Nationhood as Illusion in The Spanish Tragedy

Summary

Kay Stockholder and Katherine Maus have argued that social status lies at the heart of The Spanish Tragedy, but a more pointedly political orientation reveals the concept of nationhood to be a particular focus of the play's anxiety. Writing at a time when, as Richard Helgerson has shown, building national identity was a consuming concern of lawyers, voyagers, poets, and playwrights, Thomas Kyd portrays characters who act as if they serve a common national interest. In so doing, they enact a definition of nationhood that is, to use Helgerson's framework, “inclusionist,” with a range of social groups afforded “privileged participation in the national community.” Within the framework of the revenge tragedy, however, Kyd includes a number of dramatic elements by which he emphasizes and then exposes as fiction the inclusionist assumptions about nationhood that initially motivate the actions of those in the lower rank.

Kyd opens with the figure of Andrea: this ghost, come from the grave, sets up the shifts in perspective that will follow. The play's premise begins with Andrea seeing himself as having fought valiantly against the Portuguese rebellion—the fictional war occasioned when Portugal resists its status as a tributary of Spain. Given that he has recently lost his life in that endeavor, his initial view is remarkably circumspect: “For in the late conflict with Portingale / My valor drew me into danger's mouth / Till life to death made passage through my wounds.” Not yet in the revenging mood, Andrea views his death simply as the result of providing military service for the collective cause of Spain, which he has performed with “valor.” Once he has received the proper burial rites, the only question to be answered is, given the requisite chivalric intertwining of love and war, whether he should be assigned the Elysian locale befitting a warrior or a lover. These roles are bound together in Andrea's formulaic understanding: his “duteous service” merits the noble Belimperia's “deserving love” (I.i.9). But this blithe belief that meritorious service to Spain will be rewarded is shown throughout the play to be illusory.