Chapter Twenty-One

“Here Sit We Down”

The Positioning of Andrea and Revenge

Annalisa Castaldo

The Spanish Tragedy opens with the entrance of Revenge and the ghost of Andrea, and both these characters are generally assumed by both editors and academics to remain on the stage for the entire play, commenting on the events between each act and serving as a kind of chorus at the tragic end. Scholars have long recognized the central thematic and structural importance of these two characters. But questions concerning the stage presence of Revenge and Andrea are much less discussed. Where are they located? Do they actually stay onstage for the entire play? And do these liminal characters ever interact, directly or tangentially, with the action unfolding onstage? A number of scholars have discussed staging issues for the play, but the focus has almost always been on the much more overtly complex staging of the play within the play or the killing and hanging of Horatio in the arbor.1 When Andrea and Revenge are mentioned, the focus is usually on their position as detached watchers and stand-ins for the actual spectators, as shown in a 1969 article by Barry Adams entitled “The Audiences of The Spanish Tragedy,” which focuses on Revenge and Andrea as audience surrogates. His argument is a powerful one, but in the process of making it, he includes the following footnote:

My colleague Professor Scott McMillian, who has made a close study of staging practices at the Rose during the 1590s, considers it most likely that Andrea and Revenge take a position on the main platform in full view of the audience and remain there throughout the play. Three stage directions from the 1592 quarto—those at the beginning and end of III.xv and the beginning of IV.v—seem to require them to leave the stage at least twice, but these directions probably involve textual corruption.2

It is worth quoting this footnote at length because most articles written after 1969 accept the claims as given. Almost no one questions the basic assumptions presented by Scott McMillian in the 1960s. D. F. Rowan “with much trepidation” suggests that the stage directions indicating entrances at the end of acts 3 and 4 “may simply indicate a coming to centre stage.”3 Michael Hattaway, with more confidence, cites early modern references to support his claim that Andrea and Revenge enter from the trap; he then states “It is reasonably certain that at the Rose performances the Ghost and Revenge then mounted to the gallery above the stage to view the tragedy unfold.”4 Both Rowan and Hattaway, however, seem to agree that, once onstage, there is no interaction between these two supernatural characters and the rest of the cast, nor do these characters interact with or influence the action; neither even addresses this question. The scholarly community has, for fifty years, been united in the belief that there is nothing to explore. Revenge and Andrea enter in 1.1, take a seat on the main stage, or possibly in the gallery, and remain there, quiet (except for their discussions at the end of each act) and passive throughout the play.

However, this performance choice underutilizes two actors (an important concern in the repertory companies of the sixteenth century) and takes up much stage space. Therefore it is unlikely to have lasted into performance, even if Kyd was so impractical as to explicitly create it. In addition to being impractical, it suggests, in both Kyd and the various acting companies, a lack of theatrical awareness that is hard to imagine. Furthermore, modern productions almost all have Revenge (and, to a lesser extent, Andrea) engaged in some way with the action. It is unlikely that having written a technical and thematically complex play, Kyd would not have had understood how powerful the interactions between the supernatural and the human characters would be. It would also be unprecedented. There is no other early modern drama that introduces a ghost who is completely separate from the action.

Any suggestions about what actors in the sixteenth century might or might not have done onstage must necessarily be speculative and incomplete, but speculation here is worthwhile, especially with seldom-performed plays and especially with supernatural or allegorical characters, who are too often treated by scholars, editors, and teachers as disembodied vessels of thematic information, poetry without substance. Vice, Rumor, and Revenge may carry great literary weight, but they are also exciting and often engaging characters, played by real actors who have to get on and off stage, wear costumes that make them recognizable to the audience, and, often, be available to play other roles. Considering the plays as drama and thus considering the constraints and requirements of performance often tells us a great deal about how plays were conceived and written, performed and understood, thus enriching our understanding of the plays as works of literature. By treating Revenge and Andrea as disembodied characters that have no real stage presence, scholars have simplified and flattened these roles. They exist only in the symbolic register, not in the physical or emotional. As such, they cannot provide added depth to the actions performed onstage, or to characters’ emotions and interactions, and become less interesting themselves. This is especially true for students, who are often fascinated by Revenge and want to imagine him interacting with the characters. This reasonable desire is frustrated by every modern edition, because none offer either footnotes or supporting material suggesting that Revenge has the option to do anything other than speak his lines.

An instructive comparison to The Spanish Tragedy is its near contemporary Taming of a Shrew. In the anonymous Shrew, Sly, another character onstage for the entire play, attempts repeatedly to interact with the lives of the characters, such as when, in the third interlude, he demands that Phylotus and Valeria not be sent to prison (“Why Sim, am not I Don Christo Vary? / Therefore, I say, they shall not go to prison.”).5 Sly also comments on the action, twice asking after the fool, Sander. Through these various interruptions, the actual audience is guided as to when they should remember the existence of Sly, and their reaction to his presence is meditated by his reactions, presenting the early modern audience with a mirror of their own actions that is both amusingly overstated and reassuringly familiar. In contrast, Andrea and Revenge (in the modern academic construction) behave startlingly like a twentieth-century theater audience, sitting still, acting as if the other characters cannot see or hear them, and commenting only to each other and only during designated breaks when the stage is cleared of actors. If The Spanish Tragedy was supposed to be staged this way, it would have upended every expectation of audience behavior and contradicted the behavior of most other onstage audiences. Academics may find the ending of A Shrew simplistic, but Sly’s announcement to the Tapster that he now knows how to tame a wife shows how an onstage character is used when he is designated as the audience surrogate, guiding their views of what they have seen.

Shrew is, of course, not the only time actors take on the role of audience members and interact in some way with the larger play. In Knight of the Burning Pestle, the audience members who move onto the stage are so interactive that they demand, and get, an entirely different play. The idea that audience stand-ins would be expected to attempt to influence the play, or at least interact with it, is also evidenced by the plays within plays of Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Roman Actor, just to name a few. Compared to these examples, the combination of an unbroken stage presence and complete inaction seems likely to distract an audience. If Revenge and Andrea are completely passive during the action of the play, especially if they are seated on the main stage in the sight lines of at least some spectators, the audience has no guidance as to how they should react to these audience stand-ins. Note, in comparison, that the published text of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew does not mark a final exit for Sly and his companions. One thing this could indicate is that the audience might be expected to ignore Sly after he is silent for a few scenes, and that he could quietly exit without anyone noticing. It is true that Andrea and Revenge call attention to themselves at the end of each act, but especially during the lengthy third act this is not enough guidance to ensure a coherent audience reaction. Andrea and Revenge take a middle position, neither fading into the background as Shakespeare’s Sly does, nor providing regular commentary for the audience to follow and react to, as in Taming of a Shrew and The Knight of the Burning Pestle.

There are further practical problems to the widely accepted idea that the two sit on the main stage for the entire play. As Andrew Gurr points out, the Rose, where The Spanish Tragedy was first staged, offered a very small playing area. Gurr suggests that the Rose may have had as little as five hundred square feet of playing area.6 To offer a modern comparison, the American Shakespeare Center’s stage is about 640 square feet. Those who have sat on the gallant stools can attest to how very close the actors can be at times—especially in scenes involving many actors, of which The Spanish Tragedy has quite a few. Just to name the largest, 1.2 has the army process twice across the stage while watched by the King, Castile, Hieronimo, and the General; 1.4 has a banquet (probably requiring a table) of at least six people watching a dumb show that involves six other actors; and of course the final scene involves the King, the Viceroy, Castile, “and their train” watching Hieronimo, Balthazar, Lorenzo, and Bel-Imperia present their all too real tragedy. As many scholars have noted, the play is obsessed with layers of audience, and while it is absolutely true that Andrea and Revenge are a vital component of this theme, it is hard to imagine where on the stage they could sit and not be in the way at some point. It is also important to note that in every other scene involving an onstage audience, that audience interacts directly with the action, from a very minor engagement (the request to Hieronimo to explain his dumb show) to taking control of the scene’s direction (Lorenzo and Balthazar’s murder of Horatio). Kyd thus establishes a pattern of characters moving from spectators to directors, shaping scenes to their desired ends. If Andrea and Revenge only watch the action, they break the pattern Kyd himself established.

Although The Spanish Tragedy has not been produced very often in the modern era, most directors who have worked on the show have found Andrea and Revenge irresistible. The first modern professional production, 1978, Citizen’s Theater, featured a Revenge “who was both spectator and participant, present as a dapper pageboy in white who spoke most of the servants’ lines and magically dropped in every letter needed to draw the characters towards their nemesis. He was also, of course, the boy with the empty box.”7 In the 1984 production at the National Theatre, Revenge “is also the stage manager who sets the stage and distributes the props.”8 A student production at the American Shakespeare Center had Revenge double Villuppo, the Hangman, Isabella’s maid, and Bazulto, and at the very end of the play Andrea helps all the various dead characters up, arranging them for their bows.9 In the 2009 production by the Rude Mechanicals, which did place Andrea and Revenge in the front row of the audience, Revenge hands Bel-Imperia’s letter to Hieronimo, and both Revenge and Andrea help the dead Pedringano down from the gallows during intermission.10 Just from this sampling, it is clear that directors immediately recognize the theatrical gold of Revenge and Andrea, and it is almost impossible to believe that Kyd himself and the first companies were blind to the possibilities of the text.

Considering the probable rehearsal and performance of an early modern company, it is unlikely that the original run featured the kind of complex interplay that modern directors have used. However, the popularity of the play—its twenty-nine performances making it one of the most performed of the era—would have provided the actors with an unusual level of familiarity with the text and action. It is also possible that Revenge could have been played by the company clown. There is no clearly designated clown part in the play, but Revenge’s behavior (falling asleep, for example) has some comic tinges to it. While Andrea’s speeches are long, formal declamations full of classical references, Revenge’s speeches are shorter and more informal. In the final scene, for example, Andrea recounts the tragedy that has just occurred in a twenty-six-line speech. Revenge responds with a couplet with the borderline absurd line “Where none but Furies, bugs and tortures dwell” (4.5.28, emphasis added).11 Andrea, in a fifteen-line speech, mentions no fewer than five classical underworld references. Revenge’s final speech is two more couplets, framing the punishments as theatrical spectacle, not Greek myth. While this is not proof that Revenge was written for or assigned to a clown, it would support the possibility that Revenge was expected to interact with the human characters in ways not specified in the text, taking advantage of both the clown’s ability to improvise and the audience’s expectations that he would.

All of the reviews of modern productions and comments by directors make links between the increased roles (especially for Revenge) and certain themes that the production wished to highlight. Richard Proudfoot, accepting the standard scholarly view, says of the National Theatre production: “Central to the visual conception is the treatment of the figures of Revenge. Kyd’s text suggests that Revenge and the Ghost are present throughout the play as passive spectators, reacting to its events in opposite ways and serving as chorus to help the audience follow the ramifications of the developing plot. The director’s most radical innovation is to convert them into very active figures on stage.”12 He goes on to comment on how Andrea’s proximity creates a sense of pathos, as well as short-circuiting any possibility of a divine presence—the reality of the cigar-smoking Revenge is simply too pragmatic to be godly. Interestingly, when Ron Daley directed the play in 1986, he cut both characters, claiming “the use of Revenge and the Ghost of Don Andrea is a surrender to convention by Kyd” and that cutting the frame allowed him to “bring out the humanity.”13 His belief that the frame made the play “unproducible” was due to his mistaken notions about the behavior of the two characters; other directors have found that Andrea, especially, adds to the humanity of the story.

Having suggested that it is improbable that Andrea and Revenge would have been static throughout the play, it is worthwhile to explore how they might move around the stage and where they might spend their time, beginning with the very first appearance of the pair, at the opening of the play. Andrea’s first speech is eighty-five lines vividly describing his love of Bel-Imperia, his death in war, and the confusion of the judges of the underworld about where his ghost should reside. After all this exposition, Revenge speaks much more briefly, promising Andrea that he will see Balthazar murdered by Bel-Imperia, and then says “Here sit we down to see the mystery” (1.1.90). If this were a later play, written for an indoor theater, the question of where they sit down would be obvious—they could either take actual gallant stools or bring stools on and place them unobtrusively by the already existing seats. But no evidence suggests that either the Rose or the Fortune had onstage seats for audience members. Thus either the stools/seats were set out ahead of time, or the actors carried them onstage themselves. When this chapter was presented as a paper at the 2011 Blackfriars Conference, an actor was asked to walk onstage carrying a stool, set it down, and then give the first line of the Ghost’s speech from Hamlet 1.5. The response was immediate; the entire audience burst out laughing.

Moreover, wherever the stools are, the actors must stay near them, because Revenge says “Here sit we down” not “There,” and with only eleven words after “sit we down” it seems improbable that the actors moved very far before seating themselves. And while it is possible that the two actors walked away from their stools and back again, given the nature of the speech—formal, highly rhetorical, and also full of exposition—it seems, again, improbable that the actors moved about a great deal. A way to avoid all of this—who carries in the stools, where they would be placed, and how much the actors might move about the stage—can be by having the characters enter “above” and having them speak from and seat themselves on the balcony or, as suggested by Michael Hattaway, entering through the trap and ascending to the gallery through one of several methods.

Hattaway does not consider this early mobility a sign that the characters should continue to move about, but the text offers places where it makes theatrical sense for either Revenge or Andrea, or both, to leave their seats. How might Andrea and Revenge interact with the play? I will offer two examples that seem consistent with the text and what we know about rehearsals and performances on the early modern stage. First, in 3.2, Hieronimo delivers his famous “O eyes no eyes” speech and determines to search for some evidence of who the murderer is. As he soliloquizes, he is interrupted by a letter, written in blood, falling from above. It is clear the letter is from Bel-Imperia; the letter itself says “Me hath my hapless brother hid from thee” (3.2.27), and in a later scene Bel-Imperia herself appears complaining of Hieronimo’s inactivity: “why writ I of thy wrongs / Or why art thou so slack in thy revenge?” (3.9.8–9).

Despite the absolute clarity of the letter’s author, how the letter comes to Hieronimo is exceedingly ambiguous. The stage direction says “A letter falleth” rather than suggesting Bel-Imperia drops it herself from the balcony. Most editors note that the letter’s perfectly timed arrival demonstrates the destined working out of events by supernatural forces. While that is true, it does not answer the question of how the letter makes its way onstage. If it “falleth,” someone must drop it from the balcony. It should be noted that for an early playtext, the quarto offers very full descriptions of the actions that are not completely clear from dialogue. For example, when the King says “Take this and wear it for thy sovereign’s sake” (1.2.87), the stage direction reads “Give him a chain.” Horatio’s line “Madam, your glove” (1.4.100) is explained by the very full stage direction “She, in going in, lets fall her glove, which Horatio, coming out, takes up.” These detailed stage directions seem designed to recreate the experience of watching the play. The ambiguity of who acts in “the letter falleth” suggests that whoever was responsible for the written stage directions wanted to emphasize the nonhuman element of the letter’s delivery. Only Andrea and Revenge are sufficiently supernatural, and since the letter is a call for revenge, it makes sense that Revenge would drop the letter, which would be easily accomplished if he and Andrea were seated in the gallery. As has already been pointed out, more than one modern production has used Revenge in just this way, whether dropping the letter or actually handing it to Hieronimo.

Second, I would like to turn to the stage directions at the end of acts 3 and 4, the stage directions which are regularly dismissed as printer’s errors because of the assumption that Andrea and Revenge don’t leave the stage. First, it is important to note that the first two stage directions read only “Enter Ghoast” not “Enter Ghoast and Revenge.” As mentioned already, the quarto is quite good about stage directions, rarely forgetting to list who is entering and never missing a main character. Therefore, if Andrea does “enter” in some way, it is worthwhile to consider that he does so alone, without Revenge. While the stage directions of “Enter Ghoast” may be a compositor’s error, just before 3.14, Bel-Imperia appears to agree to marry Balthazar, and Hieronimo appears to reconcile with Lorenzo. In addition, this is the only point in the play where someone other than Lorenzo speaks of Bel-Imperia’s affair with Andrea, when her father, Castille, says “Content thyself, for I am satisfied / It is not now as when Andrea lived” (3.14.109–10).

Here Andrea might leave the balcony during the lines quoted above, perhaps after expressing distress (hearing him mentioned by name, it would be natural for the audience to look for him), and reappear on the main stage, after the other characters have left. His lines “Awake Erichtho! Cerebus awake! / . . . Such fearful sights, as poor Andrea sees / Revenge awake” (3.15.1, 7–8) could effectively be shouted at the sleeping Revenge from below, the distance between the actors demonstrating the distance between the characters’ states. Andrea’s failed attempt to actually interact with the still living characters would contrast beautifully with Revenge’s emotional and physical reserve. This staging is not so complex that it would require multiple rehearsals to perfect, and it accounts for both the emotional state of Andrea (who is quite angry at Revenge’s nap) and the supposedly erroneous stage direction.

While no scholar can say for sure that a particular staging might have occurred in a sixteenth-century production, all scholars need to resist the urge to treat supernatural or allegorical characters as less embodied than other characters, less likely to move about the stage or interact with characters. It is entirely too easy to concentrate on the symbolic register of such characters and to ignore the simple truth that Revenge and Vice, ghosts and choruses are not only allegorical creations of poets, but also actors and part of companies with specific practices and limitations, performing for audiences with equally specific expectations. Keeping the limitations and expectations in mind does not, paradoxically, limit the interpretive range of these allegorical characters; it instead opens up a richer understanding of the work they do, on the stage and in the imagination.

Notes

1. For example, see Barry B. Adams, “The Audiences of The Spanish Tragedy,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 68, no. 2 (1969): 221–36.; Barbara J. Baines, “Kyd’s Silenus Box and the Limits of Perception,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 10 (1980): 41–51; Michael Hattaway, Elizabethan Popular Theatre: Plays in Performance. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982); Einer J. Jensen, “Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy: The Play Explains Itself,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 64 (1965): 7–16; D. F. Rowan, “The Staging of The Spanish Tragedy,” Elizabethan Theatre 5 (1975): 112–23; and James Shapiro, “Tragedy Naturally Performed: Kyd’s Representation of Violence,” in Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, ed. David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass (London: Routledge, 1991): 99–113.

2. Barry B. Adams, “The Audiences of The Spanish Tragedy,” 225.

3. Rowan, “The Staging of The Spanish Tragedy,” 117.

4. Hattaway, Elizabethan Popular Theatre, 115.

5. Stephen Roy Miller, ed. The Taming of A Shrew: The 1594 Quarto. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 114.

6. Andrew Gur, The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 130.

7. Tony Howard, “Renaissance Drama Productions: Kyd—The Spanish Tragedy 1978,” Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 21 (1978): 65.

8. Patricia E. Tatspaugh, “The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd,” Theatre Journal 37, no. 2 (May 1985): 233.

9. Asea Dean, email message to author, January 15, 2012.

10. Charlene Smith, email message to author, January 22, 2012.

11. Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, ed. J. R. Mulryne (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989). All future citations are from this edition.

12. Richard Proudfoot, “Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy,” Critical Quarterly 25, no. 1 (1983): 73.

13. Ron Daley, interview by Harry Keyishian, Shakespeare Bulletin 4, no. 3 (May/June 1986): 11.