Thomas Kyd - Bring out the significance of play within the play in Kyd's 'The Spanish Tragedy'.

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The Spanish Tragedy

--- Thomas Kyd

Bring out the significance of play within the play in Kyd's 'The Spanish Tragedy'.

The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd is the first successful revenge tragedy in the Senecan model, before Shakespeare's Hamlet. In The Spanish Tragedy in the Spanish Tragedy, Kyd transforms revenge into a convention and justifies it. The principal motive behind the action of the play is revenge. Another feature of the revenge tragedy in Senecan plays was a villainous character and in The Spanish Tragedy we a have a remarkable villain in the person of Lorenjo. But the most interesting feature of the play is the 'Dumb-show' or the play within the play. It is an excellent device by which Heironimo takes revenge. There could not have been more spectacular and shocking method by which Heironimo might have achieved his revenge.

In Act IV scene I, in the drama, Balthazar has requested Heironimo to arrange some kind of entertainment for hid father, the Portuguese viceroy, who is on a visit to the Spanish court. Heironimo says that a long time back he had written a tragic drama about Persada and Soliman and that he