The Role of "Senex" in Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy

The Role of "Senex" in Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy Joost Daalder In the edition of The Spanish Tragedy prepared by Philip Edwards for the Revels Plays series, Act III, Scene xiii introduces a new character into the play who is called an "Old Man" when he is first referred to in the stage direction after line 50: "Enter three Citizens and an Old Man." But, somewhat surprisingly , afterwards he is styled "Senex" and "Bazulto." Edwards comments: "There is some inconsistency in referring to characters . Balthazar is Balthazar or Prince. Castile is The Duke of Castile, Castile, Don Cyprian, the Duke. Page becomes Boy. In Ill.xiii, an Old Man enters, who is Senex in the speech-headings and is referred to in a stage-direction as Bazulto. These variations would hardly be tolerable in a prompt-book."1 Edwards sees the variations as likely to be authorial, and in this I agree with him. But I think we may well ponder why they occur. Balthazar is the only Prince in the play, so the two denominations are in fact interchangeable. No confusion is possible, and no significance seems to be attached to either label as distinct from the other. Similar reasonings appear to be applicable in the case of the Duke of Castile, who can quite logically be referred to as either "Castile" or "the Duke," and who merely happens to have the more "personal" name of "Don Cyprian" as well. There does seem to be a connection between the first stage direction and what the character is called afterwards. Thus the first stage direction to I.ii has "Enter Spanish KING, GENERAL , CASTILE, HIERONIMO," and "Castile" is "Cast." in JOOST DAALDER is Reader in English at the Flinders University of South Australia . He is editor of Sir Thomas Wyatt: Collected Poems (London: Oxford University Press, 1975) and of Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Thyestes (published by Benn in London and Norton in New York, 1982) and has published widely on Renaissance literature. 247 248Comparative Drama the first speech heading applicable to him, while the King calls him "brother of Castile" in line 15. But in Il.iii the stage direction calls him "Don Cyprian," and, although the King again calls him "Brother of Castile" in line 1 , he refers to him as "our brother here, Don Cyprian" in this scene's fifteenth line. An explanation may well be that the name "Don Cyprian" was needed for metrical reasons and that, having used this designation , Kyd remembered it when he inserted the first stage direction (introducing the characters needed on stage). But in any case the fact that the Duke of Castile is referred to in more than one way is surely without significance, and we would be clutching at straws if we tried to differentiate between a "page" and a "boy." Even so, if "Don Cyprian" was used for metrical convenience , there was a reason for the name, and Kyd's introduction of it would then not be entirely arbitrary. Likewise, we must keep open the possibility that there was a yet more important cause for employing the name "Don Cyprian," although we do not appear to have discovered it as yet. And I do think that Kyd, in his own mind at least, did not confuse the designations "Old Man," "Senex," and "Bazulto." "Bazulto" does not, as far as I can work out, actually mean anything. The importance of the name rather lies in the fact that it is a name, so that "Bazulto" personalizes the character while "Old Man" or "Senex" does not. We need to distinguish also between, say, the Duke of Castile on the one hand and the "Old Man" on the other as different dramatic identities. The Duke is a character, while the Old Man is traditionally an anonymous figure, usually presented as someone (hardly individualized ) with considerable moral authority because of his age. In English literature, the Old Man in Chaucer's The Pardoner's Tale is an example, as is the Old Man in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. To point at this traditional conception of an "Old Man" is not to deny that such a figure may well be seen as capable of...