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November 3, 1558


Thomas Kyd, (November 3 1558, buried August 15, 1594), a popular Elizabethan playwright, acquaintance of Christopher Marlowe, and possible author of an early version of Hamlet, lived a life that dwarfed his stories in terms of drama. What we have here is an example by another author of some qualities of Kyd's drama, a deliberate imitation. Kyd's most popular work is The Spanish Tragedy. The author of this analysis is Jakob Ayrer, a German scholar, in his edition of Kyd's works: The Works of Thomas Kyd (1901.)

In the Induction to another piece of the same genre, A Warning for Faire Women(1599), there is a satirical catalogue of the stock incidents in dramas of Kyd's semi-Senecan type:

How some damn'd tyrant to obtaine a crowne, 
Stabs, hangs, impoysons, smothers, cutteth throats, 
And then a Chorus too comes howling in, 
And tells us of the worrying of a cat. 
Then ... a filthie whining ghost 
Lapt in some fowle sheete, or a leather pilch, 
Comes skreaming like a piggie halfe stickt, 
And cries Vindicta, reuenge, reuenge. 

The above references The Spanish Tragedy, where some say Shakespeare got the play within a play structure also. A ghost, revenge. Perhaps this was an influence on Hamlet. I am just pleased to notice someone finds a cat in Hamlet. One reads that most of Kyd's writing has been lost.

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