"Tamburlaine the Great" and "The Spanish Tragedy": The Genesis of a Tradition

Abstract

Conspicuous in English Renaissance tragedy is a tendency to conceive of the tragic as a process of sudden, extreme change involving the clash and confusion of contraries, the ideal or pre-tragic state being understood as a bond of opposites. The more obvious effects of this twin idea are easily summarized. Tragic protagonists are regularly presented as creatures of impossible mixtures who vividly exemplify the maxim that none can be always one.' They may oscillate between opposite emotional and behavioral extremes, or they will become their own antitheses in an arresting process of self-loss and self-betrayal.' The spectacle of extreme change and instability in the protagonists often generates feelings of bewilderment in the observer (both onand off-stage), yet such feelings are more characteristic of the protagonists' own experience of tragic reality. Suddenly finding themselves in a labyrinthine world where everyone and everything contradicts their instinctive expectations and where they are driven by forces they may not understand to defy their better nature or chosen principles, they move through a state of profound confusion in the direction of madness itself. Although psychologically simple by contrast, villainous characters are often presented in contrary terms too. Their function is to entangle the noble in the dualities of their own nature and of the world at large, and they are characterized accordingly as personifications in outward appearance of everything they essentially are not They seem truthful, loyal, kindly, and courteous -evangelists of unity and concord.3 With its stark contrasts in the shape and sequencing of scenes, dramatic construction frequently serves to reinforce these patterns of character and experience. So too do certain symbolic actions and motifs which rapidly became conventionalized in the Renaissance. By far the most important of these is the scene of the treacherous entertainment (as I shall call it), that ritual affirmation of love, peace, and unity-often associated with a marriage-which quickly proves to be a masque for hatred and destruction.4 Functioning always as a complete model of its imaginative environment, the