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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