Books by Thomas Kyd
Five Revenge Tragedies: The Spanish Tragedy; Hamlet; Antonio's Revenge; The Tragedy of Hoffman; The Reve nger's Tragedy (Penguin Classics)
by William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, John Marston, Thomas Kyd, Henry Chettle
A new, authoritative edition of five classic revenge plays
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. This anthology presents five crucial tragedies of the era collected together for the first time, including Shakespeare's 1603 version of Hamletand Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy, a ferocious satire that reflects the mounting disillusionment of the age.
The introduction by Shakespeare scholar Emma Smith explores the political and religious climate behind the plays, as well as their dramatic conventions.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
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Four Revenge Tragedies: The Spanish Tragedy, The Revenger's Tragedy, 'Tis Pity She's A Whore and The White Devil (New Mermaids)
by John Webster, Thomas Kyd, John Ford
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.
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The Spanish Tragedy (New Mermaids)
by Thomas Kyd
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.
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The Spanish Tragedy (Arden Early Modern Drama)
by Thomas Kyd
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.
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