Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / The authorship of the five additions to Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy remains a conundrum. Ben Jonson was first thought responsible, but a majority of scholars argue against his involvement. Other candidates have been proposed, namely Thomas Dekker, Thomas Heywood, William Shakespeare, and John Webster. Past attribution studies have mainly focused on Shakespeare due to the fourth addition, the Painter’s Scene, which has been perceived to exhibit Shakespearean quality. John Nance’s lexical study of the fourth addition makes a most compelling case: Shakespeare’s hand is almost certainly present. Warren Stevenson, Hugh Craig, Brian Vickers, and Douglas Bruster have also supported an attribution to Shakespeare; however, their research errs in assuming a single author wrote all five of the additions. This assumption is disproven by Gary Taylor’s work on the first addition, which is the first to identify Heywood, not Shakespeare, as its likely author. Taylor’s conclusion emphasizes that the additions could embody revisions by more than one playwright, such as in the case of Sir Thomas More. Therefore, the authorship of the other additions must remain conjectural until further study. My thesis is the first to independently explore the third addition’s authorship, and based on lexical evidence, the following analysis disproves claims of Shakespeare’s presence within the third addition.

During the height of the English Renaissance, the revenge tragedies The Spanish Tragedy and Hamlet were introduced to the English literary canon. In this essay, I will focus on the similarities that the protagonists, Hamlet and Hieronimo, share as prototypical avengers. Although Hamlet’s contribution to the genre should not be discredited, I will argue that the similar characterisation of Hieronimo in The Spanish Tragedy, portrays the same depth and entitlement to the acclaim as a prototypical avenger as Hamlet. Even though their portrayal may differ in tone, their shared commonality attributes equal complexity to both characters. I will compare and analyse the two plays in order to demonstrate that both characters should be considered prototypical avengers. The essay concludes that a reluctance to revenge and a tendency to contemplate the morality of the action is prominently shared by both prototypical avengers. Although critics generally infer Hieronimo is a less complex character in comparison with Hamlet, this essay will show how both avengers deserve equal credit. This essay illustrates this statement by juxtaposing their equal need to find justification before taking revenge, use of suicide to emphasise their moral dilemma, and comment on the tragic consequences of revenge.

If Shakespeare contributed the additions to the 1602 edition of Thomas Kyd's The Spanish tragedy, he did so at the time he was writing Hamlet. The additions were written anonymously, but contemporary references to playwrights and their works, publication records, and documented theatrical transactions have provoked the authorship controversy for centuries. Recent studies have attempted "fingerprinting” and "DNA" analysis of verbal structures to solve the case once and for all, but this study moves beyond the (impossible) task of trying to "prove" that Shakespeare wrote the additions and instead seeks to recreate a hypothetical scenario to show why and how Shakespeare may have written them. Using the loose structure of a modern recreation of a cold-case crime, this study contextualizes the additions and the authorship controversy they have inspired, situating the case in its earlier manifestations and in present-day criticism. It will be shown why Shakespeare would have been the ideal candidate to revise The Spanish tragedy: he was familiar with Kyd's work, was known for revitalizing older works, knew the players, and was a writer for hire. It will be argued that the publisher of the additions, Thomas Pavier, followed Shakespeare throughout his career and saw a marketing opportunity to capitalize on three trends: title pages that advertised newness, nostalgia for old texts, and a market for Shakespearean language. This essay will trace the hypothetical steps to see how Shakespeare's additions might have been written, dispersed, rehearsed, acted, and printed. Ultimately, the additions will be situated as a hypothetical middle step between Kyd’s Ur-Hamlet, The Spanish tragedy, and Shakespeare's Hamlet. / text

This paper explores the depiction and function of madness on the Renaissance stage, specifically its development as trope of the English revenge tragedy from its Elizabethan conception to its Jacobean advent through a representative engagement of Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. Madness in these plays selectively departs from popular conceptions and archetypal formulas to create an uncertain dramatic space which allows its sufferers to walk moral lines and liminal paths unavailable to the sane. “Madness” is responsible for and a response to vision; where the revenger is driven to the edge of madness by a lapse in morality only visible to him, madness provides a lens to correct the injustice. It is the tool that allows them to escape convention, decorum and even the law to rout a moral cancer, and, in this capacity, is enabling rather than disabling.

Torture and the Drama of Emergency: Kyd, Marlowe, Shakespeare recovers the legal complexity of early modern torture and makes it central to an account of the anti-torture politics of the English stage. More people were tortured in the 1580s and 1590s than at any other time in England's history, and this sudden increase generated a backlash in the form of calls for the protection of liberties. Chapters on plays by Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, and William Shakespeare show how theater contributed to this backlash by means of its unique ability to present on the public stage the otherwise private suffering characteristic of state torture. Above all, these playwrights alerted audiences to the dangers posed by the concentration of absolute power in the hands of the monarch. The introduction and first chapter of Torture and the Drama of Emergency demonstrate that although torture was unknown to common law, it was executed in the context of a state of emergency. The second chapter presents Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy as resistance literature: rather than critiquing Spanish cruelty, as its setting implies, the play indicts English torture. Kyd uses the genre of revenge tragedy, enormously popular after and because of his play, to argue that torture is a form of revenge the state itself might carry out. Chapter three, on 1 and 2 Tamburlaine, argues that Tamburlaine transforms the world into a military camp by extending martial law to everyone, everywhere. Marlowe's portrayal of the creation and rise of this totalitarian regime depicts the nightmarish consequences for the people when the state's power to extend martial law remains unchecked. The final chapter, on King Lear, argues that in his most pessimistic play Shakespeare suggests there is no escape from the state's ability to seize absolute power in times of crisis. Lear's moving but tenuous declaration of human rights remains a dream that cannot survive the state of emergency created when he divides the kingdom. / text

This dissertation argues that in Renaissance discourses of the body the body is progressively evacuated of the spirit, as we move from texts of the late Medieval period to texts of the Jacobean period. Where New Historicists have suggested that the practice of “self-fashioning,” which dictates behaviour, speech and dress, takes place in the Renaissance, I argue that there was a material self-fashioning of the body occurring simultaneously. Such corporeal fashioning, motivated by desire for physical improvement, frustrates the extent to which the soul shapes the body. My Introduction lays theoretical and historical groundwork, situating the body/soul relationship in relation to Christian theology, Senecan-Stoicism, Epicureanism and philosophical materialism. Discourses of artistic creation, informed by neo-Platonism, also influence corporeal fashioning in that the most radical bodily modifications are imagined through literature, where artificers are often privileged as creators. Chapter One examines “The Miracle of the Black Leg,” a transplant, by the doctor-Saints Cosmas and Damian, of a Moor’s black leg to a white Sacristan, whose gangrenous leg is amputated. In written and pictorial representations Cosmas and Damian, initially figured as Saints, are later presented as doctors who perform a medical procedure. Alongside the doctors’ increasing agency, the black leg itself, inflected by Renaissance notions of Moors and Moorishness, troubles the soul’s immanence in the body. Chapter Two examines Elizabeth I’s practices of bodily fashioning through her wigs, dentures and cosmetics. I argue that Elizabeth’s symbolic value, which includes components of monarchical rule, as well as attitudes toward female beauty, is always already pre-empted by her body. In Book III of The Faerie Queene, moreover, Edmund Spenser writes an alternative history of England through Britomart’s body to provide an heir to Elizabeth’s otherwise heirless throne. Chapters Three and Four perform close readings of Book II of The Faerie Queene, Thomas Tomkis’s Lingua, Thomas Middleton’s The Maiden’s Tragedy and Revenger’s Tragedy, and John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. I argue that both the allegorical and theatrical modes demand a level of materialism that paradoxically makes the body the centre of attention, and anticipates Cartesian mechanistic dualism. / Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2008-09-25 22:59:31.67

In his Book of the Courtier, Castiglione appeals to the Renaissance notion of self-fashioning, the idea that individuals could shape their identity rather than relying solely on the influence of external factors such as birth, social class, or fate. While other early modern authors explore the practice of self-fashioning—Niccolò Machiavelli, for example, surveys numerous princes identifying ways they have molded themselves—Castiglione emphasizes the necessity of modeling one's-self after a variety of sources, "[taking] various qualities now from one man and now from another." In this way, Castiglione advocates for a self-fashioning grounded in a discriminating kind of synthesis, the generation of a new ideal form through the selective combination of various source materials. While Castiglione focuses on the moves necessary for an individual to fashion himself through this act of discriminatory mimesis, his views can explain the ways authors of the period use source material in the process of textual production. As poets and playwrights fashioned their texts, they did so by consciously combining various source materials in order to create not individuals, as Castiglione suggests, but characters to represent new cultural ideals and values. Early moderns viewed the process of textual, as well as cultural production, as a kind of synthesis. Creation through textual fusion is particularly common in early modern accounts of the heroic, in which authors synthesize classical conceptions of the hero, which privilege the completion of martial feats, and Christian notions of the heroic, based on the contemplative nature of Christ. In this dissertation, I demonstrate how Thomas Kyd in The Spanish Tragedy (1585), Edmund Spenser in The Faerie Queene (1590), William Shakespeare in Titus Andronicus (1594), and John Milton in A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle (1632) syncretized classical and Christian notions of the heroic ideal in order to comment upon and shape political, social, and literary discourses. By recognizing this fusion of classical heroism with contemplative heroism, we gain a more nuanced understanding of the reception of classical ideas within an increasingly secular society.