Mourning Thomas Kyd's Lost Works
Accepted version
Peer-reviewed
Repository URI
Repository DOI
Change log
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
1522-9270
Volume Title
58
Publisher
Project MUSE