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Thomas Kyd may have delighted Elizabethan audiences, but he still wasn’t a patch on Shakespeare

Brian Vickers aims to ‘restore’ Kyd to greatness – but claiming too much on too little evidence does the playwright no favours

14 December 2024

9:00 AM

14 December 2024

9:00 AM

Thomas Kyd: A Dramatist Restored Brian Vickers

Princeton University Press, pp.400, 35

The biggest blockbuster hit of the Elizabethan theatre was not by William Shakespeare or Christopher Marlowe or Ben Jonson. In fact it wasn’t by anyone. The Spanish Tragedy, a sturdy play of rhetoric, blood and revenge, was published in multiple editions without any attribution at all. Its central figure, Hieronimo, was a cultural phenomenon, but the drama was widely quoted, imitated and parodied without mention of its author.

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