This was the most popular play in Elizabethan England before the arrival of Shakespeare (it was apparently first performed around 1582). Shakespeare was clearly influenced by it in some ways. It’s a brutally violent and lurid study of revenge. I couldn’t find any audio or video performance of it. The poetry doesn’t exactly call up any admiration, though Kyd gets some amusing effects when he has characters alternate single lines in a kind of rapid-fire patter. We don’t know much about Kyd, and not much of his work has survived. He is reputed to have written the “Ur-Hamlet”, the treatment of the Danish story that Hamlet is said to have either revamped or supplanted, but which has not survived. He was not as skillful at eluding the censors as Shakespeare. For various impieties, he was imprisoned and tortured. His career ruined, he died at the age of 35. He had been Marlowe’s room mate for awhile. Marlowe was either assassinated for political reasons, or in random brawl, depending on the biographer’s inclination. Being a playwright was a rough game, in those days.
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