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Kyd is arguably Shakespeare's most important tragic predecessor. Brilliantly fusing the drama of the academic and popular traditions, Thomas Kyd's plays are of central importance for understanding how the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries came about. Called 'an extraordinary dramatic … genius' by T.S. Eliot, Thomas Kyd invented the revenge tragedy genre that culminated in Shakespeare's Hamlet some twelve years later.
In this study, The Spanish Tragedy – the most popular of all plays on the English Renaissance stage – receives the extensive scholarly and critical treatment it deserves, including a full reception and modern stage history. Yet as Erne shows, Thomas Kyd is much more than the author of a single masterpiece. Don Horatio (partly extant in The First Part of Hieronimo), the lost early Hamlet, Soliman and Perseda, and Cornelia all belong to what emerges in this work as a coherent dramatic oeuvre.
This groundbreaking study is now in paperback.
Introduction
1. Don Horatio and The First Part of Hieronimo
2. The Spanish Tragedy: an introduction
3. The Spanish Tragedy: origins
4. The Spanish Tragedy: framing revenge
5. The Spanish Tragedy: additions, adaptations, modern stage history
6. Hamlet
7. Soliman and Perseda: an introduction
8. Soliman and Perseda: the play and its making
9. Cornelia
10. Other works and apocrypha
Appendix: Kyd's patron
Select Bibliography
Index