Daryna Borovets Group 2.

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Thomas Kyd

BORN: 1558, London, England

DIED: 1594, London, England

NATIONALITY: British

GENRE: Drama

MAJOR WORKS:
Ur-Hamlet (c. 1589)
The Spanish Tragedy (1592)
Cornelia (1594)
The Truth of the Most Wicked and Secret Murdering of John Brewen (1592)

Overview

Although little is documented in the historical record of Thomas Kyd's life and
work, it is clear that he was a playwright who made important contributions to the
repertoire of the public playhouse during the Elizabethan era and beyond. Kyd is
best known for The Spanish Tragedy, a great popular success that established the
genre of “revenge tragedies” and greatly influenced the course of English drama.

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Works In Biographical And Historical Context

Mysterious Beginnings There exists very little evidence of Kyd's life as context

for his influence on Elizabethan drama. Except for one spectacular event—his
arrest for libel in 1593—the biographical record is uncertain.

Kyd lived his entire life during the Elizabethan era, the time period during which
Queen Elizabeth I ruled England and Ireland. The era lasted from 1558 until her
death in 1603, and was most notable for two great accomplishments: The rise of
British sea superiority, demonstrated by both the British defeat of the Spanish
Armada in 1588 and the extensive oceanic explorations of Francis Drake and Sir
Walter Raleigh; and the advancement of English theater to a popular and enduring
art form, demonstrated by the works of William Shakespeare and Christopher
Marlowe.

Historians believe that an infant named Thomas Kyd, baptized on November 6,

1558, is the playwright; if so, then he would be the son of Francis Kyd, a London
secretary of some standing, and his wife, Anna. Thomas was enrolled in 1565 at
Merchant Taylors' School, and there is no evidence of college attendance. There is
also little trace of his name in the theatrical records. There is one notice that
associates him with the Queen's Company during the period 1583–1585. The
Spanish Tragedy was first published in 1592, anonymously. Scholars can trace its
authorship only because of three lines quoted and attributed by Thomas
Heywood in his Apology for Actors (1612). For all its popularity, the play was
never printed under Kyd's name until the eighteenth century. Kyd is also often
attributed a 1588 translation of Torquato Tasso's Il Padre di Famiglia. Scholars are
certain, however, that Kyd produced a translation of Robert Garnier's Cornélie in
1594.

A Brief Flash of Fame This almost invisible life suddenly flared in May 1593
with Kyd's arrest for the publication of a group of anonymous libels and alleged
atheistic statements. Kyd denied the charges and shifted the blame to his one-time
housemate, the playwright Christopher Marlowe, claiming that some of their
papers got shuffled together. Marlowe was summoned by the law soon after Kyd's
arrest, then released on the condition that he report back daily, but soon afterward
Marlowe was killed in an apparent dispute over a tavern bill. Kyd was released, but
he never fully recovered his health or his literary reputation. In one of his letters,
Kyd refers to his “pains and undeserved tortures,” presumably suffered during
interrogation. He died one year later at the age of thirty-five, in poverty, leaving no
trace of his burial.

The Elizabethan era saw many struggles between the various European powers as
they fought over trade routes across the ocean. One notable event was Spain's
victory over Portugal in 1592, which is the historical setting for The Spanish
Tragedy. Using an unusual method for an Elizabethan dramatist, Kyd seems to
have worked from no particular source for the play, so he was free to invent his
characters and situations. It would probably be misleading, however, to look for
too much influence from history or Kyd's personal life in the content of The
Spanish Tragedy. Neither the main plot nor a somewhat tangential Portuguese
subplot is based on any specific event. Some details show a casual acquaintance
with military history and Spanish geography, and a few incidents may or may not
have been inspired by English politics. For the most part, however, Kyd should be
given credit for his originality and invention.

Works In Literary Context

Influence on Hamlet Thomas Kyd's place in the history of English Renaissance

drama is secured by one surviving play, The Spanish Tragedy. But Kyd's most
lasting influence has come from a play that no longer exists—even the title is
unknown.

There is evidence that Kyd wrote a play known simply as the Ur-Hamlet, which
was the immediate source for William Shakespeare's Hamlet. There is no sign that
Kyd's play was ever printed. Reconstructions of the play rely heavily on the strong
similarities between Shakespeare's Hamlet and The Spanish Tragedy and how they
each differ from the Danish source material for the original Hamlet story. The
device of the play-within-a-play, a key feature of Hamlet and many other
Elizabethan dramas, probably began with Kyd's Ur-Hamlet and The Spanish
Tragedy. It seems reasonable as well to credit Kyd's Ur-Hamlet with introducing
the character of Hamlet's father's ghost, and the addition of Hamlet's own death
was also probably Kyd's innovation. Shakespeare's Hamlet has gone on to be the
most performed, admired, adapted, and studied play in the history of world drama,
and many have claimed it to be one of the greatest—if not the greatest—single
pieces of English literature.

The Revenge Tragedy Kyd helped to formulate and popularize revenge tragedies,

the dominant mode of drama throughout the Elizabethan period. Loosely inspired
by the bloody tragedies of the classical Roman dramatist Seneca (4 bce–ce 65),
revenge tragedies tended to feature a hero driven by vengeance, a ghost of a
murdered kinsman who appears and demands justice, characters going mad or
feigning madness, at least one scene in a graveyard, plenty of sword fighting and
imaginative uses of gore (mutilation, severed limbs, cannibalism, etc.), and scenes
of physical or mental torture. Just as horror movies are often blockbusters today,
Kyd's formula for revenge tragedy proved to be box office dynamite. The more the
Puritans objected to its immorality and bad influence, the more people packed the
theaters.

From 1660 into the eighteenth century, fashion championed “heroic tragedies” that
showed high-minded heroes choosing between their responsibilities to their loved
ones and their duty to their country (the correct choice for the men was always
duty to country; for the women, it was responsibilities to loved ones). Even in their
stark differences to the violence and madness of the revenge tragedies, these plays
show the influence of The Spanish Tragedy—by trying to establish their own
originality and cultural relevance for a new “enlightenment” age. These plays self-
consciously used Kyd's work as a model for everything they tried not to be.
Revenge was often a theme in nineteenth-century drama, although the context was
more often domestic and sentimental.

Works In Critical Context

Recent scholarship on Kyd often falls into the categories of either theatrical
performance studies or sociopolitical interpretations. The Spanish Tragedy is a
revealing choice to examine what Elizabethan performance may have looked like.
Richard Kohler has found the play's language to give valuable evidence for staging
methods, and the popularity of the play and its violent special effects illuminate the
experience of play going during the period.

New Historicism and cultural studies have often turned to Renaissance literature in
recent years, following the lead of Stephen Greenblatt, a founder of New
Historicism and noted Shakespeare scholar. This approach often searches for ways
in which literature influences culture as much as culture influences literature,
 breaking down the barriers between “text” and “context.” For example, New
Historicists have pointed out a parallel between the violence of The Spanish
Tragedy and the form of public executions in sixteenth-century London.
Greenblatt, along with Molly Smith, demonstrates how power has a distinctly
theatrical function during Elizabeth's reign, and Kyd more than any other dramatist
set the form for how power relates to vengeance, madness, and personal tragedy.
James Shapiro, on the other hand, points out how The Spanish Tragedy can also be
used to challenge many of those assumed relationships.

Political theorists have often observed the British nationalism of The Spanish
Tragedy in the form of its Spanish and Catholic prejudices. Scholars such as Eric
Griffin and Carla Mazzio and have studied the play for how it reveals the anxiety
and ambiguity that goes along with increasing nationalism, as was the case in
Elizabeth's England, particularly after her navy defeated the Spanish Armada in
1588.

Responses To Literature

1. Evaluate the rhetoric of The Spanish Tragedy. What are some of the great
speeches and monologues from the characters, particularly Hieronimo? How are
they structured, what rhetorical devices do they use, and how exactly do they
achieve their effect? If you like, research what an educated Elizabethan would have
known and expected about rhetoric in the theater and elsewhere.
2. Evaluate Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and Hamlet as revenge tragedies in
light of their debt to The Spanish Tragedy. What do these two Shakespeare plays
share, and how are they different? Can the elements of both these similarities and
differences be found in The Spanish Tragedy?
3. Do you think that The Spanish Tragedy endorses or condemns the idea of
taking the law into your own hands and finding justice through violent revenge?
Why?
4. Do some research on the nature of “special effects” on the Elizabethan stage,
and look for the places in The Spanish Tragedy where they would have been used.
How would Elizabethan actors have handled the appearance of ghosts, severed
limbs and heads, bleeding wounds, explosions, and so on?

The Spanish Tragedy, or Hieronimo is Mad Again is

an Elizabethan tragedy written by Thomas Kyd between 1582 and 1592.
Highly popular and influential in its time, The Spanish Tragedy established a
new genre in English theatre, the revenge play or revenge tragedy. The play
contains several violent murders and includes as one of
its characters a personification of Revenge. The Spanish Tragedy is often
considered to be the first mature Elizabethan drama, a claim disputed
 with Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine,[2] and has been parodied by many
Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights, including Marlowe, William
Shakespeare and Ben Jonson.[citation needed]
Many elements of The Spanish Tragedy, such as the play-within-a-play used to
trap a murderer and a ghost intent on vengeance, appear in
Shakespeare's Hamlet. (Thomas Kyd is frequently proposed as the author of the
hypothetical Ur-Hamlet that may have been one of Shakespeare's primary
sources for Hamlet.)