Thomas Kyd’s Verbal Borrowing from Tito Vespasiano Strozzi in The Spanish Tragedy

Extract

In The Spanish Tragedy I.iii.15–18, the Viceroy of Portugal speaks three lines in Latin to better express his sorrow:

Qui iacet in terra non habet unde cadat.

In me consumpsit vires fortuna nocendo;

Nil superest ut iam possit obesse magis.¹

In Clara Calvo and Jesús Tronch’s translation: ‘He who lies on the ground has no place to fall from. In me, Fortune has exhausted her power to harm; nothing remains that can injure me any further’. All modern editors of The Spanish Tragedy indicate that these lines are an example of Kyd’s habit of interweaving different Latin quotations: the first line derives from an often-anthologised aphorism by Alain de Lille, while the second seems to be ‘from Seneca’s Agamemnon 697–8’² when Cassandra laments: ‘nec, si velint saevire, quo noceant habent./Fortuna vires ipsa consumpsit suas’.³ Instead, the third line has been interpreted as ‘presumably Kyd’s own composition’:⁴ ‘Kyd may have devised the third [line] himself’.⁵ In the most recent edition of the play, Brian Vickers comments that this line is ‘Kyd’s own composition, unifying the two preceding allusions into an elegiac couplet, in which the first line is in dactylic hexameter, the second in dactylic pentameter’.⁶