The Spanish Tragedy Memory and the Past Quotes

Did you know that Moby Dick starts with the classically famous line, "Call me Ishmael."? But what if it started like this: "When I was alive, they called me Ishmael."? Yeah, we just mangled one of the most important lines in literature, but we do so to make a point.

Our first point is to get you thinking about why a dead guy speaks the first words of the drama. From the start, the play obviously wants to get you thinking about memory and the past. And in this play the past is a living and almost breathing force that leads characters to lose their minds, kill other characters, and commit suicide. So we might begin to ask ourselves if there's a better way for characters to process memories. As moderns we could always go to therapy. But what are the options for the characters in the play? Does everything go wrong because of a corrupt legal system? Or is human memory in its most raw form inherently dangerous?

This passage is a tough read, so allow us to Shmoop it up a bit. Here we get the ghost of Andrea describing a recalled conversation between the underworld dudes who try and decide where he should go in the afterlife. The first dude, Minos, makes the point that Andrea lived and died for love. And then the next dude, Aeacus, hears his point and says something like, "then let him eternally reside with lovers for his afterlife." But then the awesomely named Rhadamanth counters that Andrea died a warrior, making it unseemly for him to live forever with lovers.

Quite the quandary, right? And they never solve this problem. Which leaves us to consider how the memory of life should live in eternity. All of this informs us to take a closer look at revenge in a play where memories of crimes spur characters to pursue violently fitting punishments. If the dudes from the underworld can't figure all this out, how can we expect humans to rightly handle the task. If revenge is about satisfying bad memories, expect the outcome to be messy.

Here we get a Spanish general telling his king how Horatio beat the Portuguese prince off his horse. (Or does he? More on that in a second.) This memorial reconstruction is important because later in the scene we get an entirely different account from Lorenzo, who claims that he deserves final credit for downing Balthazar. Sure, Lorenzo is a liar, killer, and jerk. But memory can be a crazy thing, right?

For example, maybe the general has some memory issues. Ever heard of "the fog of war?" Conspiracy theorists and close readers will notice that the general uses passive voice while describing the final outcome (you know, that thing your teachers are always warning you about). Take a look: "But straight the Prince was beaten from his horse." Kyd's grammar teacher would suggest changing the line to read, "But straight Horatio beat the prince from his horse." But doing this would take the delicious ambiguity out of the sentence. All this leaves open the possibility that Lorenzo did intervene to take down Balthazar. And then a careful reader might start doubting all memorial accounts in the play. Or start doubting human memory altogether. But none of us read that suspiciously, do we?