Anatomy of an Actress: Bel-imperia as Tragic Diva
Bel-imperia is a star player in The Spanish Tragedy, using bravura theatricality as she drives the plot forward and seeks revenge for the deaths of two lovers. With this novel role Kyd invokes the virtuosic performances of professional actresses, who first emerged in the commedia dell’arte in Italy in the 1560s. Their scenes of pathos and passion extended the arte’s reach beyond comedy to tragicomedies and tragedies. Playwrights and actors began to create new female-centered plays to showcase the actress’s presence and skills. This trend eventually affected the all-male stage, nowhere more clearly than in The Spanish Tragedy. Kyd refers explicitly to the Italian troupes, which gained international fame and royal patrons performing both improvised plays based on scenarios and fully scripted and memorized five-act plays. He built an innamorata in the Italian mode, translating her to the English stage with spectacular scenes mingling witty eroticism and tragic violence. Kyd stresses her virtuosity and multi-generic range while spinning a web of allusions to far-flung spheres featuring royal women and courtly politics, mixed-gender players and playing, and dramatic innovations in Italy, France, and Spain. The Spanish Tragedy shows that English playwrights used models forged abroad to fashion Italian-style leading “women” just as the commercial stages were striving to expand the repertory, attract paying audiences, and satisfy courtly tastes. Bel-imperia, played by a boy, is Kyd’s bold attempt to answer Hieronymo’s question: “For what’s a play without a woman in it?”
Correcting Justice with Vengeance in The Spanish Tragedy
The crux of The Spanish Tragedy, and to a certain extent the revenge genre, is articulated in this passage, whereby revengers seek justice in an unjust world, amid a ‘mass of public wrongs’. This heartfelt plea comes in the wake of Horatio’s murder, as Hieronimo struggles to make sense of the ‘lively form of death’ he has discovered in the arbor (3.2.2). Kyd is quick to bring his audience’s attention to the universal, almost symbolic, nature of Horatio’s death. Within two hundred lines of discovering his son’s body, Hieronimo expresses the intertwined nature of vengeance and justice, in a rhetoric that owes more to Fortescue than to Seneca. His utterance relates directly to the rhetoric of law as the bulwark of civilisation, a rhetoric that continually reminded citizens how without law ‘all kingdoms and estates would be brought to confucyon, and all humane society would be dissolved’.1 Compare William Lambarde’s charge to a quarter session jury in 1595, when he says: 
[I]f these good laws were not, our whole course and conversation should be disturbed and could be nothing else but a continual confusion, horror, and a living death.2 
Lambarde’s ‘living death’ is literalised by Kyd in the ‘lively form of death’ that is Horatio’s corpse, presenting us with a world ‘[c]onfused and filled with murder and misdeeds’.
Barbarians, Gentlemen and Players : A Sociological Study of the Development of Rugby Football
Part I: Folk Antecedents and Transitional Forms of Football in the Public Schools 1. The folk antecedents of modern rugby and their decline 2. Football in the early 19th century public schools Part II: The Modernisation of Rugby Football 3. The preconditions for modernization: embourgeoisement and public school reform 4. The incipient modernization of rugby football 5. The 'civilising process' and the formation of the RFU. 6. The democratization of rugby football. 7. Professionalisation and the amateur response. 8. The split. 9. The class structure and the professionalisation of British sport. Part III: The Development of Rugby Football as a Modern Sport 10. The professionalisation of rugby league. 11. Rugby union as a modern sport: bureaucracy, gate-taking clubs and the swansong of amateurism. Conclusion: Sociological Reflections on the Crisis in Modern Sport