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A major new edition of Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy,an
outstanding landmark of Elizabethan drama. In its time, it quickly
became a box office success and probably inspired Shakespeare to
write Hamlet, as it contains a ghost, murders that demand revenge
and a hero that hesitates and contemplates suicide. As a revenge
tragedy, it set up the salient features of a dramatic genre that
would last decades. Its hero, the aged Marshall of Spain Hieronimo,
whose son is murdered at night, soon transcended the play and
became the standard stage representation of grief, rhetorical
passion and madness. Hieronimo's main antagonist is one of the
first Machiavellian characters of English drama. This edition
explores the play in relation to its historical context and
contemporary Iberian dynastic policy. It also relates the play, as
a literary artefact, to other artistic manifestations of the
European Renaissance and offers a fresh assessment of the play's
stage history. For the first time in the play's textual history,
this edition presents an integrated text inviting a reading of the
play as it was published both in 1592 and in 1602.
A major new edition of Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, an
outstanding landmark of Elizabethan drama. In its time, it quickly
became a box office success and probably inspired Shakespeare to
write Hamlet, as it contains a ghost, murders that demand revenge
and a hero that hesitates and contemplates suicide. As a revenge
tragedy, it set up the salient features of a dramatic genre that
would last decades. Its hero, the aged Marshall of Spain Hieronimo,
whose son is murdered at night, soon transcended the play and
became the standard stage representation of grief, rhetorical
passion and madness. Hieronimo's main antagonist is one of the
first Machiavellian characters of English drama. This edition
explores the play in relation to its historical context and
contemporary Iberian dynastic policy. It also relates the play, as
a literary artefact, to other artistic manifestations of the
European Renaissance and offers a fresh assessment of the play's
stage history. For the first time in the play's textual history,
this edition presents an integrated text inviting a reading of the
play as it was published both in 1592 and in 1602.
The first fully-fledged example of a revenge tragedy, the genre
that became so influential in later Elizabethan and Jacobean drama,
"The Spanish Tragedy" (1589) occupies a very special place in the
history of English Renaissance drama. Hieronimo, Knight-Marshal of
Spain during its war with Portugal, fails to obtain justice when
his son is murdered for courting Bel-Imperia, the Duke of Castile's
daughter, and decides to take justice into his own hands
This new student edition has been freshly revised by Professor
Andrew Gurr to incorporate the latest stage history and critical
interpretations of the play. It also appends the scenes that were
added in 1602, discusses Elizabethan attitudes to revenge, the
Senecan features of the play and the significance of the
Anglo-Spanish conflict in the 1580s.
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.
Francis Bacon described revenge as a 'kind of wild justice'. Then
as now, early modern playwrights and their theatre-going public
were fascinated by the anarchic energies that a desire for
retribution unleashes. Rather than rehearsing familiar conventions,
each of these plays presents a unique social and cultural milieu
where dark fantasies of revenge are variously played out.In Kyd's
"The Spanish Tragedy"""a grieving father seeks public justice for
the murder of his son by envious princelings. When his attempts are
thwarted he turns a court spectacle of murder into the 'real'
thing. Blackly comic in its tone and style, "The Revenger's
Tragedy"""(anon.) presents vengeance as mimetic art, witty and
cruel. Ford's '"Tis Pity She's a Whore"""represents an innovative
re-working of the genre as a brother's love for his sister leads to
his spectacular revenge on his rival, her husband, in a society in
which brutal retaliation for perceived wrong is the norm. In
Webster's "The White Devil" crimes of passion ignite revenge in the
courts of the Italian city states.This student edition contains
fully annotated, modernized texts of each play together with an
introduction discussing the dramatic and poetic style of each play,
focusing on its action and play of ideas.
Drama Classics: The World's Great Plays at a Great Little Price A
ghoulish and bloody 16th-century tragedy. The ghost of a murdered
courtier is promised by Revenge that he will see his murderer
killed by his mistress. The two ghostly figures sit down to watch
the violent proceedings. Thomas Kyd's play The Spanish Tragedy is
credited with establishing a new genre in English theatre, the
revenge play or revenge tragedy. This edition of the play in the
Nick Hern Books Drama Classics series includes an introduction by
Simon Trussler.
As the Elizabethan era gave way to the reign of James I, England
grappled with corruption within the royal court and widespread
religious anxiety. Dramatists responded with morally complex plays
of dark wit and violent spectacle, exploring the nature of death,
the abuse of power and vigilante justice. In Kyd's The Spanish
Tragedy a father failed by the Spanish court seeks his own bloody
retribution for his son's murder. Shakespeare's 1603 version of
Hamlet creates an avenging Prince of unique psychological depth,
while Chettle's The Tragedy of Hoffman is a fascinating reworking
of Hamlet's themes, probably for a rival theatre company. In
Marston's Antonio's Revenge, thwarted love leads inexorably to gory
reprisals and in Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy, malcontent
Vindice unleashes an escalating orgy of mayhem on a debauched Duke
for his bride's murder, in a ferocious satire reflecting the
mounting disillusionment of the age. Emma Smith's introduction
considers the political and religious climate behind the plays and
the dramatic conventions within them. This edition includes a
chronology, playwrights' biographies and suggestions for further
reading.
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