The Spanish Tragedy

Content Warning: This section of the guide describes and analyzes the source text’s depiction of violence, murder, self-harm, and death by suicide. 

In Hieronimo’s garden is a bower, a pleasant area enclosed by trees and vines. Typically, this would be a place for recreation—as Hieronimo says, upon finding Horatio’s corpse hanged in the tree, “This place was made for pleasure, not for death” (2.5.12). However, Lorenzo and Balthazar turn the bower into a crime scene, subverting its normal connotation and transforming it into a symbol of death, corruption, and lost innocence. 

When Lorenzo and Balthazar kill Horatio, Lorenzo inverts the language of growth and reproduction usually associated with gardens, saying, “Aye, thus, and thus: these are the fruits of love” (2.4.56) as he stabs him. In addition to demonstrating Lorenzo’s cruelty, his line is a morbid joke: Horatio hangs from a tree like a fruit, and “Although his life were still ambitious-proud / Yet is he at the highest now he is dead” (2.4.60-61). While he eclipsed Lorenzo in honor and feats of arms while he lived, in death, he is physically higher up than he has ever been.