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This article focuses on Bel-Imperia’s power of playing which matches or even replaces Hieronimo’s authorial privilege in The Spanish Tragedy (c.1587). I first provide an overview of the early modern ideas about the mouth, suggesting that Kyd and his contemporaries turned to the mouth/tongue conceit for a model of the actor’s trade. Ranging from antitheatrical tracts to a dramatist’ letter to the Master of the Revels, the period’s writings examined here figured the actor as the mouth passively repeating the author’s writing. Puppet theater was an especially charged space, linking ventriloquized wooden objects not only to the passivity of actors, but also to their surprising counter-attack. I briefly explore Ben Jonson’s Bartholmew Fair and its depiction of a farcical puppet show. In doing so, I suggest that the identification between the puppet and the living actor crucially shaped the puppet’s attraction for playwrights exploring the actor’s potential autonomy. In the second section, I trace The Spanish Tragedy’s implicit allusions to puppetry elements. Recognizing its borrowings of the ‘low’ theatrical mode shows Kyd turning Bel-Imperia from a receptive puppet of Hieronimo’s blood-seeking spectacle into a glamorous, and violently murderous, actor. She throws off the showman’s intervention and becomes the possessor of the actor’s tongue. Finally, the paper provides a re-reading of Hieronimo’s climactic tongue-cutting in relation to Bel-Imperia’s improvisation. Highlighting the importance of intra-company collaboration and the actor’s representational power, I suggest that The Spanish Tragedy breaks with the author’s exceptionalism and gestures towards an alternative way of conceiving dramatic authorship.
