Andrew Sofer
Absorbing Interests: Kyd's Bloody Handkerchief as Palimpsest
Volume 34.2, Summer 2000

Despite the inroads against idolatry made by Protestant reformers, Kyd's bloody handkerchief celebrates the enduring capacity of theatrical objects to seduce audiences through an apparently limitless series of metonymic substitutions. Kyd exploits a received visual language (the Elevation of the Host, the ocular proof of the sudarium in the Visitatio Sepulchri) for his own sensational ends. Holy cloth and sacred blood are stripped of their former theological efficacy, but—much like a painted-over rood screen—the old Catholic imagery bleeds through. For Kyd, it was necessary to travesty sacred objects in order to reclaim them for his sensational theater. While it is possible that some of The Spanish Tragedy's spectators left the playhouse with their suspicion of "Papist" idolatry confirmed, it is far more likely that Kyd's theatrically absorbing handkerchief, which substitutes an addictive "contract of sensation" for the late medieval "contract of transformation," thrilled its audience and left it thirsting for fresh blood. Such a hypothesis seems confirmed by the slew of bloody handkerchiefs on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage that followed in Kyd's wake.

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