The Spanish Tragedy: Authoritative Text Sources and Contexts Criticism

Thomas Kyd’s highly influential and popular revenge play is now available in a richly documented and critically engaging Norton Critical Edition.

The freshly edited and annotated text comes with a full introduction and illustrative materials intended for student readers.

The Spanish Tragedy was well known to sixteenth-century audiences, and its central elements―a play-within-a-play and a ghost bent on revenge―are widely believed to have influenced Shakespeare’s Hamlet. This volume includes a generous selection of supporting materials, among them Kyd’s likely sources (Virgil, Jacques Yver, and the anonymous “The Earl of Leicester Betrays His Own Servant”), Thomas Nashe’s satiric criticism of Kyd, Michel de Montaigne and Francis Bacon on revenge, and “The Ballad of The Spanish Tragedy,” which suggests the play’s initial reception.

“Criticism” is thematically organized to provide readers with a clear sense of the play’s major themes. Contributors include Michael Hattaway, Jonas A. Barish, Donna B. Hamilton, G. K. Hunter, Lorna Hutson, Molly Smith, J. R. Mulryne, T. McAlindon, and Andrew Sofer.

A Selected Bibliography is also included.

Michael Neill is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Auckland and Professor of Early Modern Literature at the University of Kent. He is the author of Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy and Putting History to the Question. His editions include Antony and Cleopatra and Othello for the Oxford Shakespeare, Middleton’s The Changeling for New Mermaids, and Massinger’s The Renegado for Arden Early Modern Drama.