Beyond 'The Spanish Tragedy': A Study of the Works of Thomas Kyd by Thomas Kyd (review)

Abstract

956 Reviews Elizabethan News Pamphlets: Shakespeare, Spenser, Marlowe & the Birth ofJournal? ism. By Paul J. Voss. (Medieval & Renaissance Literary Studies) Pittsburgh, PA:Duquesne University Press. 2001. xii + 256pp. $60. ISBN 0-8207-0321-4. Elizabethan News Pamphlets argues forthe historical and literary significance of news pamphlets or 'news quartos' which supplied English readers with information on the Huguenot Henry of Navarre in his conflicts with the Catholic League. This period, which ran from Henry * s accessionin 1589 to his reconversionto Catholicism in 1593, provided the conditions necessary for serial publication; indeed, Voss claims these quartos as the firstEnglish journalistic series, in a challenge to previous attempts to date this to the early 1620s. Voss's work bears on three main areas of critical dis? cussion in considering the contribution made by the quartos to the development of journalism; their influence on imaginative fiction; and the ways in which they both reflect,and help furtherto create, a sense of national self-identification in the 1590s. Voss succeeds in establishing news quartos as a valuable source of information about the French wars of religion, placing them alongside plays, letters, ballads, prayers, and other forms of cultural expression. Less convincing are his attempts at times to privilege them over other genres on the basis that they provide English read? ers with clear access to events in France. In comments such as 'In these pamphlets, English readers directly experienced the suffering of France without the tempering shroud of fiction' (p. 8) Voss seems unwilling to consider the quartos as fashioned textual constructs with designs on the reader, and this sits uneasily with his acknowledgement elsewhere in the book that these quartos serve as propaganda pieces. (The public-relations exercise at work in the quartos?which, Voss tells us, misrepresented Huguenot losses?might be read as one such fictional 'shroud'.) Some ofthe primary sources that Voss cites suggest that the quartos not only influenced , but were also influenced by,imaginative fiction. But itis only in his briefparallel in the closing chapter of the book of the Prince of Parma and Marlowe's Tamburlaine that Voss considers a two-way influence between news quartos and early modern drama. Had this approach been developed it would have enriched Voss's laudable project to consider how news quartos provide 'a unique perspective into the relation? ship between fact and fiction, between the literal and the figurative' (p. 5). Voss seems unwittingly to have created obstacles to this kind of nuanced approach in dividing the book into two sections?of description followed by analysis?which means that the early stages of the book contain a number of resonant primary quotations whose strategies qua literature are unexplored: a noticeable gap in a work concerned to read these pamphlets as both historical and literary documents. Elizabethan News Pamphlets nevertheless contains much interesting material, such as the ways in which Navarre's reconversion to Catholicism influenced the reception of texts and images, and the use made across different genres of the woodcut of St George and the dragon in asserting connections between France and England. Its value lies in directing attention towards a neglected area of historical and literary study which relates to current critical work on national identity and on 'the market place of print' in the early modern period. University of Liverpool Melanie Ord Beyond 'The Spanish Tragedy': A Study of the Works of Thomas Kyd. By Lukas Erne. (Revels Plays Companion Library) Manchester and New York: Manch? ester University Press. 2002. xix + 252pp. ?45. ISBN 0-7190-60093-1. Given his crucial role in the development of English tragedy, Thomas Kyd has fared poorly both critically and in the theatre. An enormous success on the Renaissance MLRy 98.4, 2003 957 stage, The Spanish Tragedy virtually disappeared after 1642, to be revived in occa? sional amateur performances from the 1920s onwards, but not given a fully professional staging until 1973. There have been several since, with particularly successful ones at the National Theatre in 1982 and the Swan, Stratford, in 1997. Even so, Kyd's masterpiece is not yet restored to what Lukas Erne believes to be its rightfulplace on the English stage. There is a similar lack critically, with...