5
ACTA NEOPHILOLOGICA  UDK: 821.111.09-21Kyd T.
DOI: 10.4312/an.54.1-2.5-14
The Price That Women in Renaissance  
Drama Pay for Taking Initiative: Isabella’s 
Soliloquy in Act IV of The Spanish Tragedy
Jonathan S. Rebetz
Abstract
The article is a close reading of Isabella’s soliloquy in act IV of The Spanish Tragedy by 
Thomas Kyd. Pointing at the difference between the role of women in Early Modern re-
ality and their function in contemporary plays, it demonstrates the perversity of a society 
where women were regularly marginalized and where, even in theatre, their transgressions 
of the boundaries imposed on them by the patriarchal social apparatus led to extremely 
unfavourable repercussions. Isabella, emotionally crushed by the foul murder of her son, 
decides in her helplessness to take her own life. In a world dominated by men, she does 
not quietly accept her passive role, but works within its limitations to become a character 
that takes action, albeit action that ends her life. Before making the symbolic gesture of 
stabbing herself, she exclaims against the circumstances which drove her to it. Her speech 
can be seen as one of the climactic points of the play.
Keywords: Renaissance drama, Senecan tragedy, Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, patri-
archy, soliloquy, suicide
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6 Jonathan S. Rebetz
INTRODUCTION
The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd is a play in the tradition of Senecan trage-
dy, and it is fairly loyal to its mother genre (Bevington 3). There are properties, 
however, that differentiate it from the prototypical Senecan play: it is meant to 
be staged; it disregards the unities of time, place, and action; and it brings the 
violence from behind the curtains into plain view. Violence itself is an impor-
tant part of the revenge tragedy, a genre that The Spanish Tragedy initiated (Lamb 
33–37), and in tandem with eloquent, powerful speeches written in perfect iam-
bic pentameter, it resonates particularly strikingly. One such powerful speech can 
be found in the second scene of act IV of The Spanish Tragedy. Isabella, driven to 
despair by the foul murder of her son and her husband’s seeming incompetence 
to revenge Horatio’s death, decides to end her life. She goes to the scene of the 
original crime, the garden of her own house, takes her anger out on the arbour in 
the garden where her son was hanged, calls once more upon Hieronimo to pursue 
the deaths of Horatio’s killers, and stabs herself in the chest. In her pre-suicide so-
liloquy, Isabella is equated to the arbour she destroys. The (double) perversity1 of 
laying harm first upon her symbolic self, then upon her physical self, reflects the 
perversity of a society in which women seemingly had no power to act, despite 
their irrepressible impulse to do so.
THE VOICE OF WOMEN AND THE DUTY OF KINGS
Act IV is the last act of the play. Previously, the Portuguese Viceroy’s son, Prince 
Balthazar, had led a rebellion for Portuguese independence, but his forces were 
defeated and he himself was taken prisoner by the oppressing nation. Lorenzo, 
the Spanish king’s nephew, and Horatio, son of the Knight Marshal, dispute over 
who captured Balthazar. Lorenzo essentially takes credit for something he had 
no part in, but the King nevertheless gives half of the spoils of victory to him. 
Furthermore, he leaves Balthazar in Lorenzo’s charge, which infuriates the real 
captor Horatio.
To complicate matters, Lorenzo’s sister Bel-Imperia falls in love with Hora-
tio (despite having previously loved his best friend Andrea, an officer who fell in 
battle under Balthazar’s sword), and all the while, Balthazar himself is becoming 
enamoured with Bel-Imperia. When Lorenzo discovers Horatio and Bel-Impe-
ria’s romantic connection, he does not dawdle but immediately starts convincing 
the Portuguese heir to help him to get rid of Horatio. This goes in line with the 
Spanish king’s decision that a marriage between Balthazar and Bel-imperia would 
1 Suicide was at the time seen as an abhorrent act and a deadly sin (Steltzer 67–68).
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7The Price That Women in Renaissance Drama Pay for Taking Initiative
be an excellent way to repair the peace with Portugal.2 Lorenzo and Balthazar 
calculatingly murder Horatio, stabbing him and hanging him from an arbour in 
his family’s garden. When Horatio’s parents find him thus assassinated, his moth-
er Isabella loses her mind. Even though her husband Hieronimo later learns the 
identity of their son’s killers and even though he is the Knight Marshal, the execu-
tor of the law, he cannot find justice for Horatio. Sadly, even his high office is none 
compared to the authority of the King – the King himself, it must be underscored, 
being tied by blood to one of the responsible parties.
In the second scene of act IV, Isabella, disappointed with her husband and the 
world, decides to end her life and stabs herself in the chest. Her tragic if self-in-
flicted demise foreshadows the violence that is to follow, but also, and more im-
portantly, sheds light on the helplessness of women in an aggressively male world. 
Renaissance women were treated legally and socially as inferior to men and had 
no obvious channel to voice their disagreement with this discriminatory order. Of 
course, “critiques of sexual inequality and tentative proposals for rectifying women’s 
inferior social roles” were nascent in 17th-century Europe, and they had started to 
pave the long way to equality (Gwyneth Ross 276–77), but the average genteel Re-
naissance woman’s voice was mainly restricted to her household, while the house-
hold was represented outwardly by the pater familias. As such, it was nearly impos-
sible for a woman to become a renowned philosopher of womanhood, a humanist 
fighter for the feminist cause, an intellectual star of literary salons. Such women 
did exist, and their names are now famous,3 but they are the brilliant exception to a 
rather unfair rule. Isabella of The Spanish Tragedy is unfortunately not one of them. 
She desperately has something to exclaim in a public forum but cannot not do so 
because of her situation as a woman. Wanting to express her tragic helplessness, her 
character turns to the audience with the most moving soliloquy of Kyd’s tragic play.
Isabella begins her speech by expressing her impatience and frustration, ex-
claiming against the “monstrous homicides” (4.2.1). Homicides can either be the 
persons committing murder or the acts of murder themselves. The ambiguity in 
meaning makes Isabella denounce both at the same time, which is efficient and 
carries much rhetorical weight. The idea is that homicide is a monstrous deed, 
which makes anyone performing it monstrous by association. A great portion of 
Isabella’s vocabulary, in fact, has several possible meanings; this makes her speech 
rich in allusion and metaphorical association. Line 2, for example, contains two 
graphically very similar words, piety and pity: “Since neither piety nor pity moves 
/ The King to justice or compassion” (4.2.2–3). Both emotions are associated more 
with the feminine than with the masculine, and indeed in Isabella’s eyes the King 
2 Indeed, a morganatic marriage between Horatio and Bel-Imperia would be much less fortuitous.
3 Christine de Pizan, Mary More, Batsua Makin, Lucrezia Marinella, to list just four.
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8 Jonathan S. Rebetz
does not feel them, or is at least unmoved by them. The two near-homographs 
become truly illustrative when we look at them closely. According to the Oxford 
English Dictionary,4 “piety” had two groups of meanings at the time when the 
play was written: one was related to “the quality of feeling or showing pity”, while 
the other was related to devotion, as in the “faithfulness to the duty naturally owed 
to someone”. The second definition adds a layer of meaning to what Isabella is 
conveying: it hints at the King’s duty as the sovereign to be reverent to God, the 
source of his power, and, accordingly, to rule justly, punishing those who deserve 
to be punished. Since “pity” not only means “the disposition to mercy or compas-
sion”, but also “a ground or cause for pity”, Isabella is implying that because the 
King is not acting compassionately despite having good cause to do so – in her 
mind, acting compassionately would mean finding and punishing Horatio’s mur-
derer – he is neglecting his divine duty.
Frustrated with the King’s passivity, Isabella decides to act herself, and in doing 
so, she transgresses the boundaries of her traditional gender role. Most Renais-
sance scholars agree that it was untypical of women in Early Modern society to 
undertake operations beyond the domestic sphere (Camden; Fletcher; Rose). Bib-
lical “evidence” in support of this hierarchy was often put forward,5 mainly, but not 
exclusively, because it was difficult to argue against the Holy Scriptures. And even 
though The Spanish Tragedy in its entirety does not closely observe a Christian vi-
sion of the world – its eschatological crux essentially being a Classical pagan one 
(Aggeler 330) – orthodox beliefs nevertheless pervade the work. The orthodox pa-
triarchal structure of Renaissance society meant that possibilities for women were 
very restricted: they had fewer legal rights, virtually no access to education, and no 
real professional opportunities. Their submission to male authority was regarded as 
a necessity and, as it was mentioned earlier, they were mostly limited to the con-
fines of their household. If decision-making and taking up various forms of action 
were tasks dispensed to men, women were expected to wait for male authorization 
or, better yet, intervention. This had been the case ever since the Middle Ages gave 
way to the Renaissance and “the relations of the sexes were restructured to one of 
female dependency and male domination” (Kelly 20). Even though she was “in 
charge” of her house and household, the married woman was legally still in potes-
tate mariti.6 Such a subdued position was naturally a great source of frustration for 
powerful women, as can be seen in the example of Isabella.
4 All subsequent definitions of lexical items are taken from that source.
5 The commonest references were the story of Adam and Eve from Genesis (e.g. Gen 2:5–7 and Gen 
2:15–24) and the letters of Saint Paul (e.g. Eph 5:22–30 and Col 3:18–19).
6 Before getting married, of course, she was under the authority of her father. The only women who 
did not have to answer to anyone in this manner and who enjoyed relative independence were 
widows.
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9The Price That Women in Renaissance Drama Pay for Taking Initiative
ISABELLA’S ACTION AND ITS SYMBOLISM
Isabella of The Spanish Tragedy is torn between being an active and being a passive 
character. Working within the limitations of being a woman, she wants to “re-
venge [herself ] upon [the] place / Where thus they murdered [her] beloved son” 
(4.2.4–5). Since on her own she is unable to prosecute the culprits legally or kill 
them in a duel (or some other form of physical confrontation),7 the main object of 
her wrath becomes the garden arbour. One could imagine this arbour as “a bower 
or shady retreat, of which the sides and roof are formed by trees and shrubs close-
ly planted or intertwined” or as “lattice-work covered with climbing shrubs and 
plants”. Either explanation works within the context of this speech and play. The 
former is supported by the use of vocabulary in the passage, while the latter would 
be easier to build and use onstage.8 The arbour reappears several times in the play 
and at this point of the narrative symbolically refers both to the past and to the 
future. Horatio was hanged from it, so it symbolizes him, the unfair circumstances 
of his death, and, through synecdoche, death itself.9
As for its future signification, it is when Isabella revisits the arbour that the 
reader gets a hint at what she is about to do. Even without the connection to the 
two previous deaths, one might suspect the development of the scene: an arbour, 
being an arch-like construction, adopts the symbolism of the arch; arches, looking 
somewhat like doors, are symbolic passageways, symbols of transition (O’Connell 
and Airey 10), and since transition in tragedy is seldom something other than 
death, the arbour is a foreshadowing of Isabella’s suicide. It emphasizes Isabella’s 
determination to take action, even if this means her simultaneous demise. The 
stage directions call for Isabella to cut down this arbour while she exclaims, 
Down with these branches and these loathsome boughs
Of this unfortunate and fatal pine!
Down with them, Isabella, rend them up. (4.2.6–8)
Then, in line 9, Isabella mentions burning “the roots from whence the rest is 
sprung”. This directly refers to the roots of the growth on the arbour, but it is 
7 As a woman she would not be educated at arms.
8 The arbour they used in the Renaissance production would likely have looked like a hybrid between 
the two kinds of arbours described above, but a question arises when talking about the staging of 
this particular scene. Would Isabella actually destroy the arbour onstage? Two arguments speak 
against this supposition: one is pecuniary (despite it being made of wood, building a new arbour 
for every performance would be simply too expensive and inefficient), while the other is dramatur-
gical (the noise of axing down the arbour would interfere with the gravitas of the words being said, 
possibly even drowning them out).
9 This symbol is enhanced when the arbour likely reappears as the gallows where Pendringano is executed.
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10 Jonathan S. Rebetz
also a metaphor later repeated in lines 35 and 36 that go: “And as I curse this tree 
from further fruit, / So shall my womb be cursèd for his sake.” It is not hard to 
see that in both cases Isabella is making a metaphorical parallel between a woman 
and a fruit-bearing tree. In Latin, the word for tree, arbor,10 is feminine because it 
gives birth to leaves and fruit.11 Both women and trees are begetting entities, so 
to speak. Line 9 is a variation of this metaphor. It replaces (α1) the tree and (β1) 
its fruits by (α2) the roots and (β2) the parts of the tree that are not the roots but 
spring from the roots. Isabella sees herself as the roots that gave birth to Horatio, 
but more broadly, she identifies herself with the arbour in its entirety. This identi-
fication is at the very heart of her speech. By cursing and felling the arbour which 
has, she finds, complotted her misery, she is, in fact, attacking herself. With this 
desperate act she is pointing at the twistedness of the society that does not leave 
her any alternative ways of asserting that she is an active character.
A woman taking an active role in the action of the play is actually a crucial me-
chanic in Renaissance drama. In many plays of the period, “women […] seem con-
tinually to be evading what is expected of them” (Eisaman Maus and Bevington 
xxxvii), sometimes to a greater and sometimes to a minor extent. If Isabella does 
not exactly take action against the murderers of her son, she does not mourn in a 
closed chamber either. She will not be one of those grieving mothers whose loss has 
rendered them hopeless and inert, she will not passively pine away in silence and 
submission – she will do something, even if it is just symbolic. This break with social 
convention is not unique to her character. In Renaissance drama – as opposed to 
contemporary Early Modern reality – it is quite common for women to act contrary 
to the expectations of the misogynous society. By doing so, they rise above the mun-
dane and often render themselves more interesting than their male counterparts 
(against whom they have, among other things, a numerical disadvantage12).
Even if one restricts oneself to The Spanish Tragedy, one can find another ex-
ample of such female unconventionality. Bel-Imperia is in fact even more re-
bellious than Isabella. She constantly defies her male relations: first by taking a 
morganatic lover, then, after the former dies, by getting involved with his friend 
despite all interdictions. Following her involuntary betrothal to the Prince of 
Portugal, she ruins the wedding by first killing the Prince, then herself. In the 
context of Renaissance theatre in general, “play after play contains unforgettable 
10 The Latin arbor is in fact not an etymological predecessor, but merely a distant cousin of the En-
glish arbour. The OED traces the origins of arbour to the Latin herbarium, a collection of grass and 
herbs. It is evident that the word has undergone great change of signification and form.
11 Grammatical gender in Latin is interestingly based partly on semantic criteria, which is relatively 
rare and does not hold true for languages that developed from Latin (cf. French un arbre).
12 For almost all English Renaissance plays it holds true that there are fewer female roles than there 
are male roles.
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11The Price That Women in Renaissance Drama Pay for Taking Initiative
portraits of strong-minded, articulate, intelligent women [whose] very transgres-
siveness makes them dramatically interesting” (Eisaman Maus and Bevington 
xxxviii). In fact, their transgressions frequently prove decisive for the denoue-
ment. They themselves, however, are dealt with in the spirit of the time: one 
need only remember the fates of the Duchess in The Duchess of Malfi and Bea-
trice-Joanna in The Changeling, who “elude patriarchal control by joining them-
selves to servingmen […] and transgress both class and gender hierarchies” (Su-
zuki 43). They are severely punished for their guilt – guilt, which from today’s 
perspective is dubious at best.
Returning to the soliloquy of Act IV, when Isabella enumerates the parts of a 
tree, this is a clear demonstration of her earnest wish to take action:
I will not leave a root, a stalk, a tree,
A bough, a branch, a blossom, nor a leaf,
No, not an herb within this garden plot. (4.2.10–13) 
After she has razed the arbour with the ground, she wants that piece of garden to 
stay forever empty and unproductive (again, she is playing with the double mean-
ing of words, “fruitless” signifying both). Her wish is that the soil there remain 
barren and that “whosoever / imagines not to keep it unmanured,” (4.2.14–15) be 
blissless. The unnatural stress in lines 14 and 15 makes for an eerie tone that goes 
very well with her curse: the traditional foot in Renaissance drama is an iamb, re-
peated five times, but lines 14 and 15 both begin with a trochee, and only then 
continue with four iambs. This breaks up the rhythm in a peculiar, cacophonous 
way. There is also a metaphor hidden in lines 14–16: just as Hieronimo is not 
tending to justice for their son, no one should take care of the garden.
Strong imagery follows to support this demand. All the senses are evoked: the 
rustling wind can be heard and felt, the unpleasant odours smelled, the swirling 
snakes seen. All will keep away from this ungodly place “for fear to be infect”. The 
word infect means not only “tainted with disease”, as from a snake bite, but also 
“morally corrupted”. Isabella suggests that even by approaching, people could be-
come contaminated with vice. They will therefore rather stand at a distance and 
solemnly discuss the importance of the unlucky garden plot. The plot is, of course, 
unlucky through association to Horatio. Isabella exclaims: “Ay, here he died, and 
here I him embrace. / See where his ghost solicits with his wounds / Revenge on 
her that should revenge his death!” (4.2.23–25). The use of the present tense in 
line 23 is meaningful. She says “embrace”, not “embraced”. She is not referring to 
scene 2.5, where she and Hieronimo found Horatio in the garden and discovered 
he was dead. The tense indicates that she is embracing Horatio as she speaks, al-
though we know he is not there anymore. Horatio is on a different metaphysical 
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12 Jonathan S. Rebetz
plane, but she can nonetheless see him. Because she is so close to death herself, 
the boundaries between this world and the other are blurred for her, so she sees 
Horatio’s ghost and reads in his wounds a cry for vengeance – vengeance that she 
as a woman sadly cannot bring to fruition.
Isabella then hails Hieronimo, declaring that “sorrow and despair hath cit-
ed [her] to hear Horatio plead with Rhadamanth” (4.2.27–28). Her careful use 
of law-specific vocabulary in lines 22–27 is very important. She says that Hora-
tio’s ghost solicits, the personified Sorrow and Despair cite, and Horatio himself 
pleads. These evocations of the judiciary process put her – in anachronistic terms, 
of course – in the middle of a courtroom, where she, too, is on trial. She is being 
accused of not avenging Horatio’s death, although this accusation is clearly unfair. 
Hieronimo is the male character, he is the one with administrative power, he is 
the one with the ability to administer justice, he is the one who can make him-
self heard outside the sphere of his household. Alas, he does not do so because he 
is too afraid of the king. Not acting despite having the ability to act, he is failing 
their son more than Isabella is failing him by committing suicide. It is no wonder 
Isabella chides Hieronimo for this with her final words:
Make haste, Hieronimo, to hold excused
Thy negligence in pursuit of their deaths
Whose hateful wroth bereaved [Horatio] of his breath.
Ah, nay thou dost delay their deaths,
Forgives the murderers of thy noble son,
And none but I bestir me – to no end. (4.2.29–34)
CONCLUSION
Isabella – despite her passive role as a woman and even though it was ultimately 
to no avail – still did more than the (supposedly) active male Hieronimo. With 
a terrifying symbolic gesture she showed that the murder of her son remained 
unpunished. Her misplaced retribution through self-sacrifice speaks strongly of 
the time’s societal structure: it points out the inability of women to voice their 
grievances, help themselves, take action into their own hands, and it stresses 
their reliance on men to act in their stead. In this light, Isabella’s son’s solicita-
tion for her to do something – which is of course only a figment of her grief-
struck imagination – is unfair. Horatio pressures Isabella into action, knowing 
perfectly well she cannot act.
As the close reading of this passage has proved, Isabella is a hapless victim 
of a world dominated by male violence, forced to destroy herself because of the 
sins of others. Nevertheless, what she does can readily be described as active and 
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13The Price That Women in Renaissance Drama Pay for Taking Initiative
dynamic, even if her actions fall somewhat short of Bel-Imperia’s. But what unites 
both is the headlong termination of their earthly existence, which comes hand 
in hand with their transgression of gender boundaries and links them to other 
“disorderly” women in Renaissance drama. Speaking in more general terms, The 
Spanish Tragedy reveals the paradox of women’s marginalization in contemporary 
reality and their prominence in dramatic works, even if that prominence always 
comes at an excessively high price.
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Jonathan S. Rebetz
University of Ljubljana
jonathan.rebetz@student.uni-lj.si
Cena, ki jo morajo ženske v renesančni drami plačati, če prevzamejo 
pobudo: Izabelin samogovor v IV� dejanju Španske tragedije
Prispevek je poglobljena analiza Izabelinega samogovora v IV. dejanju Španske tragedije 
Thomasa Kyda. Članek pokaže razkorak med podrejeno vlogo žensk v renesančni dobi 
in njihovo pomembno funkcijo v dramskih delih tistega časa ter obelodani perveznost 
družbe, kjer so bile ženske marginalizirane in kjer je celo v dramatiki vsakršna prestopitev 
mej, ki jim jih je določil patriarhat, imela zanje izjemno neugodne posledice. Izabela, ki jo 
čustveno grudi pokvarjeni umor njenega sina, se v svoji nemoči odloči, da si bo vzela živ-
ljenje. V svetu, ki ga vodijo moški, glasno zavrne svojo predpisano pasivno vlogo in znotraj 
njenih omejitev najde dejanje, ki bo vsaj na simbolični ravni aktivno. Preden se zabode, 
vzklikne proti okoliščinam, ki ji vežejo roke in so jo do tega pripeljale. Njen samogovor je 
ena klimaktičnih točk dramskega dela.
Ključne besede: renesančna dramatika, seneška tragedija, Thomas Kyd, Španska tragedija, 
patriarhat, samogovor, samomor
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