Revenge and Justice Theme Analysis

Thomas Kyd’s play The Spanish Tragedy is widely regarded as the very first revenge play of the Elizabethan era. The Spanish Tragedy paved the way for other revenge plays of the day—such as Hamlet by William Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy—and like other revenge plays, Kyd’s tragedy explores revenge and the ethics of taking justice into one’s own hands. Revenge motivates several of the characters, but the play focuses mainly on the story of Hieronimo, the Knight Marshal of Spain. After Hieronimo’s son, Horatio, a war hero and honorable man, is murdered by Lorenzo, the son of the Duke of Castile and the nephew of the King of Spain, Hieronimo swears justice for his son. Hieronimo demands revenge; however, he questions whose responsibility it is to seek it. Is it God’s responsibility, or the law’s? Or is it his own responsibility as a father? Eventualy, Hieronimo reluctantly takes it upon himself to avenge Horatio’s death, but through The Spanish Tragedy, Kyd suggests that even when revenge seems like the only way to get justice, it’s still not worth it. 

It is implied throughout the play that revenge is ultimately God’s responsibility and is not to be taken into the hands of man. When Hieronimo finds Horatio hanged in the garden and swears revenge, his wife, Isabella, suggests he wait. “The heavens are just,” she says, “murder cannot be hid: / Time is the author of both truth and right, / and time will bring this treachery to light.” In other words, Isabella implies that Horatio’s murderers will be punished by God’s judgement. After Horatio’s murder, as Hieronimo struggles with his own desire for revenge, he cries: “Vindicta mihi!” This Latin phrase, meaning “my punishment,” is a reference to the New Testament of the Bible and Romans 12.19, in which God declares vengeance his exclusive responsibility rather than mortal man’s. Hieronimo may want revenge, but with these words, he shows that he knows it isn’t really his to take. Even when Hieronimo does decide to seek revenge himself in the tragic play-within-a-play at the play’s conclusion, he acknowledges that he will likely be condemned for doing so. “Now shall I see the fall of Babylon,” Hieronimo says. “Wrought by the heavens in this confusion. / And if the world like not this tragedy, / Hard is the hap of old Hieronimo.” Hieronimo still knows that revenge is God’s responsibility, but grief and injustice ultimately drive him to seek it anyway.

The play also suggests that the law, which during Kyd’s time was believed to derive its power from God, has the power to seek justice through revenge. As the Knight Marshal of Spain, it is Hieronimo’s responsibility to sit in judgement over all sorts of matters, including murder. After Pedringano—the servant of Lorenzo’s sister, Bel-Imperia, and an accomplice in the murder of Horatio—is arrested for the murder of another servant named Serberine, Hieronimo says: “For blood with blood shall, while I sit as judge, / Be satisfied, and the law be discharged.” The law, it seems, does not condemn revenge, and as an official judge, Hieronimo is sanctioned to dispense it. While Hieronimo obviously desires revenge after the murder of Horatio, he is initially determined to get it through the proper channels. “I will go plain me to me to my lord the king, / And cry aloud for justice through the court.” In other words, Hieronimo will openly go to the court and plead Horatio’s case for justice. Despite his grief and anger, Hieronimo first seeks justice legally. With proof of Lorenzo’s guilt, Hiernimo goes to the king, but Lorenzo convinces the king that Hiernimo’s pleas are merely the ramblings of a lunatic. Ironically, despite Hieronimo’s role as a judge, he cannot find justice for his son.

Given the failures of these attempts at officially sanctioned justice, Hieronimo does eventually take justice into his own hands, but it is a decision that he takes seriously. He goes to great lengths to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt the identity of Horatio’s murderer, and he waits so long to exact his revenge that Revenge—the ghost that personifies revenge in the play—actually falls asleep waiting for Hieronimo to act. When Hieronimo finally does seek revenge, it goes spectacularly wrong. The long-awaited revenge leads to the unexpected suicide of Bel-Imperia and ends with Hieronimo biting his own tongue out so he cannot be compelled to talk. Afterward, when Hieronimo is given a pen to write his confession, he uses it to stab and kill the Duke of Castile before stabbing himself to death. Hieronimo kills Lorenzo only after he has exhausted legal options, and as a grieving father, he seems justified in his actions, but the results are nevertheless disastrous. In this way, Kyd indicates that while revenge may at times seem justified, it should nonetheless remain the responsibility of God and the law, since individual acts of revenge like Hieronimo’s will only lead to more death.