The passage from Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (2009, 4.4.88-112, pp. 119-120) contains many rhetorical devices and linguistic techniques which help illuminate the character of Hieronimo, the wider themes of the play and engage the audience.
After Hieronimo’s opening line of speech, asking his audience to look on his “spectacle.” (4.4.89), he moves on to speak four lines containing anaphora (4.4.90-93). The phrase “Here lay my” is modified with the omission of “lay” to “here my” when it is repeated, in each separate line, Hieronimo assigns a different characteristic to Horatio – hope, heart, treasure and bliss. The effect of repeating each characteristic means that Hieronimo’s audience cannot fail to understand the depth of feeling Hieronimo felt for…show more content… This audience is not just the physical audience who watch or read the play, but the other characters on-stage to whom Hieronimo is speaking – the King of Spain, Viceroy of Portugal and Duke of Castille (4.4. first stage direction). Knowing that Hieronimo has felt these…show more content… At first, this question seems almost ridiculous – he has orchestrated the deaths of Balthazar and Lorenzo and he has described his emotions with great detail, the audience can hardly fail to see he is grieving, but this question serves two principal purposes. It is inherently metatheatrical, as it asks those observing the play to assess his emotional state and decide whether they find his speech emotionally convincing or not. As G.M. Colón Semenza posits, this is another instance of The Spanish Tragedy’s “provocation of disparate interpretations and judgments” (2010, pg.159), so instead of passive consumption, it requires its audience to actively engage with the text being presented and the questions asked within it, for example this line and also
