![]() ![]() Just about every playwright of the English Renaissance borrowed from Kyd's innovative form of stylized violence and dramatic intrigue, but the playwright had already taken his cue from Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 B.C.E.-65 C.E.). When his father discovers his son's bloodied body hanging from a tree, he then devotes the rest of his time finding his son's murderers and executing them in a shockingly theatrical way. The Spanish Tragedy tells the story of a young soldier who comes home from war only to be brutally murdered while chatting his girlfriend up in an otherwise romantic setting. If most of the cast dies at the end of a play or movie you're watching, go ahead and thank Kyd. The Spanish Tragedy is Kyd's only surviving play, but you'd be hard pressed to find a more influential work. Some twenty years later, William Shakespeare would borrow heavily from Kyd's tragedy while writing a little play called Hamlet (you might've heard about it). Kyd penned this bloodbath sometime in the late 1580s (we're not exactly sure when), ushering in a popular genre that has yet to grow stale: the revenge drama. It's Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, and it's no overstatement to call Kyd "The Godfather of Hyper-Violence." No, this is not a Quentin Tarantino film. Murder conspiracies, a descriptive descent into a torturous hell, bloody revenge, and a protagonist who bites off his own tongue. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |