Beyond The Spanish tragedy: a study of the works of Thomas Kyd

Abstract

Beyond The Spanish Tragedy: A Study of Works of Thomas Kyd, by Lukas Erne. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2001, Pp. xix + 252. Cloth $74.95. Without risking overstatement, we say with reasonable certainty that Thomas was author of one extraordinarily generative play.1 Within decade and half of its initial appearance, The Spanish Tragedy had been produced and performed, prefaced, and parodied, printed and reprinted, amended and printed again. All while, was inspiring Kyd's better-known contemporaries, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson, along with host of lesser dramatic lights, who freely cribbed lines and allusions from work they realized had become fixed in imaginations of contemporary theatergoers. Whereas earlier commentators reduced to this of his plays, in Beyond Spanish Tragedy: A Study of Works of Thomas Kyd, Lucas Erne sets out to that dramatist can be identified with some confidence as author of least five plays: The Spanish Tragedy, Soliman and Perseda, Corelia, Don Horatio . . . and lost Hamlet (xi). As his ten chapters comprehensive scholarly and critical introduction to Kyd's works that reviews, amends, and updates previous work on Kyd (9), Erne seeks to demonstrate that when we push beyond Thomas Kyd's seminal tragedy, coherent body of work emerges. To canon five major works is to set playwright on plane with his famous roommate Christopher Marlowe, which Erne does outset by establishing Kyd's place in history of Elizabethan two-part play (9).2 This attempt, in turn, rests upon affirming between the spanes comodye donne oracioe, which, according to Henslowe, was playing in rotation with The Spanish Tragedy by February of 1592, and farcical First Part of Hieronimo, not printed until 1605.3 In order to persuade us of their connection-and of forepiece's dialectical relationship with tragedy-Erne parses short play's two textual layers, discerning them both stylistically and in terms of dramatic symbol. Here, as elsewhere in study, Erne positions himself against Arthur Freeman, who regarded style of 1 Hieronimo as unquestionably . . . not Kyd's.4 Where Freeman saw crude imitation, Erne discovers stylistic harmony, which inspires him to claim that Kyd's stands with Marlowe's Tamburlaine at head of Elizabethan vogue for two-part plays (10).5 Enre's opening analysis gives rise to problem that will return to trouble later moments of study. For while dividing text's political and private layers, Erne maintains that any apparent discontinuities may be explained by limitations of stage realism, imperfections which members of an audience are asked to piece out with their thoughts, while inconsistencies between Horatio's account of Andrea's death in forepiece and event as reported in tragedy must seemed a petty detail that would not have mattered much to Kyd (27). Such claim may suggests that in his determination to prove that should be regarded as having written diptych in mode of Marlowe's far more coherent Tamburlaine cycle, author is led to make more of his evidence than ought to be deduced by construing intention. Indeed, this effort to establish congruence through an insistent focus on continuity of form leaves under-examined significant divergences in content. For discernible in forepiece are several discursive formations minimally present (if all) in tragedy it presumably prefaced. Among these are Armada tone most critics found lacking in original (which enters 1 Hieronimo via new character, Duke of Medina's son), discourse of Portuguese patriotism (also largely absent in original), and low Hispanophobic and anti-Semitic discourses that are quite out of keeping with Senecan, Vergilian, and Petrarchan codes that energize tragedy. …