Kyd lived his entire life during the Elizabethan era, the time period during which Queen Elizabeth I ruled England and Ireland. Except for one spectacular event-his arrest for libel in 1593-the biographical record is uncertain. Mysterious Beginnings There exists very little evidence of Kyd's life as context for his influence on Elizabethan drama.

Works in Biographical and Historical Context Kyd is best known for The Spanish Tragedy, a great popular success that established the genre of “revenge tragedies” and greatly influenced the course of English drama.

By exploring the intergeneric and intertextual connections established in Kyd’s translation, this article maps out the literary and cultural trajectories involved in the appropriation and emulation of Continental tragic models, thus highlighting Kyd’s experiments with various kinds of drama, clarifying the play’s connection with the productions of the Sidney-Herbert “circle,” and establishing its significance in late Elizabethan literary culture.The Truth of the Most Wicked and Secret Murdering of John Brewen (1592) OverviewĪlthough little is documented in the historical record of Thomas Kyd's life and work, it is clear that he was a playwright who made important contributions to the repertoire of the public playhouse during the Elizabethan era and beyond. This article examines more specifically Kyd’s approach to Garnier’s epic similes-many of which are actually borrowed from both classical authors and contemporary poets. Previous attempts to rehabilitate the dramatic and poetic values of Kyd’s translation have focused on the metaphoric networks that underlie Kyd’s appropriation of Garnier’s play or on the political aspects of Kyd’s treatment of historical figures and themes. Although celebrated in its time as a worthy contribution to the poetic experiments of the late Elizabethan age, Thomas Kyd’s 1594 Cornelia, translated from Robert Garnier’s Cornélie (1574), has long been held by modern criticism as a minor work in the playwright’s career.

The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd