Revenge tragedy is the genre in which Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists explored the same questions about the morality of revenge and the resistance to tyranny that occupied so many contemporary moralists and political thinkers. The play that fixed the conventions of revenge tragedy for the Elizabethans—a ghost crying for revenge, a hero run mad, Machiavellian villains, a hesitant revenger, dumb shows and a play within the play—was Thomas Kyd's Spanish Tragedy. Wildly popular, it probably first took the boards in 1586 or 1587. It was printed four times by 1602, when Philip Henslowe (he of the bad teeth in Shakespeare in Love) paid Ben Jonson to update it, and Shakespeare's company howled from the stage when a boy's company playing in a private theatre stole the play from them in 1604. In 1614 in the Induction to his Bartholomew Fair, Ben Jonson, referring to it by its hero's name, Hieronimo, poked fun at the antique theatre-goers, whose taste "hath stood still those five and twenty, or thirty, years," who "will swear Hieronimo or Andronicus [Shakespeare's gory war-horse of a revenge play] are the best plays yet." As if to prove him right, more editions appeared in 1615, 1618, 1623, and 1633. Ten years after the Puritans closed the theatres in 1642 appeared "the awful tale of a young lady who, being accustomed in health to seeing a play a day, on her death-bed continued every crying, "Oh Hieronimo, methinks I see thee, brave Hieronimo" and "fixing her eyes, intentively, as if she had seen Hieronimo acted, sending out a deep sigh, she suddenly died."

"A ghost crying for revenge, a hero run mad""

Kyd's Hieronimo is Knight Marshall or chief justice of Spain, a commoner who has won his monarch's "love and kindness" by his deserts within the court." But when his son is treacherously stabbed to death by two great princes, nephews of his King and the Viceroy of Portugal, even Hieronimo, father of the victim as well as the chief instrument of law in the kingdom, is unable to bring them to justice. "To know the author were some ease of grief," Hieronimo laments, "For in revenge my heart would find relief" (2.5.40­1). When a letter, written in blood and naming the murderers is dropped at his feet, the wary Hieronimo suspects "this unexpected miracle" is really a trick—"to entrap thy life this train is laid," he reasons to himself (3.2.38). To accuse the King's nephew, he realizes, "should draw / Thy life in question, and thy name in hate" (42­3), and he vows to press no charges until he finds proof "to confirm this writ" (49). But even after another letter proves the murderers' identity, justice is denied him. Driven nearly to suicide by grief and his own frustrated desire for vengeance, Hieronimo now seems mad, and when the opportunity to denounce the murderers to the King finally comes, one of them, the Duke's son, blocks his way. When he hears his son's name, Hieronimo raves so violently for justice that the Duke's son easily convinces the King that Hieronimo is "Distract, and in a manner lunatic" (3.12), his complaints about a murdered son sheer madness.

The soliloquy that follows epitomizes the revenger's dilemma.

Enter HIERONIMO with a book in his hand

"Mortal men
may not appoint
their time"





"Strike home, where wrong is offered thee"






"I will revenge
his death!
But how?"





"All times fit not for revenge"




"Thou must enjoin thy
heart to patience"

The Spanish Tragedy fixes the conventions of what became the most popular genre of Elizabethan melodrama. In revenge tragedies the avenging hero is always a subject, a subaltern or underling like Hieronimo. Suffering from some intolerable wrong, he cannot seek justice from the law; the enemy who has wronged him is always a powerful prince or magistrate who has abused the position he has usurped or inherited. Subverting the very institution from which the hero seeks redress, he wields all of the power of the state to cover up his guilt. To evade his enemy's power the vulnerable hero must beguile the time and hide what he knows, biding his time until his enemy unwittingly offers him an opportunity to strike. Thus the revenger does not so much act as react. His premeditated schemes are seldom successful, and typically he strikes on the spur of the moment. Add to this Kyd's other innovations—a vengeful ghost, a skull, madness real and feigned, a play-within-the-play, a Machiavellian villain who holds the reins of justice—and we have a pretty good outline for Hamlet.