Professors Alice Dailey and Chelsea Phillips win GRASP award: “The Spanish Tragedy: Artist Residency and Archive”

Professors Alice Dailey and Chelsea Phillips (Department of Theater) won a $15,000 Grant for Researchers for Arts and Sciences Professors from the College of Arts and Sciences to support a year-long exploration of The Spanish Tragedy.  Specifically, the grant will enable them to have a guest artist in residence next year and to archive the work generated by the project.  Graduate students can participate in this project by taking the fall course, THE 8200 Legacies of Revenge in Drama, Fiction, Comics, and Film, and the corresponding spring course which will stage the play. Students are not required to take both fall and spring courses, but it is encouraged.

From the successful grant application:

As the play that introduced revenge as a tragic motive to the Renaissance stage, The Spanish Tragedy has had an enormous influence on the representation of revenge in the anglophile tradition, an influence that stretches from Shakespeare’s Hamlet (c. 1600) to contemporary comic books and television epics such as Game of Thrones (2011-19).  It is often studied, but for both stylistic and technical reasons, it is infrequently staged.  This means that opportunities to examine The Spanish Tragedy as a fully-fledged piece of theater—as a play being played, embodied by actors and spoken aloud in Kyd’s iambic pentameter, the verse form that would go on to become the indelible rhythm of Shakespearean drama—are exceedingly rare.  On the one hand, this makes our staging of particular interest to a large community both on campus and off.  Villanova community members who are familiar with the play—from Father Peter to Theater faculty and students to our undergraduate theater groups—have responded with overwhelming enthusiasm about our producing it here at Villanova, and colleagues in English and Theater from area universities and beyond are excited for the opportunity that our production will create to study this play “on its feet.”  On the other hand, it means we are entering relatively uncharted territory.  One can find any number of book-length studies on how to perform Shakespeare’s works; there are only a handful of essays on performing those of Thomas Kyd.

The Spanish Tragedy, like other plays of its era, is written in iambic pentameter, a metrical structure that demands greater breath support and control than everyday speech and that requires time in rehearsal to understand and execute.  The play also employs oratorical strategies that were taught in 16^th-century English grammar schools and universities, such as formal rhetorical figures, Latin quotation, and classical allusions, all of which contribute to the generation of character and meaning.  Understanding and using these features of the language will be key to performing the play successfully.  The fall undergraduate and graduate courses, which will form the conventional academic foundation for the project, will explore the play’s literary background—its roots in Senecan tragedy and its direct descendants in English Renaissance drama—as well as its cognates in contemporary culture, including literature, art, television, and film. Students will use this background to edit the text of The Spanish Tragedy for performance and to propose production designs for various components of the play. 

            In short, the fall will prepare enrolled students to understand the play intellectually. As we move into the rehearsal process, however, it will be necessary to translate that understanding into embodied mastery of the language and story.  To do this, we propose the same model theater workers have used for centuries, including during the English Renaissance: apprenticeship with a senior artist.  We propose an artistic residency for an experienced performer who has not only acted in every play in the Shakespearean canon but also, crucially, in the plays of many of his contemporaries.  The residency will take place in spring 2024, offering invaluable embodied, performance-based knowledge of English Renaissance plays to our students during rehearsal.