Thomas Hawkins's Attribution of the Authorship of The Spanish Tragedy

Abstract

IT is accepted in Renaissance scholarship that the author of The Spanish Tragedy is Thomas Kyd. The play had been anonymous, apart from some attempted attributions such as to ‘one William Smith’ by Robert Dodsley in his Select Collection of Old English Plays of 1744.1 In 1773 Thomas Hawkins in his Origin of English Drama noted a reference in Thomas Heywood's Apology for Actors (1612): Therefore M. Kid, in the Spanish Tragedy, upon occasion presenting itselfe, thus writes. Why Nero thought it no disparagement, And Kings and Emperours haue tane delight, To make experience of their wits in playes.2 The Spanish Tragedy as printed in 1592, 1594, and subsequently, names no author, and until 1773 no editor or theatrical historian had discovered one …. Beyond [Hawkins's] offhand attribution by a member of a later generation, we have no external evidence whatever of Kyd's authorship.6