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COPYRIGHT 2006 Associated University Presses
Beyond The Spanish Tragedy: A Study of the Works of Thomas Kyd, by Lukas Erne. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2001, Pp. xix + 252. Cloth $74.95.
Without risking overstatement, we can say with reasonable certainty that Thomas Kyd was the author of one extraordinarily generative play. (1) Within a decade and a half of its initial appearance, The Spanish Tragedy had been produced and performed, prefaced, and parodied, printed and reprinted, amended and printed again. All the while, the play was inspiring Kyd's better-known contemporaries, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson, along with a host of lesser dramatic lights, who freely cribbed lines and allusions from a work they realized had become fixed in the imaginations of contemporary theatergoers. Whereas earlier commentators have "reduced" Kyd to this "most famous" of his plays, in Beyond the Spanish Tragedy: A Study of the Works of Thomas Kyd, Lucas Erne sets out to prove that the dramatist "can be identified with some confidence as the author of at least five plays: The Spanish Tragedy, Soliman and Perseda, Corelia, Don Horatio ... and the lost Hamlet" (xi). As his ten chapters "present a comprehensive scholarly and critical introduction to Kyd's works that reviews, amends, and updates previous work on Kyd" (9), Erne seeks to demonstrate that when we push "beyond" Thomas Kyd's seminal tragedy, a coherent body of work emerges.
To place the Kyd canon at five major works is to set the playwright on a plane with his famous "roommate" Christopher Marlowe, which Erne does at the outset by establishing Kyd's "place in the history of the Elizabethan two-part play" (9). (2) This attempt, in turn, rests upon affirming the relationship between "the spanes comodye donne oracioe," which, according to Henslowe, was playing in rotation with The Spanish Tragedy by February of 1592, and the farcical First Part of Hieronimo, not printed until 1605. (3) In order to persuade us of their connection--and of the forepiece's "dialectical relationship" with the tragedy--Erne parses the short play's two textual layers, discerning them both stylistically and in terms of dramatic symbol. Here, as elsewhere in the study, Erne positions himself against Arthur Freeman, who regarded the style of 1 Hieronimo as "unquestionably ... not Kyd's." (4) Where Freeman saw crude imitation, Erne discovers a stylistic "harmony," which inspires him to claim that Kyd's...
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