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Mourning Thomas Kyd's Lost Works

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

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Type

Article

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Authors

Tregear, Ted 

Abstract

This essay examines the related questions of mourning, knowledge and authorship in Thomas Kyd’s elusive corpus. In The Spanish Tragedy, Isabella cannot begin to mourn her murdered son until she knows “the author of this endles woe;” her melancholic state helps us to revisit fragments from Kyd’s lost works, preserved in two 1600 anthologies. Connecting together recent bibliographic criticism, theoretical writing from Freud to Gillian Rose, and a consideration of the infamous ur-Hamlet, this essay argues that these fragments, taken from their settings, are characterized by a melancholic loss that uncannily replays the preoccupations of Kyd’s drama.

Description

Keywords

47 Language, Communication and Culture, 4705 Literary Studies

Journal Title

SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

0039-3657
1522-9270

Volume Title

58

Publisher

Project MUSE