but is also present for reasons related to its dramatic efficiency, since Renaissance penal spectacles were known for their established, widely-recognized and culturally-defined poetics. The experiential proximity of this form of punishment to the majority of Renaissance spectators reduces aesthetic distance by establishing a close link between the theatre and reality as well as between different forms of visual culture.
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