The Spanish Tragedy

Thomas Kyd was a contemporary of Shakespeare or more specifically a playwright who preceded the Bard both chronologically and artistically. Kyd's most famous work was "The Spanish Tragedy," a revenge tragedy which was apparently very successful on the Elizabeth stage. The work has multiple revenge themes including a character named simply revenge, who provides a chorus like function commenting on the action of each act.

The tragic hero the play is Hieronimo who serves at the court of the King of Spain without being of noble blood himself. Hieronimo's son, Horatio is murdered by two of the characters among other things to end his romance with Bel-Imperia, the female lead. Understandably upon discovering the murder and the murderer, Hieronimo vows revenge which he first seeks unsuccessfully through the "system." Undeterred by this obstacle, he proceeds to achieve his goal through the use of a play within in a play.

If the latter sounds familiar, it is, of course, a mechanism that Shakespeare will use in "Hamlet," another, more fully developed revenge tragedy. In fact, a great deal of Kyd's significance in the history of drama is how much of what happens "Hamlet" - the use of ghosts, the play within a play is seen in this earlier play. There has also been speculation, although without any documented evidence, that Kyd was the author of the Ur Hamlet, an earlier version of the play now lost.

Last weekend I listened to a BBC archived broadcast of an interview with noted Shakespearean scholar Jonathan Bate and two other scholars about revenge tragedies from Kyd through Shakespeare. Bate made the point that in the case of "Hamlet," as in much of Shakespeare, the original source material has been given a much more in depth treatment. According to Bate, much of what is considered to be Hamlet's vacillation about revenging the death of his father is his inner debate about the right and wrong of revenge. That's an issue that is of some interest - much of the intellectual/moral world where I have spent a lot of time suggests that revenge is an empty human motivation that doesn't produce the benefits one expects. Reading "The Spanish Tragedy" showed me how revenge can escalate far beyond the original issue, perhaps making its value somewhat questionable. It will now give me an additional perspective on "Hamlet" which I expect to see at least once this fall.

Marling Hall

"Marling Hall" is the third of Angela Thirkell's Barsetshire novels set during World War II. We learn the period covered by this story at the very end when mention is made of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The novel concludes with a detailed depiction of the Christmas festivities at Marling Hall. This all done in the spirit of Christmas that Thirkell captured in "Northbridge Rectory" when she wrote (my words, not her's) that the problem with Christmas is that it separates people who want to be together and brings together people who should always be kept separated.

In this novel Thirkell introduces a new family, the Marlings as well as a number of other new characters. However, the story also serves to re-introduce the Leslie family who were at the heart of "Wild Strawberries." The Leslies have aged with David Leslie back to his old tricks making himself a love interest with little effort of his own. The love story revolves primarily around Lettice Watson (nee Marling) who was widowed at Dunkirk. Thirkell creates another 2/1 dynamic as well as the possibility that there will be no resolution at all.

Most of this familiar to the reader and I would put the novel somewhere in the middle in any rankings of her work. The war time novels do feel somewhat "choppy" as my buddy DT would say, but I will see how I feel about that after reading the last two which should arrive from Amazon in the next day or so. The thing that really stuck out for me in this book came early on with little real impact on the main story. One of the minor characters, Ed Pollett, who is gifted with machines, but apparently of limited mental capacity takes the obligatory physical for military service. The doctor who is apparently even more limited doesn't recognize or doesn't care about Ed's problems and tries to label him as prime military material.

At this point Sir Edmund Pridham intervenes and Ed is spared something that could easily have been the end of him both physically and mentally. One got me about this was not what happened, but how Thirkell describes Ed and those like him. She notes that Sir Edmund "took an immense pride in all country idiots," protecting them against harm because he regards "them on the whole as part of our National Heritage (as indeed they are.)" This is followed by several more paeans to village idiots - the language is incredibly blunt and judgemental, something that would never be accepted today. The bluntness is even more shocking given the understated, almost non-verbal communication used by many of the characters in Thirkell's novels.

Yet in spite of the blunt, cruel words, there is a caring here for people like Ed that is quite touching. Sir Edmund has no official position in all of this, he is simply a leader in the county and takes personal responsibility for a group that it would be quite easy for him and others to ignore. This just reinforces my belief that there is a lot more depth to Thirkell's work than meets the eye - the stories are not just light hearted satires on the middle and upper classes with too much money and too little to do. I still have a long way to go to finish all of her books, when I do, I plan to read some criticism of her work that I think shares this idea - that the books can be ready at several levels.