The Spanish Tragedy
The Spanish Tragedy, or Hieronimo is Mad Again is an Elizabethan tragedy written by Thomas Kyd between 1582 and 1592. Highly popular and influential in its time, The Spanish Tragedy established a new genre in English theatre, the revenge play or revenge tragedy. Its plot contains several violent murders and includes as one of its characters a personification of Revenge. The Spanish Tragedy was often referred to (or parodied) in works written by other Elizabethan playwrights, including William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Christopher Marlowe.
Many elements of The Spanish Tragedy, such as the play-within-a-play used to trap a murderer and a ghost intent on vengeance, appear in Shakespeare's Hamlet. (Thomas Kyd is frequently proposed as the author of the hypothetical Ur-Hamlet that may have been one of Shakespeare's primary sources for Hamlet.)
Read more about The Spanish Tragedy: Date, Performance, Publication, Authorship, Influences, Allusions, Dramatis Personæ, Plot, The 1602 Additions, Themes and Motifs, Structure, Modern Performances
Famous quotes containing the words spanish and/or tragedy:
“It’s like a jumble of huts in a jungle somewhere. I don’t understand how you can live there. It’s really, completely dead. Walk along the street, there’s nothing moving. I’ve lived in small Spanish fishing villages which were literally sunny all day long everyday of the week, but they weren’t as boring as Los Angeles.”
—Truman Capote (1924–1984)
“It is comedy which typifies, where it is tragedy which individualizes; where tragedy observes the nice distinctions between man and man, comedy stresses those broad resemblances which make it difficult to tell people apart.”
—Harry Levin (b. 1912)