RHETORIC AND TRUTH IN THE SPANISH TRAGEDY

Rhetoric was an essential discipline in the Renaissance to fully understand plays such as Thomas Kyds The Spanish Tragedy. Paying special attention to the figurative devices present in the play, this paper intends to be a new contribution to the study of this rhetorical language in Kyds tragedy. I will mainly focus my study on the descriptions of battles that appear in the first act of the play, and on how these descriptions seem to be tightly connected to the Humanist rhetorical tradition revised by Erasmus in his De Copia. When describing the terms enargeia and evidentia, Erasmus is constantly concerned with the relationship between words and things, emphasising in that way the importance of truth-telling as expressed by means of an accurate rhetorical language. Rhetorical accuracy, words and things are therefore bound and interconnected, which renders language a vital tool for communicating faithful information. Following this leading idea offered by Erasmus, this paper seeks to provide a new perspective of how the language and richness in discourse used to describe the battle in The Spanish Tragedy are related to Erasmus interest in shaping the thoughts with a trustworthy and accurate rhetoric