Doing Kyd: Essays on The Spanish Tragedy

Doing Kyd reads Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, the box-office and print success of its time, as the play that established the revenge genre in England and served as a 'pattern and precedent' for the golden generation of early modern playwrights, from his contemporaries, Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare, to Thomas Middleton, John Webster and John Ford. This collection of essays offers a wide understanding of early modern playwriting and playgoing. It examines with specialist attention the context from which Thomas Kyd's dramatic work emerged, the play's immediate impact and its legacy in print, stage productions and the challenges posed, issues from genre to gender in theories of revenge, and editing the play - not just for the page but also for the stage and screen. As a collective effort, it assembles the top scholars in the field including editors, theatre historians, theory scholars and critics, and benefits from their wealth of work on this play, bringing together international expertise - veterans and young alike - to 'do Kyd'. Interdisciplinary in approach and accessible in style, this volume appears at the time when Thomas Kyd and his play are back in the spotlight, through renewed critical interest, several new stage productions between 2009 and 2013, and its firm presence in the Higher Education curriculum for English and Drama. As a historical and critical companion to recent editions of the play, such as the Arden and Norton editions, it will be of interest to lecturers, students, dramaturges and translators of early modern drama, but also to editors and performance historians with a particular interest in non-Shakespearean drama.