I haven’t posted anything since January, despite my promise then to mend my lazy ways. At that time, I had the excuse that I had been working two jobs, and that once things calmed down at work in mid-April, I could hope to blog again. Well, things have calmed down, but I find my issue now is simply lack of practice.
So to get back into the swing of things, I offer the post below, which is simply a loosely organized (and loosely written) set of observations on Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (1592), which I just finished reading.
“All the world’s a stage”
My impression while reading the play was that Kyd used the word “world” an awful lot in it, and that therefore it must have some particular significance as an overarching motif. However, his usages are various and I could not come up with a common theme or trope running through them. I began to wonder whether there really were so many instances, or whether I was just imagining it, so I did a count. There are 18 instances of the word “world” in The Spanish Tragedy, not including two instances of variants (more on these shortly). By way of comparison, I counted 26 in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Now, Hamlet is a significantly longer play, so a better comparison might be Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, in which “world” occurs 33 times (including one of the variants found in Kyd). Overall then, it doesn’t seem like Kyd was necessarily overdoing it.
My impression of overuse might have come from Kyd’s tendency to clump instances together. For instance, in Hieronimo’s opening soliloquy to Act III, scene ii, it appears three times, two of them in one line (ll. 3 & 22):
(The long comma-separated list in this rhyming couplet, formed mostly of monosyllables, I would normally find tedious, but here it does succeed in displaying Hieronimo’s distracted state of mind and his disjointed thought processes, his son having recently been murdered. The alliteration in the last line is particularly effective.)
The sense of repetition isn’t helped in one case by the fact that Kyd seems to have nodded a bit, not realizing that the Duke of Castile plagiarizes a line spoken by Lorenzo several lines earlier in the same scene:
Turning to Kyd’s two variants of “world” I mentioned, we should pause to consider the etymology of the word. It is Germanic. According to the OED, in Old High German the prefix wer- referred to “man” and alt meant “old” or “aged”, much as it does in modern German. The basic idea here is that the world and the things in it exist in time; they age, they grow old. The German verb veralten means to grow old, outdated, or obsolescent.
Now, the two variants of “world” in Kyd, occur within the same speech. The first is “worldling”. In Act III, scene xv, l. 18, Revenge says “Thus worldlings ground, what they have dreamed, upon.”
I admit I love this word and shall endeavor to use it whenever I can. But I particularly love it in the sense in which the editor of my edition of The Spanish Tragedy defines it: a worldling is simply a mortal. However, if you look up “worldling” in the OED, you are told that the word refers to someone who is devoted to earthly pleasures, and wholly immersed in the affairs of the world. This is the sense that most dictionaries give it. The dictionaries are not wrong, and the two senses are obviously not unrelated. The notion of the secular – to switch from the Germanic to the Latinate – has this sense, of the mortal realm within which runneth the writ of time.
However, I find Kyd’s editor to be more on the mark here, wherever he got his definition. First, there is the above etymology of “world” as that which exists in time and ages.
Second, there is the occurrence of the second of Kyd’s variants of “world” a few lines down in the same speech after the appearance of “worldling”: “For in unquiet, quietness is feigned, / And slumbering is a common worldly wile” (ibid. ll. 24-25). Now here, “worldly” could be taken in its OED sense, but it is worth noting that the speech comes from Revenge. In The Spanish Tragedy, most of the acts either begin or end with dialogue in the underworld between Revenge and the ghost of Don Andrea, and these passages are particularly laden with occurrences of “world”. Revenge and the dead Don Andrea both dwell in an eternal realm, so when they speak of the world and make observations on its inhabitants, they look upon it as that middle place where mortals temporarily (or temporally?) dwell.
Third, the word “worldling” also occurs in scene 13 of the B-text of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. It is spoken by Mephastophilis, who refers to Faustus thus:
Again, the word “worldling” is being used by a distinctly other-worldly entity to describe the inhabitants of the mortal world.
“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”
Another thing I noticed as I read Kyd’s play was the use of legal terminology. It’s not so much that there is a lot of it; it’s that it is anachronistic. Actually no, not anachronistic; rather, anatopistic (i.e. not erring against time but against place). What I mean is that the play is supposed to take place at some undetermined time in Spain. But the legal references are peculiarly English.
Take for example the incident in Act III, scene iv, where Pedringano has just been seized by the watch after killing Serberine. A speech by Lorenzo, at whose bidding Pedringano committed the murder, contains these lines (ll. 65-66):
Now, in one sense, this is perfectly normal: Hieronimo is the Marshal of Spain, the magistrate before whom Pedringano will appear. And the “Marshal sessions” would presumably refer to a session of this magistrate’s court. The usage has an English ring to it, but the underlying concept could also apply to Spain (for all I know).
In England there also existed a Marshal. As part of his duties, he acted as a magistrate who oversaw criminal jurisdiction within what was called the “verge”. The verge was defined as the area which at any given time lay 12 miles in any direction from the King. For purposes of criminal jurisdiction, it was considered part of the royal household, and the Marshal was an officer of said household. By Kyd’s time, the verge came to mean the 12 miles around Whitehall, although the Marshal’s court also travelled along with the royal household when the King moved about the realm. From this was derived one of the names for the Marshal’s court: the Court of the Verge. It was also called the Court of the Marshalsea (from “marshalcy”). For present purposes, there are a couple of interesting things about this court.
First, its criminal jurisdiction was peculiar in that it did not deal with all crimes committed within the verge (that would have made it effectively responsible for all crime committed in London and Westminster). Rather, it was responsible for administering justice – criminal and otherwise – between the servants of the King’s household, “that they might not be drawn into other courts and their service lost”. In this connection, we might note that the crime in question in Kyd’s play was committed by a servant (Pedringano) of the King’s niece upon a servant (Serberine) of the Viceroy of Portugal’s son, who was an honoured hostage in the Spanish court. Although the servants weren’t directly servants of the Spanish King, they were servants within the King’s household, which made it a domestic matter and brought it within the verge and the Marshal’s jurisdiction.
Second, the Court of Marshalsea, and the notorious Marshalsea prison associated with it, were located in Southwark, which also happened to be Elizabethan London’s theatre district. The Spanish Tragedy’s first recorded performance took place on February 23, 1592, acted by Lord Strange’s men at Philip Henslowe’s Rose Theatre in Bankside (built 1587). No doubt, Thomas Kyd would be fairly familiar with the nearby Marshalsea prison in Mermaid Court.
The prison brings us to the second line of the quotation above, “Bid him not doubt of his delivery”. In my opinion, “delivery” here probably had a rather technical meaning, alluding to a “commission of gaol delivery” issued to royal justices by which they were to empty the prisons by bringing the prisoners to trial. In other words, Lorenzo would have been directing his messenger to tell Pedringano that he need not fear languishing in prison much longer.
Now let us turn from the criminal to the civil law. In Act III, scene xiii, Hieronimo, who has the reputation of being a skilled and upright lawyer, is being petitioned by three citizens to take on their cases. Before proceeding, it’s worth noting that the very word “citizen” to label these minor characters was likely chosen for the particular resonance it would have had for an Elizabethan theatre audience. For them it would have meant specifically a citizen of London. As such, it would have been a byword for a certain character-type: petty, acquisitive, small-minded, and litigious. In the following bit of dialogue, we leave the lofty if violent world of court intrigue among the highborn, and enter the lowbrow world of merchants and burghers and their little legal squabbles:
Hieronimo asks Citizen 2 whether his action is for battery — I’m not sure why; maybe he has a black eye. The way I imagine this scene being acted is that the petitioners are all clamouring for Hieronimo’s attention and speaking almost simultaneously. So the battery question gets cut off by Citizen 1’s interjection. Hieronimo then says to the latter “Give place”, in other words, “Shut up and let Citizen 2 speak”. It is then that Citizen 2 answers Hieronimo’s question: his action is not for battery, it is for “the case”.
Here there is no doubt that we are dealing not with some fictionalized version of Spanish law, but with unadulterated English common law. By “the case”, Citizen 2 is referring to an action for trespass on the case. In terms of the forms of action at common law, battery was also a form of trespass; specifically, it fell under the writ of trespass vi et armis (“with force and arms”). So why is this citizen opting for trespass on the case?
Trespass on the case was a remedy developed over time by judges as a sort of catch-all. In effect, judges were gradually stretching the older fixed writs of trespass (there were a few of them) to do substantive justice in cases where the facts did not quite fit the requirements of those older writs. In such cases, judges might allow an action of trespass on the case based on some analogy of facts with the recognized forms of trespass. When you hear “trespass on the case”, think “trespass on the facts of the case”. (Roman law had something similar, the actio in factum. This was literally an “action upon the facts” rather than upon the form.) It was a way of getting around the law’s increasing rigidity.
Perhaps the facts of Citizen 2’s case didn’t quite fit the older writs; perhaps whatever happened was done either without the requisite “force and arms,” or lacked the necessary intent on the part of the defendant. Instead, he opted for this newer, more flexible remedy.
Quite comically, when one looks at some of the old court cases one comes across an alternative strategy used by defendants: they bring an action for something that is not even trespass at all with a writ of trespass vi et armis. Here a plaintiff wishing to recover a debt, for instance, would insert a statement into his writ asserting that the defendant did “with force and arms” withhold repayment. It was of course a fiction, and one which judges had a growing tendency not to question.
Which brings me to Citizen 1, who is indeed bringing an action of debt. My question is, why is he too not bringing it as a trespass on the case, as Citizen 2 is doing? Let me explain what I mean.
Debt was an older form of action, which would have allowed the defendant to elect for what was called “wager of law”, in which he could acquit himself by bringing into court a certain number of fellow citizens who were willing to swear his innocence. Providing he could find or pay enough people to do so, the plaintiff’s action failed. This archaic procedure was obviously not very satisfactory, and so it became typical for a plaintiff to massage the facts of his case to make it fall under some other action that did not allow the defendant to “wage his law”. One such action was trespass. As mentioned previously, creditors sometimes might sue for trespass vi et armis and claim that the defendant was violently withholding “by force and arms” the money owed. Similarly, a plaintiff wishing to get back some article of property given to someone for safekeeping – the traditional action of detinue, which also allowed wager of law – might try to sue for trespass instead, by making a point of having his writ worded to say that the defendant “violently and with arms” was withholding the plaintiff’s property.
The development of trespass on the case meant that plaintiffs no longer needed to resort to such silly and palpable fictions to avoid wager of law. Trespass did not permit wager of law, and trespass on the case had the desired flexibility to extend to an ever-growing variety of fact situations.
One notable example of this in Kyd’s time was the development of the action of trespass on the case in assumpsit. Here the plaintiff pleaded that the defendant promised (assumpsit) something which he had failed to perform. At its core was the concept of deceit. Normally, under the old actions, if someone failed to return something I had given him for safekeeping, or had lost it or broken it, I would sue for detinue. If I had lent him money and he had failed to repay it, I could sue for debt. And so on. There were at least two shortcomings of these old forms of action. First, each had its peculiar limits and rules of pleading. If I chose the wrong writ, my action would fail. So private law was littered with many technical pitfalls. Second, again, they all allowed the defendant to wage his law. At some point in the mid-1500s, plaintiffs in such cases began to turn to assumpsit for relief. Finally, a few years after The Spanish Tragedy was first acted, Slade’s Case came along, in which it was decided that all of those old actions (debt, detinue, convenant, account, etc.) implied a promise, and that therefore the plaintiff could choose to bring an action either under one of the old writs or under trespass on the case in assumpsit (“upon the promise”). To cut a long story short, assumpsit is what gave birth to modern contract law, and Slade’s Case was a pivotal moment in that development.
Given the potted legal history I outlined above, it is not surprising that Citizen 2 opted to bring an action of trespass on the case rather than battery. It is more surprising that the first citizen didn’t do likewise, but instead opted to bring an action of debt. Assumpsit would have been better.
To round things out, the third citizen was bringing an action of ejectione firmae, for being ousted from his tenancy before the expiry of his lease.
Details of Thomas Kyd’s life are scarce, and it is not known how he made his living aside from writing plays. We know that his father was a scrivener, and it has often been assumed, on little evidence, that Thomas followed his father’s profession. If he was a scrivener, it would at least go some way towards explaining his considerable familiarity with the law of his time, and it would be consistent with the prominence of the legal documents in the above passage (“band”, “declaration”, “lease”).
“Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness”
We all know that on the pre-Restoration English stage, women’s roles were not played by women, but by men or boys. The absurdity of this has often caused me to ask myself, “Did the audience members never wish, at least secretly, that there were women playing these roles?” To me there seems to be evidence in Act IV that at least Thomas Kyd so wished.
In order to explain, we need to back up a bit. Balthazar, son to the Viceroy of Portugal, and Lorenzo, nephew to the King of Spain, have murdered Horatio, the son of Hieronimo, Marshal of Spain. They did this to free up Horatio’s lover, Bel-imperia, to marry Balthazar (Bel-imperia happens also to be Lorenzo’s sister).
Hieronimo and Bel-imperia plot revenge on Balthazar and Lorenzo. The revenge involves convincing the murderers to participate in acting in a masque as part of Balthazar and Bel-imperia’s wedding celebrations. This play-within-the-play (precursor to Shakespeare’s similar device in Hamlet) will have a grisly outcome, but more importantly for our purposes, it has a female character, Perseda.
While they are deciding who will play whom, Hieronimo quite subversively suggests the following (IV.i.95-97):
Indeed, an interesting question to ask, since all plays in Kyd’s time were without a woman in it. Now consider this: Bel-imperia is assigned Perseda’s role, which effectively means that a member of Kyd’s original audience would have been presented with a male actor playing a female role playing a female role. The absurdity is heightened by the reaction of one audience member within the play. Scene iv begins with the King of Spain leading the Viceroy of Portugal to their seats to watch this masque:
The Viceroy seems surprised to be told that a woman will be acting. He needn’t worry, since Bel-imperia herself is being played by a man. Further on (line 69), the Viceroy is forced to admit, “But Bel-imperia plays Perseda well.” The “but” here suggests that the admission is somewhat grudging.
Nevertheless, to me, it’s almost as if Kyd is offering his audience a thought experiment, a notional space in which to imagine something that couldn’t be instantiated on an actual stage. Think of it: A male actor is playing a woman. He may be boying her femininity well, but there are limits to the ease with which we can suspend our disbelief. Then Kyd has us imagine a further remove, where the character we already half-believe is female is playing a female character. That is perhaps an easier leap, and now we have come as close as we can to the actual experience of watching female actors. We are then forced to admit, like the Viceroy, that Bel-imperia indeed plays Perseda well — or at least could, if she were given the opportunity.
Bibliography
KYD, Thomas. The Spanish Tragedy. J. R. Mulryne (ed.). London: A & C Black, 1989.
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