English Renaissance Drama and the Specter of Spain: Ethnopoetics and Empire

THREE: Thomas Kyd's Tragedy of "the Spains"

c h a p t e r t h r e e Thomas Kyd’s Tragedy of “the Spains” For heresie and Schisme, were the Greeke Emperours discharged, and the Empire thereby trãslated to the Germans . . . now our holy father Sixtus the fifte . . . therefore hathe specially intreated Philip the highe and mightie Kinge Catholike of Spaine . . . for his singular love towardes that nation whereof by marriage of Holie Queene Marie of blessed memorie he was once king, for the olde love and league betwixt said cuntrie and the house of Burgogne, for the infinite injuries and dishonours done to his maiestie and people by Elizabethe, and to conclude for his speciall pietie and zeale towards Gods house and the see Apostolicke . . . wold take upon him in the name of God almighty, this sacred and glorious enterprise. —William Allen, “Englishman,” 1588 Declare among the nations, and publish it, and set up a standart, proclaim it and conceale it not: say, Babel is taken, Bel is confounded, Merodach is broken down: her idoles are confounded and their images are burnt in pieces. —Jeremiah 50:2, Geneva translation For an Historiographer discourseth of affayres orderly as they were done, accounting as well the times and the actions, but a Poet thrusteth into the middest, even where it most concerneth him, and there recoursing to thinges forepaste, and divining of thinges to come, maketh a pleasing Analysis of all. —Edmund Spenser to Walter Raleigh, 23 January 1589 68 chapter three Philip ii’s assumption of the Portuguese throne in 1580 sent shockwaves through a Europe embroiled in a military and ideological struggle that would not exhaust itself until well into the next century. Suddenly, the balance of power had swung, perhaps decisively, in the direction of the Spanish Hapsburgs and their allies. The English and the French especially feared what a united Iberia might be able to accomplish, which accounts for their uncharacteristic cooperation in the attempt to prop up the “native” pretender, Dom Antonio of Avis, the Prior of Crato, in his rather futile attempts to claim the Portuguese crown for himself.1 The annexation of Portugal and its overseas possessions to the Spanish Empire in 1580 precipitated something on the order of a structural shift. “For the sudden extension of Philip’s realms,” as Fernand Braudel wrote, “raised the question of control of the Atlantic. Whether consciously or unconsciously, Philip’s composite empire by force of circumstance became centered on the Atlantic, that vital sea connecting his many dominions, the base of the claims to what was known even in Philip II’s lifetime, as his ‘Universal Monarchy.’”2 In the face of this strategic windfall—brought on by the death of the Portuguese king Sebastian I in the Battle of the Three Kings, famously memorialized by George Peele in The Battell of Alcazar (c. 1589)3 —the public sphere of early print swelled with equal parts envy and dread at the prospect of an Iberia unified as the empire of “the Spains,” even as the promoters of the Black Legend began to construct Portugal as yet another victim of Spanish tyranny. In Iberia, of course, the prospect of unification signified quite differently. As Fray Hernando del Castillo had counseled Philip II, “Uniting the kingdoms of Portugal and Castile will make Your Majesty the greatest king in the world . . . because if the Romans were able to rule the world simply by ruling the Mediterranean , what of the man who rules the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, since they surround the world? . . . The gain or loss [of Portugal] will mean the gain or loss of the world.”4 It is in this milieu that we should place The Spanish Tragedy, probably the first English drama to face the Portuguese incorporation head on and to grapple with its historical complexity.5 Absent this cultural development, neither the “glorious enterprise,” as the Hispanized Cardinal William Allen dubbed the Armada crusade, nor Thomas Kyd’s singular drama would have been thinkable.6 Like the signal event of 1588 itself, the problems Kyd stages are the consequence of an encompassing cultural watershed. When we approach The Spanish Tragedy in a manner less dependent upon our often anachronistic sense of how fully the national cultures of early modernity had constituted themselves7 —that is, internationally—it seems clear that the play neither alludes specifically to contemporary events nor simply Thomas Kyd’s...