What humiliations he must have endured, to be so given to flaying the buffoon!
—Nietzsche
Others abide our question, thou art free. We ask and ask, thou smilest. . .
—Matthew Arnold
And last but not least to be mentioned, Mr. William Shakespeare.
—John Webster
By the time his brief career as a playwright was drawing to an end, poor Thomas Kyd had much to be sorry for—and ashamed of. Son to a “gentleman,” a London scrivener ever anxious to improve his status in life, he had been given a sound education at the new Merchant Tailors School which would have fully qualified him for following in his father’s tracks. Instead, he strayed into literature, perpetrated a play (carefully based on the Senecan pattern), and it proved a resounding success. In fact The Spanish Tragedy, or “Hieronimo” as it came to be called, was probably the most often produced and reprinted of any play of the age, from the 1580s on into the Jacobean era. In 1601 it even appeared with additions by another hand—to which he could make no objection, having been miserably dead for seven years. While alive, he had seen to it that his name never appeared on any of the printings, so much so that the practice continued after his death, and even in the eighteenth century there were doubts about the identity of its author. There are none now. The play is of a piece (if the most notable piece) with
