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WRITING AND REVENGE: THE STRUGGLE FOR AUTHORITY IN THOMAS KYD'S THE SPANISH TRAGEDY

WRITING AND REVENGE: THE STRUGGLE FOR AUTHORITY IN THOMAS KYD'S THE SPANISH TRAGEDY DAVID CUTTS of certain "diuers lewd and mutinous libells," officers of the Privy Council found an "'Atheistic' pamphlet" among Thomas Kyd's belongings, which in turn led to his arrest and torture in Bridewell in 1593. Kyd insisted that the "waste and idle papers" had been authored by Marlowe, with whom he had been sharing a room. I Although he was acquitted of the charges, this ordeal seems to have contributed to his early death the following year. Ironically, Kyd had dramatized the dangers and the authority of writing just a few years earlier in The Spanish Tragedy, 2 a play that exemplifies how writing can keep an author's secrets but also can expose and condemn him. Hieronimo constructs his revenge out of a written text, a tragedy he wrote as a student at Toledo, and thus takes up the deceptively passive but actually deadly weapon-writing-that will destroy his enemies. The Spanish Tragedy thus identifies the revenger as a kind of author and writing as one of the weapons available to him. However, although Hieronimo attains his revenge by becoming an author, he does so at the cost of his own life and the lives of those who were http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Explorations in Renaissance Culture Brill

WRITING AND REVENGE: THE STRUGGLE FOR AUTHORITY IN THOMAS KYD'S THE SPANISH TRAGEDY

Explorations in Renaissance Culture , Volume 22 (1): 147 – Dec 2, 1996

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Publisher
Brill
Copyright
© Copyright 1996 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands
ISSN
0098-2474
eISSN
2352-6963
DOI
10.1163/23526963-90000181
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

DAVID CUTTS of certain "diuers lewd and mutinous libells," officers of the Privy Council found an "'Atheistic' pamphlet" among Thomas Kyd's belongings, which in turn led to his arrest and torture in Bridewell in 1593. Kyd insisted that the "waste and idle papers" had been authored by Marlowe, with whom he had been sharing a room. I Although he was acquitted of the charges, this ordeal seems to have contributed to his early death the following year. Ironically, Kyd had dramatized the dangers and the authority of writing just a few years earlier in The Spanish Tragedy, 2 a play that exemplifies how writing can keep an author's secrets but also can expose and condemn him. Hieronimo constructs his revenge out of a written text, a tragedy he wrote as a student at Toledo, and thus takes up the deceptively passive but actually deadly weapon-writing-that will destroy his enemies. The Spanish Tragedy thus identifies the revenger as a kind of author and writing as one of the weapons available to him. However, although Hieronimo attains his revenge by becoming an author, he does so at the cost of his own life and the lives of those who were

Journal

Explorations in Renaissance CultureBrill

Published: Dec 2, 1996

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