The Undemanding Dead: Fantasy and Trauma in The Spanish Tragedy and Post-Reformation Revenge Drama

He shrieks; I heard, and yet methinks I hearHis dismal outcry echo in the air.

—Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy¹

By now it is a critical commonplace that early modern English revenge tragedy is profoundly marked by the schisms of the Reformation, its melancholy revengers the representatives in extremis of a social body compelled to remember its dead but deprived of legitimized ways in which to do so.² As social and religious historians have shown, the Protestant rejection of Purgatory and the abolition of the intercessory system that had provided prayers and masses for the deceased fundamentally altered the relationship between the living and the dead by denying the possibility of communion across death's barrier. At the same time, however, as Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall note, "a recognition of the reciprocal bonds between present and past generations was too deep-rooted in popular consciousness to be easily eradicated," Protestant doctrine notwithstanding.³ Literary critics have long seen revenge tragedy as a genre uniquely responsive to the sense of cultural loss attendant on the newly-opened rift between the community of the living and the dead, as well as to the pressures and anxieties generated in its wake.⁴ Since Stephen Greenblatt's influential Hamlet in Purgatory, critics have increasingly explored the ways in which these plays also assume and perpetuate the survival, in some form, of traditional, pre-Reformation beliefs about the dead. Although few might go so far as Thomas Rist's assertion that revenge tragedies are "a surviving expression of Catholic culture in the officially, but not yet completely, Reformed England," a consensus has emerged that the genre attests to continuities across the fault lines of the Reformation and calls into question the Protestant position on the dead, thereby exposing the weak spots of Protestant ideology and undermining its hegemonic aspirations more generally.⁵

Foremost among the ways in which revenge tragedy challenges Reformed beliefs is the ghost's demand for revenge, or what Hamlet calls its "dread command."⁶ No trope more vividly suggests the enduring investment of the dead in the actions of the living, or the ongoing obligation of the living to the dead, than the spectral complaint for vengeance.⁷ Nor could there be a more apt signifier of the return of all the Reformation repressed than Hamlet's complaining ghost, the very figure invoked both in Sigmund Freud's essay on the uncanny and in Jacques Derrida's reflections on spectrality.⁸ It is not surprising, then, that the ghost who returns to demand vengeance in early modern revenge plays has been almost reflexively interpreted as an agent of disruption, a sign of trouble. For critics who see revenge tragedy as a genre that gives the lie to the success of Protestant ideology, the stock figure of the complaining ghost not only suggests the lingering presence of the dead in the post-Reformation cultural imagination, but also limns a time out of joint, a historical present haunted by its unfinished and traumatic past.⁹ Thus Paul A. Kottman writes of Hamlet that "the appearance of the ghost signals some eruption between past and future, the insistent return of what should be over and done."¹⁰

This essay, too, reads revenge tragedy as a cultural form shaped by the trauma of the Reformation, approaching its narratives of loss as indexical representations of the wound suffered by the social body.¹¹ But it argues that the genre's mediation of that trauma, particularly as focalized through the twinned figures of the complaining ghost and the spectral complaint, looks strikingly different when approached through Hamlet's theatrical predecessor, Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy—a play that, as I will show, treats both the ghost and the complaint for vengeance as the stuff of fantasy, rather than signs of an otherwise unspeakable truth. First performed in the mid-to-late 1580s and considered to be the earliest extant English revenge tragedy, The Spanish Tragedy was also among the first plays to adapt the Senecan trope of the complaining ghost for the...