Thomas Kyd's place in the history of English Renaissance drama is secured by one surviving play, The Spanish Tragedy. Impressive in itself, it is also momentous in its influence as one of the first mature plays on the Elizabethan stage and as the great original for all subsequent revenge tragedies. Oblique evidence also points to Kyd as the author of the so-called Ur-Hamlet, the lost play of which Shakespeare's Hamlet is evidently an adaptation and critique. Yet for this indisputable achievement we have very little in the way of context. Except for one spectacular event, the biographical record is sketchy and uncertain; and what there is of Kyd's oeuvre beyond The Spanish Tragedy comes nowhere near that play in interest. Of the major English dramatists of the time, only Cyril Tourneur is more shadowy.

It is highly probable, if not altogether certain, that the playwright is the Thomas...