etween Spain and Portugal, he has lost his son, his wife, his reason, and his identity. A moment later he will bite out his own tongue and commit suicide. These are the wages of vengeance, the price of becoming the instrument of the true justice administered from on high by the spirit of Revenge, in the name of the ghost of Don Andrea. In the end, all of the blood and madness in theplay comes down to one point: the false value of class that Lorenzo and Balthazar embrace, and the false value of the state which Hieronimo embodies, must ultimately give way to the true value of cosmic justice, before which all are expendable. Hence Kyd can afford to show the implements of official sanction, the noose and the stake, because in thefinal analysis they are meaningless. Only in the dispensation of rewards and punishments in the afterlife have any real value, as only there are they deserved and everlasting.------------------------------------------------------------------------Works CitedArdolino, Frank R. Thomas Kyd's Mystery Play: Myth and Ritualin "The Spanish Tragedy". New York: Peter Lang Publishing,Inc., 1985.Hunter, G. K. "Ironies of Justice in The Spanish Tragedy."Dramatic Identities and Cultural Tradition: Studies inShakespeare and his Contemporaries. New York: Barnes & NobleBooks, 1978.Kyd, Thomas. The Spanish Tragedy. Edited by J. R. Mulryne. NewYork: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1989.Shapiro, James. "'Tragedies naturally performed': Kyd'sRepresentation of Violence." Staging the Renaissance:Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama. Editedby David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass. New York:Routledge, 1991.Smith, Molly. "The Theater and the Scaffold: Death as Spectaclein The Spanish Tragedy." Studies in English Literature 32:2(1992), 217-32.Watson, Robert N. "Tragedy." The Cambridge Companion to EnglishRenaissance Drama. Edited by A. R. Braunmuller and MichaelHattaway. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990....
