Love and Madness Theme Analysis

While The Spanish Tragedy is first and foremost focused on revenge, the play also examines love—love in a romantic sense and love between family members and friends. As the play opens, Don Andrea, a Spanish soldier, has just been murdered in battle by Balthazar, the son of the Viceroy of Portugal. When Andrea passes before Minos, Aeacus, and Rhadamanth—the judges of the underworld—Minos claims that Andrea “both lived and died in love.” In life, Andrea was in love with Bel-Imperia, the daughter of the Duke of Castile, and Andrea’s ghost loves her still in death. Love is one of the most motivating factors for many of the characters in The Spanish Tragedy. For instance, after Andrea is slain in battle, his dear friend and fellow soldier, Horatio, makes sure Andrea has proper funeral rites and mourns his loss, all out of love for his dear friend. But while love is often presented as beautiful and honorable, it also causes untold torment and pain for the characters and leads them to dire extremes, such as murder and suicide. Through The Spanish Tragedy, Kyd highlights the beauty of love and its ability to enrich one’s life and relationships, but he also argues that love can be a maddening force.        

In addition to Andrea and Bel-Imperia’s love and the brotherly love between Horatio and Andrea, there are several other examples of deep love in The Spanish Tragedy. This wide variety of examples suggests that all kinds of love can be equally strong and motivating. After the death of Andrea, Bel-Imperia is comforted by Horatio, and she soon falls in love with him, too. Horatio is Bel-Imperia’s “second love,” and she loves him just as fiercely as she does Andrea. Even though it is not reciprocated, Balthazar—who killed Andrea in battle and later helps Bel-Imperia’s brother, Lorenzo, kill Horatio—is also in love with Bel-Imperia, and he plans to marry her (with the blessing of her father and the King of Spain) to join the main royal houses of Spain and Portugal together in a single power. Horatio is also deeply loved by his parents, Hieronimo and Isabella, who greatly mourn the loss of their “sweet boy.” The love that Hieronimo especially has for his son drives most of the plot of play, leading to the revenge play-within-a-play that ends in tragedy. Alongside revenge, love is the largest motivating factor within Kyd’s play, and many of the characters are driven by it in one way or another.

Many of Kyd’s characters, however, are also driven insane by love, which suggests that while love can be comforting and motivating, it can also be maddening and destructive. After the murder of her son, Isabella spirals into madness over the loss of her beloved Horatio. Before Isabella stabs herself to death at the very spot where Horatio was hanged, she “runs lunatic” alone in her room. While Bel-Imperia doesn’t go insane in quite the same way as Isabella, she commits suicide at the end of the play all the same. Bel-Imperia stabs herself to death while acting in Hieronimo’s play-within-a-play, even though her suicide was not part of the script. “But love of him whom they did hate too much,” Hieronimo says, “Did urge her resolution to be such.” In other words, Bel-Imperia loves Horatio so much, she is driven to suicide by his death. Hieronimo, too, seems to be unraveling mentally when two strangers inquire about Lorenzo—he launches into a nonsensical speech about “guilt,” “murderers,” and the “blood of innocents.” When Hieronimo bursts into inappropriate laughter, the men are taken aback. “Doubtless this man is passing lunatic,” they say before moving on. Even to complete strangers, it is clear that Hieronimo isn’t well.

Despite the convincing nature of Hieronimo’s madness, he also implies that his “brainsick lunacy” is only a ruse to ease his ultimate revenge on Lorenzo and Balthazar, which he achieves during the play-within-a-play. As entertainment for the King of Spain and the Viceroy of Portugal, Hieronimo stages his original play, and casts in it both Lorenzo and Balthazar. After Bel-Imperia, who also acts in the play, stabs Balthazar to death, Hieronimo kills Lorezno, and his revenge is ostensibly complete. Yet afterward, when Hieronimo’s attempt to hang himself fails, he bites out his own tongue to avoid talking and murders Lorenzo’s father with a pen before finally committing suicide. Even after his revenge, Hieronimo still behaves in a way that suggests he has been driven mad by losing Horatio. Kyd thus implies that despite the genuine beauty of love, it nonetheless has the power to cause tragic outcomes like madness and death.