Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Spanish Tragedy, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Revenge and Justice
Class, Gender, and Society
Love and Madness
Betrayal
Summary
Analysis
Meanwhile, Revenge has fallen asleep and the Ghost of Andrea, who is growing more and more impatient, wakes him. Revenge tells Andrea to leave him alone, but Andrea insists he wake up. Hieronimo is in league with Lorenzo, Andrea says, but Revenge assures him that he is not. Hieronimo will not forget about Horatio, and Revenge has not forgotten either.
Even Andrea believes that Hieronimo and Lorenzo’s embrace is sincere, but Hieronimo is only making nice so he can exact his revenge. The delayed action of revenge gives Hieronimo time to change his mind, but it also gives Lorenzo time to get comfortable and let his guard down. Hieronimo can’t enact his revenge if Lorenzo is suspicious, so he must make him think they are friends—yet another form of betrayal in the play.
Themes
Suddenly, a Dumb Show enters, performs a silent masque, and leaves. The Ghost of Andrea is confused, and he asks Revenge to explain. Revenge says that the actors have just performed a wedding, in which Hymen, the god of marriage, wearing a black robe over his saffron ones, extinguished the wedding torches in pots of blood.
A Dumb Show is a type of play, like the one Hieronimo stages in the beginning of the play, and this Dumb Show foreshadows the play-within-a-play from the last act, in which Hieronimo and Bel-Imperia finally exact their revenge against Balthazar and Lorenzo.
Themes
