Author Description

Born in 1559, the son of a London scrivener, Thomas Kyd was educated at the Merchant Taylors' School under Mulcaster. He came under the eye of the officers of the Privy Council as a result of his association with the atheistical Marlowe and in 1593 was arrested and charged with heresy. Despite protestations of innocence which implicated the murdered Marlowe, it was probably as a result of the treatment he received in prison that he died in the following year, aged thirty-six. The Spanish Tragedy is almost the only work we can with certainty attribute to Kyd. It was one of the outstanding popular theatrical successes of the prolific era in English drama from 1580 to 1642, although it is now perhaps best known for its enigmatic relationship with Shakespeare's Hamlet. The play, however, as well as being highly significant in this respect has delights of its own as a revenge tragedy; and once the conventions of Kyd's language are grasped, the rhetoric becomes for us as for its first audiences one of its main attractions.