The Bower

This is not your mother's garden. Unless, your mother's garden has a bloody corpse hanging in it. But your mother does have the right idea—gardens should be a pleasurable, private place. Oh yeah, "bower" is just an old-fashioned word for a shady, secluded area in a garden where people can retreat from the everyday world.

Adam and Eve, Sittin' in a Tree…

And when we first hear about the bower in The Spanish Tragedy, it's all about the private pleasures of new lovers. For example, Horatio invites Bel-Imperia to the bower by saying,

Now that the night with sable wings
To overcloud the brightness of the sun,
And that in darkness pleasures may be done,
Come, Bel-Imperia, let us to the bower,
And there in safety pass a pleasant hour. (2.5.1-5)

Bowers have been symbols for romantic love and retreat from the harshness of every day life ever since Adam and Eve lived, loved, and got kicked out of their own private bower, the Garden of Eden. So it comes as no surprise that the bower in The Spanish Tragedy carries meaningful elements of the Adam and Eve Story, which include romantic love and tragic loss. But the play does more than just borrow from Garden of Eden. Because in the process of borrowing, the play adds even more loss and sadness to the old garden story.

Paradise Lost

Just like Adam and Eve, Horatio and Bel-Imperia see the bower as a place for pleasure and ease, which Bel-Imperia expresses by saying:

I fear no more; love now is all my thoughts.
Why sit we not? For pleasure asketh ease. (2.4.22-23)

All love and no work sure does sound like the Garden of Eden, right? But Kyd has other plans, which he makes clear by allowing the serpent to enter the garden way ahead of schedule.

The serpent in this case is Lorenzo, and he comes with reinforcements in the form of Balthazar, Pedringano, and Serberine. But instead of tempting the young lovers to do something bad, Lorenzo cuts to the chase and orchestrates a brutal stabbing and hanging.

At this point Edenic symbolism is used to let us know that we are way, way far from paradise. Kyd is basically saying, "If you think there was a loss of innocence in Paradise, you should see the bad stuff that's going on in Spain."

Paradise Revenged

As if this weren't enough, Kyd uses the bower symbolism in a later scene of further tragic loss and destruction. You'll recall that Isabella, Horatio's mother, returns to the scene of her son's murder to enact her own kind of revenge. In her own words, Isabella returns to the bower to "burn the roots from whence the rest is sprung" (4.2.9). In theology, the Garden of Eden is the place where all earthly good and evil originates. Isabella echoes this idea, but she's focused on all the bad stuff.

Her plan is to cut the evil off at the roots by destroying the garden. Before she does this, she says,

And as I curse this tree from further fruit,
So shall my womb be cursed for his sake,
And with this weapon will I wound the breast,
The hapless breast that gave Horatio suck. (4.2.35-38)

She keeps her sad promise by stabbing herself in the breast that once fed her beloved son. All you biblical experts out there are probably remembering that Eve (and the rest of womankind) was cursed with painful childbirth after getting kicked out of the Garden. Well, Isabella's pain as a mother has gone way beyond childbirth. And now she's getting revenge by symbolically destroying the Garden of Eden.

The Death of Life

When God kicked Adam and Eve out of the garden it was bad for them, but good for us. Right? Because the curse of childbirth means we all could be born—sorry, mom. When Isabella destroys the garden she links it to her own life-giving potential. Which means that she is symbolically taking her revenge on, well, life.

So, do you think the play takes a cynically dark stance on the state of humankind? Hmmm, could be.