Oeconomia and The Vegetative Soul Rethin

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CHRISTOPHER CROSBIE
Oeconomia and the Vegetative Soul: Rethinking

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L Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy as arising from the class antagon-
isms between its central players. Locating Hieronimo and Horatio as
members of the “middling sort,” a category roughly tantamount to the
middle class, Kyd sets the Knight Marshal and his son in conflict with an
entrenched aristocracy jealous to retain its own privileged insularity. But
Kyd also imagines his protagonists collectively as an ambitious house-
hold, a fact only glanced at in existing criticism, and presents their success
as informed by prudent oeconomia, or household management.1 Shrewd
oeconomia enables the middling sort to advance their station in life, but it also,
when particularly successful, leads to the higher strata of the middling
sort pressing against (and threatening to unsettle) aristocratic prerogative.
Kyd’s interest in the workings of oeconomia is evinced both here and in
his translation of Torquato Tasso’s Padre di famiglia, or The Householder’s
Philosophy. As suggested by his translation’s title, Kyd attends to the
philosophic predicates of oeconomia, and the class conflicts in The Spanish
Tragedy have, as it were, deeper roots than we have previously understood.
Perhaps most astonishing is how the Aristotelian tripartite soul permeates
Kyd’s drama and shapes the oeconomia that gives rise to the play’s central
tensions. Cartesian dualism ostensibly simplified matters by subsuming
the soul’s lesser capacities within a mechanistic materialism, but Kyd’s
contemporaries imagined a more variegated psychology.2 The Aristotelian
1. For a detailed inquiry into the classical etymology and usage of “oeconomia,” see Kurt
Singer, “Oikonomia: An Inquiry into Beginnings of Economic Thought and Language,” in Aristotle:
(384 –322 BC), ed. Mark Blaug (Brookfield, Vt., 1991), pp. 74–102.
2. Here and throughout, I employ “psychology” to denote the pre- and early modern study
not of the mind but more specifically the soul, or psuchê.
3
© 2008 English Literary Renaissance Inc. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road,
Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
4 English Literary Renaissance
tripartite soul, comprised not only of the rational and animal faculties but
also the vegetative, provided the prevailing psychological paradigm for
late sixteenth-century England. The vegetative faculty governed all
reproduction, nutrition, and growth; it was the essential component, quite
literally the sine qua non, of all life.3 As the source of all development and
growth, the vegetative principle—or, as Kyd renders it in The House-
holder’s Philosophy, the “faculty of getting”—represents for Kyd both
metaphysical reality and social possibility. By presenting ambition, the
latent desire for growth and advancement, as the natural product of a
human psychology informed by Aristotle, Kyd reveals both the artificiality
of socially-constructed class hierarchy and a legitimized rationale for
middling aspiration. More significantly, however, he imaginatively depicts
revenge as not simply irrationally brutish, or, conversely, highly calcula-
tive, but also as instinctively reproductive, a mode of production that
functions as an outlet for thwarted material fecundity.
Kyd situates Hieronimo and Horatio as rising members of the
“middling sort,” marking them as outside the aristocratic echelon their
innate ambition prompts them to challenge.4 Keith Wrightson observes
that “from the last third of the sixteenth century . . . a specific vocabulary
of informal social description emerges into prominence, a set of terms
called the language of ‘sorts’ . . . [that] appears primarily to express an
essentially dichotomous perception of society.” 5 This method of
articulating a “dichotomous perception of society” provides definition
by contrast, identifying the middling sort not only by revealing who they
are but more often indicating who they are not. “Though not a middle class,
but like the middle class,” Theodore B. Leinwand argues, “they make it easier
for us to determine with whom they did or did not identify than with
3.“There is no living object,” says Aristotle, “that can possess sensitive capacities without
having this capacity for growth which plants display.” Aristotle’s Psychology in Greek and English,
ed. Edwin Wallace (1882; rpt., New York, 1976), 1.5.411b 27 –30.
4. See Christopher Brooks, “Apprenticeship, Social Mobility, and the Middling Sort, 1550 –
1800,” in The Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society, and Politics in England, 1550 –1800, ed.
Jonathan Barry and Christopher Brooks (New York, 1994), pp. 52–83, esp. pp. 52–62, 78–81.
For the middling sort’s relation to other social strata in Kyd’s era, see also Christopher Brooks,
“Professions, Ideology and the Middling Sort in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth
Centuries,” in The Middling Sort of People, pp. 113–40; Ian Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social
Relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge, Eng., 1991), esp. pp. 49–57; and D. C. Coleman, The
Economy in England: 1450 –1750 (Oxford, 1977), esp. pp. 1–11.
5. Keith Wrightson, “ ‘Sorts of People’ in Tudor and Stuart England,” in The Middling Sort of
People, pp. 44 – 46.
© 2008 English Literary Renaissance Inc.

Christopher Crosbie 5
what.”6 Writing before Wrightson and Leinwand, C. L. Barber identifies
Hieronimo and Horatio as belonging to what we might now recognize
as this “middling sort.” Hieronimo, Barber argues, has “a very clearly-
defined social position that makes him an appropriate figure for a
middle-class London audience to identify with. He is not a member of the
high nobility but a high civil servant.”7 He is, therefore, “the sort of man
Kyd would look up to, himself the son of a scrivener, and a client of a
noble family who respected learning” (p. 136). Barber anticipates
Wrightson and Leinwand here, arriving at this “clear” delineation by
setting Hieronimo against “the high nobility,” a category into which he
clearly does not fit.
Kyd imagines the play’s central conflicts as occurring not simply
between the aristocracy and a middling individual, however, but as
between the aristocracy and a middling household, figuring, therefore, the
frustrations to social advancement wrought by Lorenzo as denying the
very progress invited by the discourses of oeconomia. Barber adumbrates
without further explication this subtext when he argues the King thinks
of Hieronimo and Horatio “as a ‘house’; the ransom [for Balthazar] is the
kind of reward which could make a substantial difference to their
fortunes” (p. 139). Discussing the “social division and contention [that]
pervades Kyd’s play,” James Siemon more thoroughly examines the
limitations of father and son as indicative of their conjoined plight, rooted
in their shared social stratum: “Hieronimo himself, of unmentioned
antecedents and doubtful finances, occupies a house too small for the
captured Portuguese train, and appears to be the only major character
with a career and the accompanying daily professional responsibilities
that must be followed whether he will or no. While his own success in
rising from petty correigedor to Knight Marshall may suggest the
openness of the Spanish court to the talented individual, the fate of his
son Horatio reveals both of them to be caught in the structural inequities
of court life.”8 Despite their particular individual circumstances,
Hieronimo and Horatio together occupy a frustrating middling space,
existing with Isabella as a household limited in means yet possessing
6. Theodore B. Leinwand, “Shakespeare and the Middling Sort,” Shakespeare Quarterly 44

(1993), 292.
7. C. L. Barber, Creating Elizabethan Tragedy: The Theater of Marlowe and Kyd, ed. Richard P.
Wheeler (Chicago, 1988), p. 135.
8. James R. Siemon, “Sporting Kyd,” English Literary Renaissance 24 (1994), 556.

desire for advancement. Rising and talented yet daily laboring and
occupying “a house too small” for the captured Portuguese prince, the
protagonists may be ambitious, but they have also become functionally
static, lacking the promise of any additional advance beyond their
present condition. This, it would seem, is the particular dilemma of
middling success, but such a situation becomes especially acute for
Hieronimo and Isabella once Horatio is killed, a scenario the third
addition of the 1602 quarto further develops when Hieronimo describes
Horatio as “the very arm that did hold up our house. / Our hopes were
storèd up in him” (32–33). Hieronimo, Isabella, and Horatio together
dramatize the challenges of holding up one’s house, of seeking future
advancement through prudent management in an uncongenial environ-
ment. With “the ethic of household management, or oeconomia, newly
popular with the ‘middling sort’ of the population,” 9 The Spanish Tragedy
draws on a discursive field familiar to its audience but, notably, depicts
oeconomia as useful only to a point, as the promise of social advancement
remains starkly delimited by existing social hierarchies.
ii
Kyd’s The Householder’s Philosophy, his 1588 translation of Torquato
Tasso’s minor treatise Padre di famiglia, reveals both his interest in oeconomia
and his understanding of society as shaped by class antagonism, as fraught
with the social stratification that is and the social mobility that could, in
theory, be.10 Prominent among domestic management manuals of the
late sixteenth century, Tasso’s treatise is a “humanistic work outlining
9. Wendy Wall, Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama
(Cambridge, Eng., 2002), p. 5. For the prevalence of popular oeconomic discourses, see also Viviana
Comensoli, ‘Household Business’: Domestic Plays of Early Modern England (Toronto, 1996), esp. pp.
65–109. On the importance of oeconomia in pre-Elizabethan England, see Keith Wrightson, Earthly
Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (New Haven, 2000), esp. pp. 27 –112; on the
social changes and tensions wrought on the household in the years 1520 –1580, see pp. 132 –58.
See also Lena Cowen Orlin, Private Matters and Public Culture in Post-Reformation England (Ithaca,
1994), esp. pp. 86– 91.
10. For a concise introduction to The Householder’s Philosophy, including the possible pecuni-
ary circumstances attending its creation, see Arthur Freeman, Thomas Kyd: Facts and Problems
(Oxford, 1967), pp. 170– 74. See also F. S. Boas, The Works of Thomas Kyd (Oxford, 1901), pp.
xviii–xxii, lxii–lxiv. Boas includes a brief portrait of the class antagonisms provoked by Kyd’s
literary endeavors, particularly from Thomas Nashe. Nashe complains of those who “leave the
trade of Noverint, whereunto they were borne, and busie themselves with the indevors of art,”
finally categorizing such an author as Kyd as a “home-born mediocritie” (pp. xix-xx).

the universal principles of cosmic ordering underlying metaphysical and
material worlds rather than detailing pragmatic tasks.” 11 The emphasis on
“universal principles of cosmic ordering” rather than “pragmatic tasks”
situates the focus of the treatise outward rather than inward, on the world
external to the home despite the ostensible focus on the household itself.
But the treatise is no mere recitation of abstract philosophy. Rather,
Kyd’s translation reveals a distinct concern with the concrete realities of
social stratification, particularly the economic disparities that both
impinge on and yet define one’s household. While Kyd’s subtitle may
promise he will “perfectly and profitably” put forward “the true oeconomia
and forme of housekeeping,” it does not promise an exact rendering of
Tasso’s original. Kyd’s deviations from the original text signal an
authorial bias toward a more equitable system where merit, not privilege,
governs. The railings against usury, for example, stem entirely from
Kyd’s own additions and seem to reflect his distaste for oppressive
economies.12 The translation may be stylistically uneven, but Kyd con-
sistently makes the case that lack of “clothing, purse, or birth need not
preclude true nobility, which should be measured by richness of action,
comeliness, utterance, judgment, and argument—as if such capacities
might arise like Horatio’s virtues independently of social and material
conditions.”13 The “universal principles of cosmic ordering” of Kyd’s
translation, then, pertain directly to the distinctly fiscal, or material, dif-
ferentiations between society’s strata. For while Kyd imagines these
material differentiations separately from his definition of true “nobility,”
he nonetheless, by doing so, depicts the inherent capacities for self-
improvement as continually set against the material advantages of
the recognized “nobility” of the real, rather than theoretical, world.
The society Kyd inhabits, the one he reflects in his translation of The
Householder’s Philosophy, and the one he creates in The Spanish Tragedy
are all ordered by the dialectic implied in this contrast between privilege
and merit, between entrenched power and laboring aspirants. Indeed,
since Kyd thinks of the capacities for self-improvement as arising
“independently of social and material conditions,” it is worth asking
from where such capacities derive.
11. Wall, p. 35.

12. Boas, pp. lxiii–lxiv. See also Lukas Erne, Beyond The Spanish Tragedy: A Study of the
Works of Thomas Kyd (Manchester, 2001), esp. pp. 146 –50, 217 –20.
13. Siemon, p. 571.

The Aristotelianism still dominant in Kyd’s day and the Cartesian
dualism that would eventually supplant it differ significantly on this
point, and to understand The Spanish Tragedy, we must, therefore, look
past Descartes’ rejection of the vegetative soul to the Aristotelian concept
of a fundamental drive to self-perfection inherent to all living things.
In his survey of late Aristotelianism and the rise of Cartesian dualism,
Dennis Des Chene observes that “the divorce of the vegetative soul and
its functions from the sensitive and rational souls. . . . was effected by
Descartes.”14 He continues: “the operations of the Cartesian soul have no
intrinsic relation to nourishment, growth, or reproduction. Its sensations
and passions are. . . . ‘instituted’ by God so as to provide a guide to life.
. . . The Aristotelian soul, it would seem, requires no such institution.
. . . [T]he soul, by way of its vegetative part, is in the organs of generation,
and through its powers immediately acts on and is acted on by them”
(pp. 5 – 6). Indeed, Des Chene treats the removal of the vegetative soul as
one of the defining characteristics of Cartesian psychology. For Descartes
“insists upon sensation and passion as evidence of the strongest sort for
the ‘intimate union’ of soul and body. . . . The result is that thought is
severed only from the vegetative functions, not the sensitive” (p. 169,
emphasis mine). In Kyd’s England, however, the vegetative capacity had
yet to be severed from the soul’s functions. Fundamental to all life, the
vegetative soul had “three powers: nutrition, growth (or augmentation),
and generation.”15 The concept of growth as being a type of augmenta-
tion itself derives from Aristotle’s idea that “self-change” is the “one
criterion for being alive” and that “spontaneous movement directed to
self-perfection is characteristic of life.” (Des Chene, p. 55) As Francisco
Suarez observes, non-living things do not act “so as to acquire what is
needed to perfect themselves” whereas “living things are those that have
this power of moving and perfecting themselves by virtue of something
intrinsic.”16 Thus, Aristotelian writers argue that even plants, which
lack “sense and locomotion,” still “live and have souls,” since they move
14. Dennis Des Chene, Life’s Form: Late Aristotelian Conceptions of the Soul (Ithaca, 2000), p. 5.
15. Des Chene, p. 134. See also Philip J. van der Eijk, “Aristotle’s Psycho-physiological
Account of the Soul-Body Relationship,” in Psyche and Soma: Physicians and Metaphysicians on the
Mind-Body Problem from Antiquity to the Enlightenment, ed. Paul J. Wright and Paul Potter (Oxford,
2000), esp. pp. 64–66.
16. Quoted in Des Chene, p. 55. See also Edwin Wallace, “Introduction,” Aristotle’s Psychology,
pp. xxxix–lvi.

(even if imperceptibly) as they reproduce, attain nourishment, and grow
(Des Chene, p. 57). Though the function occurs more subtly in plants,
the vegetative soul operates in all life, and its hallmark is this fundamental
instinct toward self-perfection.17
The concept of the soul’s latent drive toward growth (and advance-
ment or self-improvement) found frequent expression in early modern
literature. While some authors briefly glance at the vegetative function,
others give it extended treatment. Marlowe’s Tamburlaine hints at this
psychology in his most famous lines: “Nature that fram’d us of foure
Elements. . . . Doth teach us all to have aspyring minds: / Our soules,
whose faculties can comprehend / The wondrous Architecture of the
world. . . . / Wils us to weare our selves and never rest, / Untill we reach
the ripest fruit of all, / That perfect blisse and sole felicitie, / The sweet
fruition of an earthly crowne” (2.7.18–21, 26–29). 18 The language of
comprehending the world immediately places emphasis on the soul’s
higher capacity for reason. But Tamburlaine points to the very elemental
composition of our framing, figures his ambition as rooted in the multiple
“faculties” of his soul, and imagines the apogee of his success as reaching
“the ripest fruit of all. . . . the sweet fruition of an earthy crowne.”19
Theridamas echoes this ambition, invoking the language of “sorts,”
when he compares the socially immobile, un-ambitious person to the
non-living, dense materials of the earth: “he is gross and like the massy
earth / That moves not upwards nor by princely deeds / Doth mean to
soar above the highest sort” (31–33). A few decades later but obviously
still within a pre-Cartesian context, Marvell will likewise describe his
own version of imperial ambition in “To His Coy Mistress,” by declaring
“My vegetable love should grow / Vaster than empires, and more slow”
17. Rosamond Kent Sprague explains the (perhaps startling) fact that for Aristotle, “plants as
well as animals are interested in eternity,” have in a sense “aspiration,” and, “like other Aristote-
lian entities, are controlled by teleology.” “Plants as Aristotelian Substances,” in Aristotle: Critical
Assessments, II, ed. Lloyd P. Gerson (New York, 1999), p. 362.
18. Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine: Parts One and Two, ed. Anthony Dawson (New York,
1997).
19. Aristotle’s critique of Empedocles is particularly relevant here. In assessing Empedocles’
depiction of the elemental construction of plants, Aristotle counters, “Besides, the question rises,
what is it that combines the elements such as fire and earth when carried in opposite directions.
They will be pulled asunder, if there be not something to prevent it, and if there be, then this
something is the soul and the cause of growth and nourishment.” Aristotle’s Psychology, 2.4.416a
6 – 8.

(ll.11–12).20 But perhaps the most salient literary reflections on the
vegetative soul and its role in growth and development may be found in
John Davies’ “Of the Soule of Men, and the Immortalitie thereof.”
Entered in the Stationers’ Register in 1599, Davies’ poem meditates on
the “effects diversified” of the soul, beginning with what the marginal
gloss terms its “vegetative or quickening power” (l.936). 21 What is more,
Davies explicitly charts the relationship between the soul’s vegetative
function and oeconomia:
Her quickning power in every living part
Doth as a Nurse, or as a Mother serve;
And doth employ her Oeconomicke Art,
And busie care, her houshold to preserve.
....
This power to Martha may compared bee,
Which busie was the household things to do;
Or to a Dryas living in a Tree,
For even to Trees this power is proper too. (ll.937–40, 945–48)
Significantly, in Davies’ poem the vegetative soul functions as Nurse or
Mother and employs her “Oeconomicke Art” entirely for the purpose of
preserving her household. Davies makes explicit the common understanding
that reproduction, nutrition, and growth are, logically, the essence of
preservation; the vegetative soul gives rise to oeconomia, and it is through
oeconomia that one preserves the household. Thus Davies moves the
reader from Martha, symbolic of busy activity, to a Dryas, the very
animating essence of the tree. Davies invokes the Dryas to reveal that
trees, too, have this vegetative faculty. But the image also simultaneously
emphasizes oeconomia not simply as an activity but also as the latent
20. Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress,” Andrew Marvell: The Complete Poems, ed.
Elizabeth Story Donno (New York, 1987), pp. 50–51. See also Patrick G. Hogan, “Marvell’s
Vegetable Love,” Studies in Philology 60.1 (1963), 1–11, and Jules Brody, “The Resurrection of
the Body: A New Reading of Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress,” ELH 56 (1989), 53– 79. Brody takes
issue with such “valuing privileged information” as Aristotelian psychology but nonetheless
allows that “vegetable” here carries Aristotelian connotations. Indeed, Brody’s emphasis on
“incessant, unrestrained sprawl” (p. 54) accords well with traditional readings of the lines; see esp.
pp. 53–61.
21. Sir John Davies, “Of the Soule of Man, and the Immortalitie thereof,” The Poems of Sir
John Davies, ed. Robert Kruger (Oxford, 1975). See also Elias Hershey Sneath, Philosophy in
Poetry: A Study of Sir John Davies’s Poem “Nosce Teipsum,” (Freeport, New York, 1903).

essence of survival, of remaining alive and, ideally, thriving in an often
inhospitable world.
The vegetative faculty likewise informs Tasso’s original treatise on
oeconomia, and Kyd’s translation depicts this latent, instinctive drive
toward advancement in his translation as “the faculty of getting,” a render-
ing that further suggests his work as interested in social delineation
and class antagonism. Kyd’s translation notes that: “The facultie of
getting may be Natural and not Naturall: Natural I call that which getteth
the living out of those thinges that hath beene brought forth by Nature
for mans use and service: and forasmuch as nothing is more naturall then
nourishment, which the Mother giveth to her Childe, most naturall
above the rest must that gayne needes be that is had and raised of the
fruits of the earth, considering that the Earth is the naturall and universall
Mother of us all.”22 Similar to Davies describing the vegetative soul “as a
Nurse or as a Mother,” Kyd’s explication of the “faculty of getting”
depicts the earth as “the naturall and universall Mother of us all.” Unlike
Theridamas, who emphasized the nonliving, dense materials of the earth
to symbolize the un-ambitious, Kyd stresses the earth’s fecundity, con-
necting it to the “faculty of getting” designated for increase and growth
(for “nothing is more natural than nourishment”) and figuring it as vege-
tative (“for most naturall,” therefore, are the gains derived “of the fruits
of the earth”). What in Aristotle is simple nutrition and “nourishment”
becomes glossed in The Householder’s Philosophy as a process whereby one
“getteth the living” by way of nature for “mans use and service” in order
to acquire “gayne.”23 The Householder’s Philosophy is thus informed by
both the Aristotelian vegetative soul and the material, economic concerns
of the middling sort regarding self-preservation. When Jonathan Barry
observes that “the middling sort defined themselves in relation to
households, which often formed the heart of the trading unit. . . . but
also acted as the key unit for the reproduction and security of the
22. Thomas Kyd, The Housholders Philosophie: Wherein is perfectly and profitably described, the true
oeconomia and forme of housekeeping (1588). Rpt. in The Works of Thomas Kyd, ed. F. S. Boas
(Oxford, 1901), p. 275.
23. Even Kyd’s reference to a possible “faculty of getting” that is “unnaturall” signals he has
the vegetative faculty in mind—even though the vegetative faculty is, arguably, the most natural
of substances. For he explains that this “unnaturall” getting (such as usury) is unnatural precisely
because it has “not onely beene condemned by Aristotle, but [also] utterly inhibited by the olde
and new law” (p. 282). “The Usurer,” Kyd’s translation continues, “offendeth Nature, for it is
not naturall that money should beget money or bring forth money without corruption, since
Nature willeth that the corruption of one bee the generation of another” (p. 287).

family,”24 he is noting something that Kyd’s contemporaries would have
thought of as both a harsh social reality and a philosophical, metaphysical
truth as well.
iii
The Spanish Tragedy’s opening—with its subtle yet distinct assumption of
Aristotelian psychology and its ghost more preoccupied with locating
his former class position and cataloguing his successes than seeking
vengeance — suggests revenge not as the play’s raison d’être but as a vehicle
for its stymied middling protagonists to redirect their energies for
advancement into a darker register. Don Andrea enters and immediately
conflates his assessment of his soul’s condition with his social status at
court:
When this eternal substance of my soul
Did live imprisoned in my wanton flesh,
Each in their function serving other’s need,
I was a courtier in the Spanish court. (1.1.1–4)25
Don Andrea’s opening statement signals the play’s underlying psychology,
but the third line presents to the modern observer an apparent contradiction.
If Kyd figures the relationship between soul and body as antagonistic, as
one of prisoner to prison, then what need of the soul does the wanton
flesh serve? What benefits the captive from the prison? 26 The relationship
described in line three, so often misunderstood by modern readers, is not
between soul and flesh but between the soul’s various components: the
24. “Introduction,” Middling Sort, p. 2.

25. All quotations from the play come from Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, ed. David
Bevington (Manchester, 1996).
26. Steven Justice explains this line by arguing “A soul longs for its old prison only if it has
gone on to something worse, and wants again the earthly goods that have failed it.” “Spain, Tragedy,
and The Spanish Tragedy,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 25 (1985), 277. In contrast,
Eugene Hill rejects the idea of a tortured Andrea. Concurring with Howard Baker, Hill notes
that “Andrea bears no such burden” as the “terrified Tantalus,” and, indeed, “his tone of address in
the Induction, unlike Senecan horror, sounds almost jaunty.” “Senecan and Virgilian Perspectives
in The Spanish Tragedy,” English Literary Renaissance, 15 (1985), 145. Even Hill’s fine essay,
however, still leaves unresolved the problem of line three, noting that “we must. . . . imagine the
moment when the actor faced the Elizabethan audience and spoke with pride mingled with
perplexity” the play’s opening lines (p. 147). He concludes that these “pious hierarchical formulas
[of “eternal substance” and “wanton flesh”] are undermined by the asserted reciprocity of l.3”
(p. 148). See also Howard Baker, Induction to Tragedy: A Study in a Development of Form in Gorboduc,
The Spanish Tragedy, and Titus Andronicus (New York, 1939), pp. 117 –18.

construction here is elliptical. Prepared by “this eternal substance,” the
opening clause’s subject, and directed by the immediate invocation of
“function,” Kyd’s contemporaries almost certainly would have assumed
“each” as referring to the capacities intrinsic to the soul’s substance that
function cooperatively within the confines of the material body. Since
the soul’s capacities were often articulated as “functions” and, for the
human, all three capacities must perform cooperatively, 27 the audience
could be relied on to know just what must serve each other’s needs. What
registers as dissonant to us would have followed logically to Kyd’s
audience because of their shared assumptions vis a vis the psyche. At the
outset, then, Kyd signals not only that Don Andrea represents a dis-
embodied soul entering the stage but a soul particularly conceived within
an Aristotelian context. This, quite literally, introduces Don Andrea’s
announcement that he was as “a courtier in the Spanish court.”
Don Andrea frames the subsequent play not solely (or even primarily)
as an angry ghost seeking revenge but as the unsettled soul of a middling
courtier who exhibited a sharp awareness of class taxonomy, an innate
ambition for greater status, and a knack for working around societal
obstructions—until death foreclosed his natural progress, “nipped,”
as it were, “the blossoms of [his] bliss,” even during “the harvest of [his]
summer joys” (1.1.12–13). Interestingly, Don Andrea’s first seventeen
lines employ the definition-by-opposition and the aspiration for
advancement affiliated with the middling sort. Despite appearing with a
personified Revenge, he articulates no initial desire for vengeance but
rather obsesses over fixing in place his social rank for the audience.
Setting himself against those beneath his station and then against those
above him, Don Andrea describes his “descent, / though not ignoble,
yet inferior far / To gracious fortunes of my tender youth” (1.1.5– 7).
The litotes “not ignoble” positions him above the lower class but
“inferior far” to his promising start in life. Don Andrea likewise exhibits
an active “faculty of getting” for he “by duteous service and deserving
love, / In secret. . . . possessed a worthy dame” (1.1.9–10). Rapidly
undercutting any suggestion of humility implicit in acknowledging his
service as “duteous,” Don Andrea trumpets his love as “deserving,”
despite letting slip that his loving was done “in secret.” What is
more, Don Andrea makes clear the causal connection between both his
27. For the cooperative interaction between the soul’s three capacities, see James E. Phillips,
“The Tempest and the Renaissance Idea of Man,” Shakespeare Quarterly 15 (1964), 147–59.

“duteous service” and “deserving love” and his “possess[ing]” Bel-
Imperia, signaling at once his own sense of personal merit and his natural
inclination toward acquisitiveness across class lines. Ambitious in life and
unsettled in death, Don Andrea enters preoccupied with his status
and his worldly successes, yet he will subsequently shift his thoughts
toward revenge, eventually desiring it in ever-increasing measure, as
his acquisitive impulses find articulation through the ensuing play’s
promised catastrophe.
Don Andrea’s temporary release from Hades by Proserpine, the quasi-
numinous, vegetative, and motivating figure behind the play, seems
unsatisfactory as a solution to the underworld’s bureaucratic confusion
over his status in the afterlife. It makes sense, however, as a reimagined
movement of the aspiring soul into an alternative outlet for ambitious
energies, a means to bypass the circumscription wrought by external
forces. Don Andrea’s indeterminate status as lover-soldier prompts Aeacus
to assign him “to walk with lovers in our fields of love” and Rhadamanth
to counter “No, no. . . . it were not well / With loving souls to place a
martialist” (1.1.45– 4 6). After Minos forwards him to Pluto’s court, Don
Andrea himself articulates the social taxonomies of Hades in the language
of dichotomous opposition and “sorts.” He passes “the foresaid fields, /
Where lovers live, and bloody martialists, / But either sort contained
within his bounds” (1.1.60 – 63). As in life where neither noble nor
ignoble, Don Andrea is appropriate here for neither “sort.” Lovers and
martialists may be contained within their respective bounds, but Don
Andrea, as one who straddles the two categories, remains excluded from
both. When he approaches “Pluto with his Proserpine” (1.1.76) and
kneels, Proserpine becomes the prime mover of what will be the play.
For at the sight of Don Andrea, “fair Proserpine began to smile, / And
begged that only she might give my doom” (1.1.78 – 79). As Don Andrea
tells Revenge, “Forthwith. . . . she rounded thee in th’ear,” and “No
sooner had she spoke but we were here” (1.1.81, 84). Proserpine, the
daughter of Ceres who generates springtime fecundity and nourishment,
provides the impetus behind the soul of Don Andrea returning to earth
with Revenge by his side.28 Her release of Don Andrea’s soul “through
28. On Proserpine’s role here and its relation to the “mythologizing literalisation of the
seasonal cycle,” see Lisa Hopkins, “What’s Hercules to Hamlet? The Emblematic Garden in The
Spanish Tragedy and Hamlet,” Hamlet Studies 21 (1999), 118. See also Frank Ardolino, Thomas
Kyd’s Mystery Play: Myth and Ritual in The Spanish Tragedy (New York, 1985), pp. 75 –87.

the gates of horn, / Where dreams have passage in the silent night”
(1.1.82–83) frames the play as a dream vision reflective of Don Andrea’s
dual concerns of class stratification and social (im)mobility. Don Andrea’s
dream—that is, the body of The Spanish Tragedy—suggests his own
insatiable desire for increase, for he begins with no discernible inclination
toward revenge and concludes the play invoking eternal wrath upon
his enemies. The play’s framing, so often perceived as only loosely
connected to the drama’s central action, reveals revenge as the vehicle
through which stifled energies of self-autonomy and advancement find
darker expression.
iv
After the Induction, the play’s opening dispute over the captured
Balthazar pits middling against aristocratic, merit versus rank, but also
establishes Hieronimo and Horatio’s fortunes as inextricably intertwined
due to their shared middling household. The King tells Balthazar,
“Young prince, although thy father’s hard misdeeds. . . . Deserve but
evil measure at our hands, / Yet shalt thou know that Spain is honourable”
(1.2.134–37). A privilege extended to royalty, this severance of father
and son’s worth allows the Spanish King to treat Balthazar individually,
“for in our hearing thy deserts were great, / And in our sight thyself
are gracious” (1.2.149–50). Thus we have the paradox of aristocratic
privilege: on account of his birth Balthazar is afforded the right to be
evaluated on his own terms, in this case as one separate from his royal
father. Balthazar gets to receive kingly munificence freely, and then
exert himself afterwards: “I shall study to deserve this grace” (1.2.151).
This aristocratic privilege stands in marked contrast to the King’s con-
flation of Hieronimo and Horatio’s status and its continual dependence
upon performance. Identifying Hieronimo by his civil function, the
King addresses his first lines to him, “Knight Marshal, frolic with thy
king, / For ‘tis thy son that wins this battle’s prize” (1.2.96 – 97), and then
claims, “Hieronimo, it greatly pleaseth us / That in our victory thou
have a share, / By virtue of thy worthy son’s exploit” (1.2.124 – 26). To
make the linkage between father and son’s fortunes wholly unmistakable,
Kyd has the King reverse the trajectory of influence later when he
promises, “Content thee, Marshal, thou shalt have no wrong, / And for
thy sake thy son shall want no right” (1.2.173 – 75). When Hieronimo
angles for Horatio’s advancement, he is “enforced of nature. . . . to plead

for young Horatio’s right” (1.2.168) by affection but also by the
reality—articulated often by the King—that both their fortunes rise or
fall together. Hieronimo is thus “enforced of nature” by the imperatives,
to use Davies’ phraseology, of his “Oeconomicke art,” his “household to
preserve” (l. 940). This accounts for why the King reassures the Knight
Marshal that he, not Horatio, “shalt have no wrong” in the settlement of
Horatio’s dispute with Lorenzo.
Although the King presents his adjudication as according with the
claims of merit, the unequal, artificially constructed social positions—not
the martial exploits of Horatio and Lorenzo—influence significantly
the division of Balthazar’s ransom and goods. The King begins equitably
enough by noting “You both deserve and both shall have reward”
(1.2.179). He assigns horse and weapons to Lorenzo and ransom to
Horatio, mediating competing claims in a manner that leads some to think
him “generously mindful of his obligations to his subjects, painstakingly
judicious, and politically astute.”29 However, while Kyd may indeed
leave the King’s motives ambiguous, his actions remain unmistakably
shaped by the pressures of class competition. As the King concludes his
division of the goods, he turns to Lorenzo and explains:
But nephew, thou shalt have the prince in guard,
For thine estate best fitteth such a guest;
Horatio’s house were small for all his train.
Yet in regard thy substance passeth his,
And that just guerdon may befall desert,
To him we yield the armour of the prince. (1.2.185– 90)
Confronted with Horatio’s undeniable merit publicly displayed twice in
procession, the King must publicly assure that “just guerdon may befall
desert.” In contrast, however, Lorenzo receives the King’s generosity
freely, not by merit but because of his “estate.” Indeed, in awarding
Balthazar’s armor to Horatio, the Spanish King seems to dilute his praise
of the Knight Marshal’s son by linking the award, in part, to Lorenzo’s
possession of more wealth, of greater “substance.” The conflicting
ambitions of an established family and a rising one force the King to
strike an uneasy balance between a middling household and a privileged
aristocrat. Kyd gives us a court in which the success of civil servant and
29. James T. Henke, “Politics and Politicians in The Spanish Tragedy,” Studies in Philology 78
(1981), 354; see also pp. 355–59.

soldier encroaches on the honors distributed by rank—and vice versa.
Spain, it would seem, rests uneasily on the faultline running between
Hieronimo and Horatio’s house and Lorenzo’s estate. The King remains
diligently aware of this faultline for he tellingly concludes his mediation
by bypassing both Lorenzo and Horatio. Neither Lorenzo nor Horatio
is given a voice here, despite the fact that the adjudication centers on
their claims to honor. Instead, the King seeks affirmation for his decision
(perhaps because neither soldier, from his perspective, could be pleased
with it fully) from the subjected and powerless, yet nonetheless royal,
Balthazar: “How likes Don Balthazar of this device?” (1.2.191). Thus the
King publicly affects equanimity while still governing his decision by the
pressures of an arbitrary aristocratic privilege.
By threatening the royal Balthazar with subjugation to Horatio, Kyd
unsettles the justifications for class hierarchy by using the philosophical
predicates of oeconomia. The Householder’s Philosophy, for example,
addresses the delineation between master and servant and then shifts to
explain how the spoils of war should be divided. Tasso identifies a clear
hierarchy rooted in Nature when he explains that “it also seemes that
Nature hath engendred not onely bruite Beasts for the service of Man,
but hath framed men, that are apt to obey, to serve those whom also she
hath framed to command” (p. 276). It might seem that Tasso’s division
of men into two categories (namely, those “framed to commaund” and
those “apt to obey”) justifies class hierarchy, but he leaves indeterminate
just how, exactly, these two categories might be implemented socially.
Indeed, the very rootedness of this framing in Nature posits a distinct
egalitarian strain, for it ignores as irrelevant any material factors such as
wealth or status.30 Moreover, immediately after this delineation, Tasso
observes that “Whatsoever is gotten or obtained in the warres being just,
the same may also bee tearmed naturall gayne” (p. 276). As we have
already seen, The Householder’s Philosophy approvingly mentions “naturall
gayne,” citing its relation to the fundamental impulse of the “faculty of
getting.” Thus, Tasso tells us there are men apt to obey, men framed to
command, and the spoils of war may be deemed “naturall gayne,” the
acquisition wrought by the “faculty of getting.” Balthazar notes the
unsettling of social order made possible by just such a formulation later
in The Spanish Tragedy when he admits, “by my yielding I became
30. Thus we are earlier told that “hee that is borne to obey, were hee of Kings bloode, is
neverthelesse a servant, though he be not so reputed” (p. 262).

[Horatio’s] slave” (2.1.123). When Balthazar, one socially framed to
command, becomes the “naturall gayne” of Horatio, one socially framed
to serve, the aristocratic, royal system of privilege becomes threatened.
In Horatio’s defeat of Balthazar, natural merit quite literally unseats royal
status. The King, therefore, must point to Horatio’s inadequate household
and use Lorenzo’s estate to trump merit, returning things to their
“proper” (but, to Kyd, not necessarily natural) order. The King’s decision
underscores the artificiality of aristocratic privilege, for it eschews
Nature’s framing of Balthazar and Horatio in favor of their socially pre-
determined class positions.
Subsequent to this opening dispute, Kyd suggests Hieronimo’s house as
contiguous to, but not incorporated within, the aristocracy by emphasizing
it has a pleasure garden, transgressively marking it (beyond its actual status)
with aristocratic trappings. Kyd takes pains to establish Hieronimo’s
garden as one designed for pleasure, not utility. Bel-Imperia arranges
her rendezvous with Horatio to be in “thy father’s pleasant bower”
(2.2.42). Horatio states that since “in darkness pleasures may be done, /
Come, Bel-Imperia, let us to the bower; / And there in safety pass a
pleasant hour” (2.4.3–5). And Hieronimo himself declares in the recog-
nition scene, “This place was made for pleasure not for death” (2.5.12).
Hieronimo’s garden is paradoxically situated between labor and leisure,
then, as it supplies the otium wrought by negotium, even as it operates as
daily testimonial to the fruitfulness of Hieronimo’s labor. Attached to
Hieronimo’s middling household it functions as a semi-private (but,
therefore, semi-public) exhibition of his oeconomic facility and his exalted
status within the middling strata. Kyd’s notable emphasis on
Hieronimo’s garden as one for pleasure brings into sharper focus the
central class conflict of the play by materially marking, by way of the
vegetative trope, the Knight Marshal’s aspirations to the coterie that
actively excludes him.
By drawing on the pleasure garden topos for the most pronounced
moments of class antagonism, Kyd employs a potent image of status
differentiation. The garden took many forms in early modern English
society, but the pleasure garden only made its appearance in England in
the mid-sixteenth century and was a distinct marker of aristocratic leisure.
Delineating the types of gardens and their roles throughout Europe, A.
G. Morton notes that “the private garden. . . . became the fashion and
pride of Renaissance princes and wealthy families” and differed remarkably
from the medieval garden which was “essentially utilitarian in lay-out,

contents, and intention.”31 While such a link between the aristocracy
and the pleasure garden had a lengthy Continental history, the pleasure
garden’s ascendancy among the upper class in England took place in the
middle of the sixteenth century. Roy Strong painstakingly charts the
development of the English pleasure garden, noting that the most significant
development in Renaissance gardening after 1580 “was that the pleasure
garden became an essential adjunct of the great house.” 32 Strong
observes that “the earliest and longest description of an Elizabethan
pleasure garden comes in a letter by Robert Laneham narrating the
entertainments given by Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, for Queen
Elizabeth I in July 1575 at his castle at Kenilworth in Warwickshire” (p. 50).
At the time of The Spanish Tragedy, then, the pleasure garden figured as
a relatively recent marker of aristocratic status in England, a recreational
(and not simply functional) space for the well-to-do. 33
v
Kyd introduces the garden through Bel-Imperia, who seeks to use it, in
part, for her own transgressive rejection of hierarchical strictures, a
rejection prompted by her own restricted position and one that establishes
her variance with the men of her social class. As sister to Lorenzo and
daughter to the Duke of Castile, Bel-Imperia actively seeks to marry
downward a second time. Despite her previous union with Don Andrea,
however, her attraction down the social hierarchy seems unthinkable
among the aristocrats. Balthazar imagines his failure in wooing Bel-
Imperia as one of material worth, that his “presents are not of sufficient
cost, / And, being worthless, all [his] labour’s lost” (2.1.17–18). Con-
sequently, he envisions his noble status as possibly saving his cause, but
only momentarily: “Yet might she love me to uprear her state; / Ay, but
perhaps she hopes some nobler mate” (2.1.25–26). When Pedringano
finally reveals Horatio as her new love, Kyd adds a stage direction to
emphasize the shock, for “Balthazar starts back” (2.1.78 – 79). To be sure,
31. A. G. Morton, History of Botanical Science: An Account of the Development of Botany from
Ancient Times to the Present Day (New York, 1981), p. 151. See also Alicia Amherst, A History of
Gardening in England (London, 1896), pp. 109–10.
32. Roy C. Strong, The Renaissance Garden in England (London, 1979), p. 45.
33. Terry Comito observes that even “Elizabethan garden books . . . . claim—simply as part
of their practical intention—to extend such royalty [expressed by way of pleasure gardens] to
ordinary men, and to make such places their everyday habitation.” “Renaissance Gardens and the
Discovery of Paradise,” Journal of the History of Ideas 32 (1971), 501.

Balthazar lacks imagination, but even Lorenzo seems surprised, exclaim-
ing “What, Don Horatio, our Knight Marshal’s son?” (2.1.79). His
incredulous response reflects his disdain for this upstart middling civil
servant by shifting into the royal “our” and categorizing Horatio by his
father’s civil profession. Bel-Imperia’s active pursuit of Don Andrea,
then Horatio, confounds the aristocratic men who anticipate her looking
equal to, or above, her own station.
One might expect “the faculty of getting,” the impulse to preserve and
advance oneself by way of prudent management, would direct Bel-Imperia
into quite a different trajectory, toward someone who could “uprear her
state,” for example, or, at the very least, one who would maintain her
current status. To be sure, if Bel-Imperia appears too easily attracted
down the class hierarchy, it may well be the effect of Kyd’s own
middling perspective, the authorial fantasy of an accessible aristocratic
woman. But Bel-Imperia’s position within the play’s own milieu is itself
unique and accords well with the drive for reproduction, growth, and
nutrition. For as Bel-Imperia flouts the boundaries of such class divisions,
she also defies expectations of female complaisance. She expresses auton-
omous desire of a different sort, a self-determining ambition to resist a
forced union. Situated in aristocratic privilege yet in subjection as a
marriageable woman, Bel-Imperia repudiates the strictures imposed by both
father and brother. Instead, her impulses for growth and nourishment
shift toward autonomy rather than class escalation. 34 Her downward
selection of lovers remains an expression of ambitious growth precisely
because it is a selection. Building on Frank Whigham’s argument that
Bel-Imperia’s “sexual relations are certainly murderous, not literally of
her superiors, but of their sustaining ideology,” Ian McAdam notes that
she challenges “gender (and class) restrictions by refusing to allow her
father and uncle to use her as a valuable commodity in the royal marriage
market of Europe.” 35 When we remember the play is framed by the
34. Michael Henry Levin calls Bel-Imperia “a hot-headed individualist who delights in flouting
convention. . . . As Lorenzo’s sister, Bel-Imperia is under surveillance, and her actions are necessarily
limited, but she does everything in her power to gain redress . . . . and she does it immediately, instinctively,
without hesitation, doubt or fear.” “ ‘Vindicta mihi!’: Meaning, Morality, and Motivation in The
Spanish Tragedy,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 4 (1964), 318–19, emphasis mine. See
also Donald R. Wineke, “Hieronimo’s Garden and ‘the fall of Babylon’: Culture and Anarchy in
The Spanish Tragedy,” in Aeolian Harps: Essays in Literature in Honor of Maurice Browning Cramer, ed.
Donna G. Fricke and Douglas C. Fricke (Bowling Green, 1976), p. 68.
35. Ian McAdam, “The Spanish Tragedy and the Politico-Religious Unconscious,” Texas
Studies in Literature and Language 42 (2000), 45.

conscripted and circumscribed Proserpine, powerless against her
abduction and choiceless in her mate, the impulse of Bel-Imperia to
woo according to her own determination appears liberating, a “faculty
of getting” that acquires something beyond the scope of her established
lot. Indeed, as a secure aristocrat but entrapped woman, Bel-Imperia
has little else she needs to get other than freedom to act on her own
terms.
Bel-Imperia courts Horatio as both a means to acquire her autonomy
and a vehicle to advance her revenge, two types of “getting” that Kyd
imbues with images of preservation and, finally, vegetative growth.
Bel-Imperia easily conflates revenging Don Andrea and loving Horatio
in a remarkable synthesis of what would ordinarily seem contradictory,
conflicting impulses:
But how can love find harbour in my breast
Till I revenge the death of my beloved?
Yes, second love shall further my revenge.
I’ll love Horatio, my Andrea’s friend,
The more to spite the prince that wrought his end. (1.4.64– 68)
At this point in the play, we have only been promised Bel-Imperia’s

revenge on Balthazar (indeed, there is nothing else yet to revenge).
Significantly, Kyd links Bel-Imperia’s first articulation of revenge with
her first affirmation to love Horatio. The relationship between the
impulses to love and revenge in Bel-Imperia appears, therefore, symbiotic.
Revenge keeps love viable, enables love to “find harbour in [her]
breast.” And love, likewise, propels and sustains vengeance, for it shall
“further” revenge “the more to spite the prince that wrought [Andrea’s]
end.” The circular interplay of preservation or nourishment (of auton-
omy in love) and acquisition or advancement (of her vengeful designs)
creates in Bel-Imperia a nuanced expression of oeconomic principles. She
seeks to bring both love and revenge to fruition at the same time, and
Kyd immediately makes explicit the vegetative trope, the image of
cultivation, for each. For Bel-Imperia vows to use Horatio to spite
Balthazar to make the latter “reap long repentance for his murd’rous
deed” (1.4.72). And when Bel-Imperia drops her glove in front of Horatio
and Balthazar, the former retrieves it, observing, “I reaped more grace
than I deserved or hoped,” initiating the rivalry between the two men
(1.4.103). At the precise moment when Horatio “reaps” grace from Bel-
Imperia, Balthazar begins the process of “reap[ing] long repentance.” In

the language of harvesting, Kyd articulates Bel-Imperia’s dual projects of
preserving her autonomy and advancing her vengeful ambitions.
Shortly thereafter, as Horatio and Bel-Imperia approach the garden,
Bel-Imperia alone intuits danger, articulating her unease as a function of
her soul, a statement that will acquire additional resonance in the ensuing
scene as the conflicting ambitions of the two lovers become more apparent.36
Horatio invites her into the bower and she responds, “I follow thee, my
love, and will not back, / Although my fainting heart controls my
soul” (2.4.6 – 7). Lisa Hopkins has noted that there exists a “strategy. . . .
habitual to the play, of representing states of mind and character in terms
of physical location” (Hopkins, p. 117), and we see something of that
here on the threshold of the bower. Earlier, Bel-Imperia had appointed
the garden as meeting place but did so at court where she was closely
constrained and where the transgressive blurring of hierarchical strictures
figured in Hieronimo’s bower may well have appeared liberating. Now
entering the garden, she has misgivings, not about Pedringano (for “he is
as trusty as my second self ” [2.4.9]) but about something she leaves
unnamed. Bel-Imperia’s heart is fainting—hardly an adjective of power
or resolve—yet it controls her still more hesitant soul. Kyd leaves
indeterminate the precise source of Bel-Imperia’s misgivings, for though
she distrusts the court, she trusts Pedringano, who holds watch. Moreover,
Horatio anticipates “safety” in the bower (2.4.5). By muting direct
allusion to an impending danger from the court, Kyd opens the possibility
that Bel-Imperia hesitates for other reasons as well. The portrayal of this
unarticulated worry as affecting her soul while she physically enters the
arboreal space with her middling lover returns us to the possibility that
Bel-Imperia’s hesitancy is rooted, in part, in the conflicting aspirations of
the lovers inherent in this wooing process.
Bel-Imperia’s reactions to Horatio’s wooing reveal that her apprehen-
sions lie in the incompatibility of her project for autonomy and Horatio’s
project to acquire her. Tellingly, Bel-Imperia seems notably more com-
fortable figuring the courtship in martial terms and balks when Horatio
shifts into the language of acquisition mediated by vegetative imagery. In
a series of cantilevered syllogisms, Bel-Imperia deftly moves Horatio
away from birdsong to a counterfeiting Cupid, and then from Venus to
the martial dominance of Mars. She notes, “And where Mars reigneth
36. On the lovers’ variant motives, see Carol McGinnis Kay, “Deception Through Words: A
Reading of The Spanish Tragedy,” Studies in Philology 74 (1977), 25–27.

there must needs be wars” (2.4.35). Most at ease while acknowledging
the power dynamics of wooing, Bel-Imperia operates comfortably
within a discourse self-consciously allusive of tension and the pursuit of
supremacy. She demurs, however, with Horatio’s transition to more
pastoral rhetoric in which he envisions attaining mastery over her:
Horatio: Then thus begin our wars: put forth thy hand,
That it may combat with my ruder hand.
Bel-Imperia: Set forth thy foot to try the push of mine.
Horatio: But first my looks shall combat against thine.
Bel-Imperia: Then ward thyself. I dart this kiss at thee.
Horatio: Thus I retort the dart thou threw’st at me.
[They kiss.]
Bel-Imperia: Nay then, to gain the glory of the field,
My twining arms shall yoke and make thee yield.
Horatio: Nay then, my arms are large and strong withal;
Thus elms by vines are compassed till they fall.
Bel-Imperia: O, let me go, for in my troubled eyes
Now may’st thou read that life in passion dies. (2.4.42–49).
On one level, these may be playful lines spoken among lovers closing
the physical space between them. Here, the pushing of middling on
aristocratic takes on an amorous, erotic quality. Yet Kyd imbues the
language with more than sexual tension by highlighting the contest for
power implicit in this courtship. Bel-Imperia imagines her “gain” as the
product of her arms that “yoke” Horatio and “make [him] yield.” Horatio
twice invokes “combat,” the means by which he forced the King’s favor
(through his own “naturall gayne” of Balthazar) and won Bel-Imperia’s
notice, and Bel-Imperia entreats Horatio to “try the push of ” her foot as
she both invites him closer and holds him at bay. Suggestive of her con-
comitant desire to have Horatio without his necessarily having her, this
ploy frames the clearest articulation of the actual nature of Bel-Imperia’s
misgivings. For at the very moment Horatio leaves the martial for the
arboreal, the character of his ambition (and the reason for her distrusting
it) becomes clear. Horatio figures his attainment of Bel-Imperia with a
threefold image of vegetative growth, circumscription, and the leveling
of distinction, for he compares the embraced Bel-Imperia to “elms by
vines. . . . compassed till they fall.” Bel-Imperia, as we have seen, recoils
at being “compassed” and erupts once again with her misgivings, this
time noting that her own self-preservation is at stake. For she pulls away,
telling Horatio that in her eyes he “may read that life in passion dies.”

While Horatio will make this into a sexual pun, Bel-Imperia envisions
the stifling of her own life under the passion of Horatio, an appropriation
of Horatio’s own metaphor that drops an elm with choking vines.
Where Horatio sees this felling of Bel-Imperia as the leveling of distinction
(and analogous to the combat through which he unseats the socially
superior), Bel-Imperia recognizes this as a very real kind of death.
In the scelus, or great crime, of The Spanish Tragedy immediately
subsequent to this scene, the aristocratic villains violently suppress the
lawful—indeed, as we have seen, natural—“getting” of Horatio, a deed
conspicuously full of ironic allusions to the vegetative tropes used to
describe middling ambition. By having Horatio woo Lorenzo’s sister,
Kyd once again portrays a threat to an aristocratic order that requires a
virtually hermetic structure to retain its identity. Consequently, Lorenzo
penetrates the arbor by bribing Pedringano, by wielding his greater
“substance” to frustrate Horatio’s ambition. When the villains murder
Horatio, Kyd juxtaposes the overwhelming force wrought by Lorenzo’s
wealth with variant permutations of the metaphor linking the vegetative
and the ambitious. Taken by surprise and outnumbered, Horatio poses little
threat of successful resistance. His hanging could seem entirely superfluous,
especially since Kyd clearly establishes Horatio’s death as caused by stabbing:
They hang him in the arbour.
Horatio: What, will you murder me?
Lorenzo: Ay, thus, and thus! These are the fruits of love.
They stab him.
While Hieronimo later notes that Horatio was slain by a cord (3.13.175),
the scene itself presents evidence to the contrary, as Lorenzo kills Horatio
by stabbing, not hanging, him. Able to talk, Horatio clearly hangs in
such a way not intended as fatal in itself. Kyd graphically underscores this
when Lorenzo, in response to Horatio’s question (“What will you murder
me?”), punctuates his answer (“Ay, thus, and thus!”) with coincident
thrusts of his blade. The hanging of Horatio in the arbor functions
not simply as a means of murder, then, nor as a method of subduing
resistance, but also as a vehicle by which Kyd emphasizes the figurative
connection between Hieronimo’s child and garden. Both extensions, or
outgrowths, of Hieronimo’s own identity and household, Horatio and
the garden symbolize the Knight Marshal’s ambition. Moreover, the
garden and Horatio’s grotesque position within it in the scelus scene also
become the means for Lorenzo’s sarcastic sneering at the son’s ambition

as well. For in case we missed the emphasis on extending one’s reach
beyond his allotted station in life, Kyd concludes this scene with
Lorenzo’s quip, “Although his life were still ambitious proud, / Yet is he
at the highest now he is dead” (2.4.60 – 61). Lorenzo equates Horatio’s
ambitious life to his corpse’s physical elevation among the boughs of his
father’s arbor. The same Horatio who sought to fell Lorenzo’s sister like
an elm is ironically raised among the trees to his death, iconic of the
violent suppression of his own ambition.
vi
Hieronimo’s dirge for the slain Horatio immediately signals a shift in his
own ambitious energies and tacitly figures his revenge as a modified
application of the vegetative faculty. Though operating rationally
through his imaginative Latinate rhetoric and emotionally through his
effusions of grief, Hieronimo desires a scenario where rational and sensi-
tive functions dissipate, leaving him just this side of complete death with
only his impulse to revenge Horatio remaining. In the dirge, Hieronimo
calls three times for herbs, the very first line reading “let someone mix
for me herbs which the beautiful spring brings forth” (2.5.67–68). 37 He
then promises that he will “gather whatever herbs the sun brings forth”
and concludes he will “drink. . . . whatever herbs” may ease his grief
(2.5.71– 74). Interestingly, Hieronimo turns to the vegetative to heal his
pain by suppressing the soul’s other, non-vegetative functions. He seeks
a medicinal draught “which will bring oblivion to our minds” and will
try any remedy “until all feeling dies at once in [his] dead heart” (2.5.69 –
70, 74– 75). Kyd’s Latin here is telling. He has Hieronimo seek oblivion
for his and Isabella’s “animis,” that is, their rational souls, and then imagines
the extinction of his “sensus,” his power of perceiving or sensing. 38 In
short, while three times imagining an herbal concoction (and twice a
mysterious feminine force that supplies it), Hieronimo desires the com-
forting annihilation of two of the soul’s three functions. As he begins to
imagine joining Horatio wholly in death, he draws back “in case then no
revenge should follow your death” (2.5.80). After imagining the absence
of the rational and sensitive functions of the soul, Hieronimo eschews
37. All translations are from David Bevington’s edition of the play, except where noted.
38. C. T. Lewis, An Elementary Latin Dictionary (Oxford, 1997), s.v. “anima,” s.v. “sensus.”

complete death in favor of a continuing impulse toward revenge. By
concluding with “sequator,” a word meaning not only “to follow” but
also “to follow naturally,” “succeed,” or “ensue,” (s.v. “sequator”)
Hieronimo’s dirge again suggests revenge as a natural outgrowth or
conclusion to a matter. Ensuing naturally and deriving from something
beyond the rational or sensitive capacities only, revenge, it would seem,
emerges from Hieronimo’s redirected energies toward creation and
growth.39 Indeed, right after the dirge, the personified Revenge under-
scores the underlying vegetative trope by responding to Don Andrea’s
impatience: “Thou talk’st of harvest when the corn is green,” and, again,
“the sickle comes not till the corn be ripe” (2.6.7, 9). Here, Revenge
echoes not only Bel-Imperia’s intent to make Balthazar “reap long
repentance” but also the Latin dirge’s underlying psychology, tacitly
affiliating vengeance with vegetative fruition. 40
Between Hieronimo’s dirge and his final vengeance, Kyd develops
Hieronimo’s natural impulse toward revenge as occurring against
Lorenzo’s artificially established and entrenched position of power
which he retains by purchasing loyalty and circumscribing potential
threats. Analogous to Villuppo, who confesses he did his foul deeds “for
reward. . . . and hope to be preferred” (3.1.94– 95), Pedringano aligns
with Lorenzo because of his wealth. Lorenzo trusts that those who “for
coin their souls endangerèd, / To save [his] life, for coin shall venture
theirs” (3.2.113–14). Emphasizing his machinations as vehicles for
retaining his already established position, Lorenzo relies on this policy of
bribery and figures himself as one of the “hopeful men . . . that mean to
hold their own” (3.4.43). Lorenzo manipulates effectively the immense
material wealth at his disposal, indicating an awareness “that behind the
facade of ceremony and eloquence by which the public life of Spain
pretends to be organized, men are actually motivated and commanded
by the properties of wealth and power” (McMillan, p. 43). Positioning
himself as a sort of besieged aristocrat, jealous to retain the status afforded
39. On the nexus here between “personal disintegration” and the creation of “a new role,
answerable to this radical experience of loss and injustice,” see Scott McMillan, “The Figure of
Silence in The Spanish Tragedy,” ELH 39 (1972), 40.
40. Lisa Hopkins concludes that “it is precisely on this complex of images of husbandry and
of the seasonal cycle that Revenge draws when he attempts to reassure Andrea. . . . Even if events
seem to outrage the customary logic of human growth and progression by killing the children
before the eyes of their parents, Revenge seems still to see them as contained within an appropriate
framework of cultivation and fruition” (p. 123).

by his birth, Lorenzo hopes to hold his own, explicitly figuring this project
as fundamentally requiring his opposition to his enemies’ aspirations. 41
The corollary to Lorenzo’s holding his own, of course, is his controlling
the movements and actions of others. The most salient instance of this
may be found in his clever dispatching of Pedringano, a move that literally
circumscribes his enemy by means of the hangman’s noose. But he also
delimits the range of action among his remaining adversaries. Thus, he
“enlarge[s]” Bel-Imperia after “clap[ping her] up where none may come
at [her]” (3.10.7, 12, 31) and, likewise, “hinder[s]” Hieronimo from
seeing the King (3.12.68). So overt does Lorenzo become in this project
that the Duke remonstrates, “It is suspected, and reported too, / That
thou, Lorenzo, wrong’st Hieronimo, / And in his suits towards his
majesty / Still keep’st him back and seeks to cross his suit” (3.14.53–56).
Lorenzo’s hindrance of Hieronimo stands in direct opposition to
Hieronimo’s threatening success. The Duke reminds Lorenzo of the
Knight Marshal’s merit: “know’st thou not the common love / And
kindness that Hieronimo hath won / By his deserts within the court of
Spain?” (3.14.61–63) and warns him of the dangers of “thwart[ing] his
passions” (3.14.66). Consequently, Lorenzo can do nothing but reframe
the known with a more favorable interpretation, claiming, “I pitied him
in his distress, / [And] held him thence with kind and courteous words”
(3.14.81–82). It is against this established position that seeks to use its
material substance and political access to maintain its privilege that
Hieronimo plans to unleash his vengeful energies.
After figuring revenge as a function of the vegetative soul during
Hieronimo’s dirge and reemphasizing (through Lorenzo’s machinations
in the third act) the entrenched power structure Hieronimo opposes,
Kyd uses the Don Bazulto subplot to further suggest revenge as a type of
gain acquired in the face of opposition and fed, in part, by the deepest
undercurrents of the human psyche. Hieronimo witnesses Don
Bazulto’s grief and marvels that “love’s effects so strives in lesser things,”
that “love enforce[s] such mood in meaner wits,” and that it “express[es]
such power in poor estates” (3.13.99–101). Observing the inverse
relationship between the power afforded by social class and that by love,
Hieronimo ruminates on the undercurrents of his own psyche that move
him toward revenge. Contrasting the “lesser waters [that] labor in the deep”
to the raging of the sea’s “upper billows” (3.13.104– 05), Hieronimo
41. See also Levin, pp. 312–15.

evokes an image of “an elemental power sought by the human revenger”
(McMillan, p. 45) right before aligning vengeance with acquisition and
turning once more to Proserpine. Hieronimo sees revenge as acquisition
or gain, for he imagines Don Bazulto and himself going to Hades and “in
this passion. . . . getting by force” the means of vengeance (3.13.109 –
11); consequently, he will endure, “Till we do gain that Proserpine may
grant / Revenge on them that murderèd my son” (3.13.120 –21). As Kyd
moves Hieronimo’s imagination from the earthly court he currently
inhabits with Don Bazulto to that of Proserpine, he shifts the play’s focus
from the turbulent surface, the “upper billows,” to the deeper recesses of
the soul that generates revenge. For here Hieronimo’s passion runs
deeper than mere emotive excess and into the lesser waters of his psyche,
the ones that govern “getting” and “gain” and find communion with the
motivating, vegetative impulse figured in Prosperine.
What I am suggesting is that the vegetative faculty that gives rise to the
middling sort’s lawful attainments of the play’s first half also promotes the
revengers’ ambitions in the second but does so in a different register, as
Kyd figures revenge as an altered type of “getting” within (and against)
an increasingly vicious milieu, one where aristocrats such as Lorenzo
violently seek to “hold their own.” Revenge, in The Spanish Tragedy’s
denouement, becomes one of a number of expressions of household
oeconomia, a form of propagation and extension of one’s self by way of
alternate means when lawful attempts to advance become retarded. As
such, revenge functions as a subset of the vegetative capacity, a method
for the powerless or marginalized to reproduce their influence (and,
ideally, something of their likeness) in the society that has robbed them
of both identity and hope. The culminating effect of Kyd’s artistic
manipulations of contemporary psychology reveals how the desire for
advancement, intrinsic by nature to each individual, will find outlet—
even if it must do so negatively.42 In short, Kyd shifts the concept of con-
tinuing one’s existence through progeny and legacy into a darker register.
Unleashing their creative energies on a courtly milieu inattentive to their
unrest, Kyd’s revengers forever alter the landscape by puncturing the
secure spaces surrounding the court with irremediable absences. What
appears to many critics as cunning rationality, a studied waiting for
42. Eugene Hill intuits this but stops at a higher level of the psyche when he argues “This is
what happens to Hieronimo repeatedly in the play: passage arrested yields passion. And when
passion becomes excessive it turns to murderous rage” (p. 159).

opportunity,43 mixed with irrational excess, is also an altered form of
natural outgrowth and a management of one’s condition. Kyd’s ironic
inversion of the latent principle of reproduction and preservation helps
explain why, as Scott McMillan astutely points out, Hieronimo draws
from Seneca “passages [that] have nothing literally to do with revenge”
but rather “share an unusual idea about ‘safety’ or ‘preservation’ which
obviously concerns [him].”44 Making their final desperate acts unalterable
and irrevocable, Hieronimo, Bel-Imperia, and Isabella guarantee the
perpetuation of their influence, and something of their likeness,
indefinitely into the future.
Take, for instance, Isabella’s destruction of the arbor, the most salient
instance of revenge as the creation of an eternal, immutable absence in
the play. Distraught, constrained, and unable to reach the murderers
themselves, Isabella resolves to “revenge myself upon this place,” what
she later terms the “accursèd complot of my misery” (4.2.4, 13). Kyd
figures Isabella’s project as one of utter annihilation: 45
Down with these branches and these loathsome boughs
Of this unfortunate and fatal pine!
Down with them, Isabella, rend them up
And burn the roots from whence the rest is sprung!
I will not leave a root, a stalk, a tree,
A bough, a branch, a blossom, nor a leaf,
No, not an herb within this garden plot—
Accursèd complot of my misery.
Fruitless forever may this garden be,
Barren the earth, and blissless whosoever
Imagines not to keep it unmanured! (4.2.6–15)
Isabella’s whole project here is the creation of absence, the void without
which her continuing impact on her environment, however limited in
scope it may be, is impossible. Not only must the earth remain fruitless
and barren but so, too, must the human mind preserve a sense of absence,
43. See Ronald Broude, “Time, Truth, and Right in The Spanish Tragedy,” Studies in Philology
68 (1971) 137–39.
44. Scott McMillan, “The Book of Seneca in The Spanish Tragedy,” Studies in English Literature,
1500 –1900 14 (1974), 204.
45. See Wineke, pp. 65 and 70 – 71. For a concise discussion of Isabella’s destruction of the
bower as “a literal enactment of the elegiac verbal curse against nature” and the pastoral world,
see Peter Sacks, “Where Words Prevail Not: Grief, Revenge, and Language in Kyd and Shake-
speare,” ELH 49 (1982), esp. 581– 82.

for Isabella extends her curse even to those potentially interested in the
future cultivation of this space. The negative formulation of her curse—
“whosoever imagines not to keep it unmanured”—further suggests that
she seeks to create an absence, a perpetual hole, continuing indefinitely
into the future. Her concern is not simply that someone might imagine
manuring this plot of land, but rather that someone might not imagine to
keep it unmanured. In other words, she seeks the continual reinforce-
ment of negation, the perpetual remembrance that this is a barren space
that must remain incontrovertibly barren. Indeed, so total is Isabella’s
proposed and enacted annihilation that she even imagines the complete
absence of people inhabiting the space, since “passengers, for fear to be
infect, / Shall stand aloof ” (4.2.20 –21).
By cursing and destroying both womb and garden, the two sites of
Hieronimo’s fruitful reproduction in which his seed(s) took root and
expanded his household,46 Isabella renders his revenge necessary, the
only means left of making his lasting mark in Spain. Isabella explicitly
figures her destruction of the garden as part of her desire for Hieronimo
to act. After tearing down the arbor, she doubly curses Hieronimo,
apostrophizing: “Hieronimo, make haste to see thy son,” and, again, “Make
haste, Hieronimo, to hold excused / Thy negligence in pursuit of their
deaths, / Whose hateful wrath bereaved him of his breath” (4.2.24–26,
29 –31). After faulting Hieronimo’s “negligence,” Isabella concludes
“and as I curse this tree from further fruit, / So shall my womb be cursèd
for [Horatio’s] sake” (4.2.35–36). That Isabella curses both womb and
tree after bemoaning Hieronimo’s torpor suggests she sees both as
vehicles for his “faculty of getting” and his oeconomic energies, for she
simultaneously shuts down their fruitfulness and links the destruction of
each with her call for Hieronimo act anew.
Once Hieronimo’s wife and garden no longer exist, Kyd has the
Knight Marshal employ his “fruitless poetry though it profit the professor
naught” (4.1.72 – 73) to enact his revenge, a destruction as absolute as
Isabella’s and one equally figured as a type of reproduction through the
creation of absence. In this case, however, Hieronimo, in a manner
analogous to his earlier advocacy for Horatio’s advancement, seeks to
reproduce his own likeness and implant it thoroughly in the court by
46. For another parallel between Isabella’s womb and the earth, see Eleanor M. Tweedie,
“ ‘Action is Eloquence’: The Staging of Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy,” Studies in English Litera-
ture, 1500 –1900 16 (1976), 230.

creating in his adversaries the sense of negation and loss he himself
experiences. After exposing the reason of his revenge, Hieronimo turns
to his audience:
Speak, Portuguese, whose loss resembles mine:
If thou canst weep upon thy Balthazar,
’Tis like I wailed for my Horatio.
And you, my lord, whose reconcilèd son
Marched in a net, and thought himself unseen,
And rated me for brainsick lunacy,
With “God amend that mad Hieronimo!”—
How can you brook our play’s catastrophe? (4.4.114–21)
Hieronimo revels in the mimetic effects of his revenge by anticipating
the Portuguese King’s weeping, something he correlates to his own
wailing for Horatio. Likewise, Hieronimo anticipates how the Duke of
Castile will “brook our play’s catastrophe,” offsetting the Duke’s
impending reaction with a recitation of his own response to personal
trauma, namely, his feigned madness and clever machinations. The
deaths of Lorenzo and Balthazar may satisfy justice but they also transform
Castile and the Portuguese King into fathers of slaughtered sons, trans-
posing Hieronimo’s likeness onto them. To the two Kings and Castile,
Hieronimo subsequently asserts that “As dear to me was my Horatio /
As yours, or yours, or yours, my lord, to you” (4.4.169 – 70). On one
level, this vengeance forces a sort of parity among Horatio, Lorenzo, and
Balthazar.47 Yet Hieronimo’s revenge is not only one of equalization but
also one of mimesis, or reproduction, a fact that becomes even clearer in
the play’s final moments. For while the deaths of Lorenzo and Balthazar
may seem to satisfy justice, the killing of Castile seems superfluous 48—
until one compares the effects of such an action. For Hieronimo explains
his first two killings, by pointing to Horatio’s body and saying, “Here lay
my hope, and here my hope hath end” (4.4.90). Then, immediately
after Hieronimo—in one fluid motion—kills Castile and himself, the
King of Spain mourns, “My brother, and the whole succeeding hope /
That Spain expected after my decease!” (4.4.203–04). The Knight Marshal’s
47. See Kay Stockholder, “The Aristocratic Woman as Scapegoat: Romantic Love and Class
Antagonism in The Spanish Tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi, and The Changeling,” in The Elizabethan
Theatre XIV, ed. A. L. Magnusson and C. E. McGee (Toronto, 1996), pp. 131–32.
48. On the injustice of Hieronimo’s killing Castile, see Eleanor Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge
(Stanford, 1971), p. 51.

slaying of Castile robs the Spanish King of the “whole succeeding hope”
of himself and his nation, recreating in the King Hieronimo’s hopeless
image by making him bereft of his successor. By the end of this scene,
the Knight Marshal has created in the two Kings two Hieronimos, estab-
lishing his perpetual presence at court by puncturing it with irremediable
absences.
vii
We see something of this insatiable desire to re-create loss in Don
Andrea’s final resumption of center stage when he depicts revenge as a
concomitantly complete yet unfinished expression of ambition. His first
words as he reclaims the audience’s attention are, “Ay now my hopes
have end in their effects, / When blood and sorrow finish my desires”
(4.5.1–2). Don Andrea more narrowly locates his delight in his soul, as
part of his fundamental psychology, and returns his thoughts to Proser-
pine and the division of sorts:
Ay, these were spectacles to please my soul.
Now will I beg at lovely Proserpine,
That by the virtue of her princely doom
I may consort my friends in pleasing sort,
And on my foes work just and sharp revenge. (4.5.12–16)
Despite having previously labeled his desires as finished (and, in the
Induction, having displayed no inclination at all toward revenge), Don
Andrea here exhibits insatiable desire, culminating in the play’s final line
envisioning “endless tragedy” (4.5.48).49 As Kyd draws his play toward
this endless conclusion, he reminds us that Don Andrea’s revenge operates
pleasurably on his soul, stems from the motivating acquiescence of
Proserpine, and will insure the eternal distinction between his friends
and foes. While the latter consist entirely of the aristocracy, the former
are entirely from the middling sort, with the exception of Bel-Imperia,
who, as we have seen, encounters proscription and oppression in her
own unique situation. As Don Andrea delights in his soul at the revenge
initiated by Proserpine, he imagines a continuation of such delight, that
49. Steven Justice argues that “the general movement of the play’s action is toward the
satisfaction of an increasingly indiscriminate appetite” and that Don Andrea, in particular, “is not
very satisfied in his satisfaction” (pp. 280, 286).

he may “consort [his] friends in pleasing sort.” Kyd conflates here the
pleasure of Don Andrea’s soul wrought by revenge and the pleasure the
ghost imagines awaiting him in eternity, a utopian vision where his
aristocratic foes remain forever subordinate to his power and his own
circle of equals (including, notably, Bel-Imperia) receive unending favor.
viii
The Spanish Tragedy, of course, is informed by other aspects of early
modern psychology beyond the Aristotelian vegetative soul. The
rational calculus found in the play’s stratagems is very real; so, too, are its
emotive excesses for which Kyd was famous (and, subsequently,
famously derided). But Kyd’s appropriation of his culture’s tripartite
psychology reveals to our post-Cartesian minds how cleverly the author
sought to use existing natural philosophy, conjoined with the pathos of
his drama, to suggest the importance of a more egalitarian politics. Inter-
ested in the very real, material advancement among the middling sort,
Kyd articulated not simply the sententious imperatives common to the
discourses of oeconomia but also the potent psychological predicate
informing those discourses. By emphasizing the most ubiquitous and
universal yet most often overlooked and minor of the soul’s faculties,
Kyd found a useful vehicle for articulating the particular condition of the
middling sort. The oeconomics of The Spanish Tragedy as well as its engage-
ment with the vegetative soul’s capacity for reproduction, growth, and
nutrition suggest revenge as not merely sensationally brutish but also
coherent, the natural outgrowth of a middling sort circumscribed by an
artificial yet entrenched system of preferment and advancement.
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Oeconomia and the Vegetative Soul: Rethinking

iterary scholars have long recognized the dramatic tensions of

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6. Theodore B. Leinwand, “Shakespeare and the Middling Sort,” Shakespeare Quarterly 44

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11. Wall, p. 35.

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24. “Introduction,” Middling Sort, p. 2.

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At this point in the play, we have only been promised Bel-Imperia’s

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41. See also Levin, pp. 312–15.

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