The Spanish Tragedy - Tapa blanda

The first fully-fledged example of a revenge tragedy, the genre that became so influential in later Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, The Spanish Tragedy (1589) occupies a very special place in the history of English Renaissance drama. Hieronimo, Knight-Marshal of Spain during its war with Portugal, fails to obtain justice when his son is murdered for courting Bel-Imperia, the Duke of Castile's daughter, and decides to take justice into his own hands. In his tragically short life, Thomas Kyd wrote one play that has become a classic. In its day, it was one of the most popular on stage and in print, going through 10 printings in the 40 years after it was written. His language is not as accessible as Shakespeare's, but with careful reading, the attraction of the play to the late Elizabethan audience becomes clear. This was one of the first revenge tragedies. By the end of the play, almost everyone has been killed or committed suicide. There are many plot lines that have echoes in Shakespeare's Hamlet. Students of that play should find it worth their time to discover what is considered by many scholars to be an influence on William Shakespeare.

Thomas Kyd (1558-1594) was an English dramatist, the author of The Spanish Tragedy, and one of the most important figures in the development of Elizabethan drama. Although well known in his own time, Kyd fell into obscurity until 1773 when Thomas Hawkins (an early editor of The Spanish Tragedy) discovered that Kyd was named as its author by Thomas Heywood in his Apologie for Actors (1612). A hundred years later, scholars in Germany and England began to shed light on his life and work, including the controversial finding that he may have been the author of a Hamlet play pre-dating Shakespeare's.