Performance

Abstract

Act ii brings about a familiar shift of perspective. As in Kyd and Marston the foreground is occupied by an action which proceeds not from the hero, the would-be revenger, but from the villain. In The Spanish Tragedy the dominant activity in this phase was the effort of Lorenzo to eliminate the accomplices to his murder. Hieronimo was reduced to a helpless figure of woe, capable of nothing but lonely and agonised soliloquy. It was not until the revelation of the letter and the confirmation of its truth that he could begin to advance emotion into action, and even then it was a long and painful transformation. The same phase of Antonio’s Revenge was similarly dominated by the self-regarding ingenuity of Piero’s plotting; indeed, he not only advertised his ever-escalating ambition as the major motive of the play but paraded in an outrageous parody of the revenger’s role. It was Piero’s ‘tide of vengeance’, with all its frantic acting and gleeful deceit, that seemed ready to roll over everything, including the hero. Antonio himself was reduced to the rhetoric of lamentation and protective dissembling.