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The Hangman's Noose and the Empty Box: Kyd's Use of Dramatic and Mythological Sources in The Spanish Tragedy (III.iv-vii)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
Extract
Source study has generally been discredited as a useful critical tool because of the past simplistic conception of the relationship between the source and its adapted context. Generally, source hunters emphasized parallel passages as the major proof of similarities between texts, merely listing the parallels without investigating more important critical implications. If we are to continue to consider source study a valuable scholarly tool—and there are good reasons to do so—we need to establish its interpretational relevance through a method which compares the conventional ideas and symbols of the source with the motifs and themes of the adapted context. Thus, the contextual method of ascription, as it shall be termed for purposes of discussion, will require an understanding of the interaction between the source's original context, including subsequent intellectual history, and the themes of the new context.
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- Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1977
References
1 ‘Kyd's Pedringano: Sources and Parallels,’ Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature, 13 (1937), 241-249.
2 The description of this plot and an account of its popularity in English drama is provided by Sand, Maurice, The History of the Harlequinade (1915; rpt. London: Benjamin Blom, 1968), I, 116–118 Google Scholar; McKechnie, Samuel, Popular Entertainment through the Ages (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1931), pp. 86–97 Google Scholar; Welsford, Enid, The Fool: His Social and Literary History (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1935), pp. 301–302 Google Scholar.
3 Philip Edwards, ed. (Methuen: London, 1959), III.v.10-17. All quotations are from this edition and will henceforth be cited within the text.
4 For the subsequent summary of the cruces and various interpretations of the Pandora myth, I am indebted to Dora and Panofsky, Erwin, Pandora's Box: The Changing Aspects of a Mythical Symbol (1956; rev. ed. Harper & Row: New York, 1962)Google Scholar. Page numbers from this book will be subsequently listed in the text.
5 A similar interpretation of the beneficial qualities of the remaining hope is provided in Alciati's Emblemata which depicts a fruitful hopefulness directed toward good ends as opposed to a false hope designed to gain evil goals (Panofsky, pp. 27-28).
6 Concerning the Cave of the Nymphs, tr. in Thomas Taylor The Platonist: Selected Writings, ed. Kathleen Raine and G. M. Harper (Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 319. The opening of the box usually is interpreted as the onset of evil in the world. For example, Greek fathers like Gregory of Nazianus and Origen compare the uncovering of the pithos to the choice of the forbidden fruit (Panofsky, p. 12), and similarly in Rosso Fiorentino's pen drawing (1530-40) Pandora releases Ignorance and a host of other vices. Thus Pedringano's decision to rely on the empty box symbolizes Man's capitulation to sin and when the page opens it he is in some way physically reenacting the moral choice which Pedringano has made. Of course, the page's perspective on the opening of the box is different from Pedringano's, but the parallel between his physical action and Pedringano's moral decision seems intended.