“Yet can he write”: Reading the Silences in The Spanish Tragedy

The argument of this important but seldom performed play, The Spanish Tragedy, is as follows: In the underworld the ghost of Don Andrea, who has recently been killed in battle by Balthazar, the son of the Portuguese Viceroy, tells Revenge that he has been sent by Proserpine because the gods of the underworld are uncertain as to whether he should be assigned to a place for lovers or for warriors. Revenge responds by telling him to watch the process by which his death will be avenged. The entire play to which Revenge and Don Andrea are audience becomes an inner play, for at the end we along with all the major characters will join Revenge and Don Andrea in the underworld. The play proper opens with an entertainment that Hieronimo, Knight Marshall to the King of Spain, has arranged to celebrate the Spanish victory over Portugal. Horatio, his son and former friend of Don Andrea and of about the same relatively low social rank at court, arrives with Lorenzo, the king's nephew, triumphantly leading the captured Balthazar. Though it is evident that Horatio deserves full credit for the capture, the king grants Horatio the ransom money, while Lorenzo is awarded his arms along with the honour of entertaining the Portuguese prince. After an intervening scene in which the Portuguese Viceroy mourns his son's presumed death and Villupo betrays his friend Alexandro in order to win the Viceroy's favour, we return to Spain where Horatio informs Lorenzo's sister, Bel-imperia, who was in love with Don Andrea, that Don Andrea did not fall in honorable single combat with Balthazar, but was ignominiously set upon by his