(The Spanish Tragedy, or Hieronimo is Mad Again is an Eliz...)
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. Its plot contains several violent murders and includes as one of its characters a personification of Revenge. The Spanish Tragedy was often referred to (or parodied) in works written by other Elizabethan playwrights, including William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Christopher Marlowe. 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.)
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(*This Book is annotated (it contains a detailed biography...)
*This Book is annotated (it contains a detailed biography of the author). *An active Table of Contents has been added by the publisher for a better customer experience. *This book has been checked and corrected for spelling errors. The Reign of King Edward the Third, commonly shortened to Edward III, is an Elizabethan play printed anonymously in 1596. It has frequently been claimed that it was at least partly written by William Shakespeare, a view that Shakespeare scholars have increasingly endorsed. The rest of the play was probably written by Thomas Kyd. The play contains several gibes at Scotland and the Scottish people, which has led some critics to think that it is the work that incited George Nicolson, Queen Elizabeth's agent in Edinburgh, to protest against the portrayal of Scots on the London stage in a 1598 letter to William Cecil, Lord Burghley. This could explain why the play was not included in the First Folio of Shakespeare's works, which was published after the Scottish King James had succeeded to the English throne in 1603.
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(Soliman and Perseda, written c. 1588 and first published ...)
Soliman and Perseda, written c. 1588 and first published in 1592 or 1593, is a late Elizabethan romantic tragedy by Thomas Kyd, author of The Spanish Tragedy. It dramatises the triangular relationship of the Turkish emperor Soliman, his captive Perseda and her beloved Erastus, and the fortunes of the comic servant Piston and the braggart knight Basilisco, against the fictionalised backdrop of the Turkish invasion of Rhodes in the early sixteenth century. The introduction to this facsimile edition contains the fullest analysis of the text to date. It also provides an account of the play's editorial history, a detailed analysis of its original printing, and lists of all erroneous readings in the first quarto, together with significant differences between the first and second quartos. This edition provides the best access we have to an important play by one of Shakespeare's leading early contemporaries.
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He was the son of Francis Kyd, citizen and scrivener of London, and was baptized in the church of St Mary Woolnoth, Lombard Street, on the 6th of November 1558.
His mother, who survived her son, was named Agnes, or Anna.
It is thought that Kyd did not proceed to either of the universities; he apparently followed, soon after leaving school, his father's business as a scrivener.
In October 1565 Kyd entered the newly founded Merchant Taylors' School, where Edmund Spenser and perhaps Thomas Lodge were at different times his school-fellows.
Between 1587 and 1593, he was in the service of an unidentified nobleman, and in the course of this employment he shared chambers for a time in 1591 with Christopher Marlowe.
Kyd remained until the last decade of the 19th century in what appeared likely to be impenetrable obscurity.
Even his name was forgotten until Thomas Hawkins about 1773 discovered it in connexion with The Spanish Tragedy in Thomas Hey wood's Apologiefor Actors.
John Lyly had a more marked influence on his manner than any of his contemporaries.
Evidence suggests that in the 1580s Kyd became an important playwright, but little is known about his activity. Francis Meres placed him among "our best for tragedy" and Heywood elsewhere called him "Famous Kyd".
The Spanish Tragedie was probably written in the mid to late 1580s. The earliest surviving edition was printed in 1592; the full title being, The Spanish Tragedie, Containing the lamentable end of Don Horatio, and Bel-imperia: with the pittifull death of olde Hieronimo. However, the play was usually known simply as "Hieronimo", after the protagonist. It was arguably the most popular play of the "Age of Shakespeare" and set new standards in effective plot construction and character development.
This drama enjoyed all through the age of Elizabeth and even of James I and Charles I so unflagging a success that it has been styled the most popular of all old English plays.
Certain expressions in Nashe's preface to the 1589 edition of Robert Greene's Menaphon may be said to have started a whole world of speculation with regard to Kyd's activity.
Much of this is still very puzzling; nor is it really understood why Ben Jonson called him " sporting Kyd. "
In 1592 there was added a sort of prologue to The Spanish Tragedy, called The First Part of Jeronimo, or The Wanes of Portugal, not printed till 1605.
Kyd's next work was in all probability the tragedy of Soliman and Perseda, written perhaps in 1588 and licensed for the press in 1392, which, although anonymous, is assigned to him on strong internal evidence by Mr Boas.
Two prose works of the dramatist have survived, a treatise on domestic economy, The Householder's Philosophy, translated from the Italian of Tasso (1588); and a sensational account of The Most Wicked and Secret Murdering of John Brewer, Goldsmith (1502).
His name is written on the title-page of the unique copy of the last-named pamphlet at Lambeth, but probably not by his hand.
That many of Kyd's plays and poems have been lost is proved by the fact that fragments exist, attributed to him, which are found in no surviving context.
Towards the close of his life Kyd was brought into relations with Marlowe.
It would seem that in 1590, soon after he entered the service of this nobleman, Kyd formed his acquaintance.
If he is to be believed, he shrank at once from Marlowe as a man "intemperate and of a cruel heart " and "irreligious. "
This, however, was said by Kyd with the rope round his neck, and is scarcely consistent with a good deal of apparent intimacy between him and Marlowe.
When, in May 1593, the " lewd libels " and " blasphemies " of Marlowe came before the notice of the Star Chamber, Kyd was immediately arrested, papers of his having been found "shuffled" with some of Marlowe's, who was imprisoned a week later.
A visitation on Kyd's papers was made in consequence of his having attached a seditious libel to the wall of the Dutch churchyard in Austin Friars.
Of this he was innocent, but there was found in his chamber a paper of "vile heretical conceits denying the deity of Jesus Christ. "
Kyd was arrested and put to the torture in Bridewell.
He asserted that he knew nothing of this document and tried to shift the responsibility of it upon Marlowe, but he was kept in prison until after the death of that poet (June 1, 1593).
He fell into utter destitution, and sank under the weight of "bitter times and privy broken passions. "
It had been preceded only by the pageant- poems of Peele and Lyly, in which all that constitutes in the modern sense theatrical technique and effective construction was entirely absent.
Curiously enough, The Spanish Tragedy, which was the earliest stage-play of the great period, was also the most popular, and held its own right through the careers of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Fletcher.
It is known that Ben Jonson was paid for these additional scenes, but they are extremely unlike all other known writings of his, and several scholars have independently conjectured that John Webster wrote them.
Of Kyd himself it seems needful to point out that neither the Germans nor even Professor Boas seems to realize how little definite merit his poetry has.
The influence of Kyd is marked on all the immediate predecessors of Shakespeare, and the bold way in which scenes of violent crime were treated on the Elizabethan stage appears to be directly owing to the example of Kyd's innovating genius.
His relation to Hamlet has already been noted, and Titus Andronicus presents and exaggerates so many of his characteristics that Mr Sidney Lee and others have supposed that tragedy to be a work of Kyd's touched up by Shakespeare.
Professor Boas, however, brings cogent objections against this theory, founding them on what he considers the imitative inferiority of Titus Andronicus to The Spanish Tragedy.
The German critics have pushed too far their attempt to find indications of Kyd's influence on later plays of Shakespeare.
The extraordinary interest felt for Kyd in Germany is explained by the fact that The Spanish Tragedy was long the best known of all Elizabethan plays abroad.
It was acted at Frankfort in 1601, and published soon afterwards at Nuremberg.
He must have died late in 1594, and on the 30th of December of that year his parents renounced their administration of the goods of their deceased son, in a document of great importance discovered by Professor Schick.
(The Spanish Tragedy, or Hieronimo is Mad Again is an Eliz...)
(*This Book is annotated (it contains a detailed biography...)
(Soliman and Perseda, written c. 1588 and first published ...)
Quotes from others about the person
Nashe describes him as a " shifting companion that ran through every art and throve by none. "
Nashe contemptuously said that " English Seneca read by candlelight yeeldes many good sentences, " no doubt exaggerating his indebtedness to Thomas Newton's translation.
