COL 49 Chapter 4 Starters

[MalignD at aol.com]

Calbert:  <<Not so fast, mon ami............from the source you cited  
yesterday.....>>

Not exactly the same source, it should be said.

The slippery Salgado whom you quote saying:

"[The Spanish Tragedy] draws this life from two  sources, Kyd's masterly 
dramatic construction and the richness of  his dramatic style."  And: " Kyd's 
linguistic virtuosity is  fully equal to his constructional skill......." 

--says in the essay I cited:  

"For all [Kyd's] undeniable theatrical skill and occasional insight into 
character, Kyd has no purpose much deeper than making our hair stand on end 
..."

And, although you cite Salgado saying:

"To his Senecan stock Kyd drafted a character, Lorenzo, who  embodied the 
contemporary interest in Machiavelli. ...  Lorenzo is thus the ancestor of 
the unscrupulous figure ... a tribe  to which belong the most dazzling 
dramatic creations of the period -  Flamineo, De Flores, Edmund, and Iago 
among a host of others."

I am reading him now saying: 

"... that since Marlowe put Machiavel on the stage (in the prologue to the 
Jew of Malta, 1588-9), the Machiavellian figure has been the embodiment of 
conscious and intricately contrived villainy ...  Thus Richard III, Iago, and 
Edmund are typical Machiavellian characters."  (Salgado dates The Spanish 
Tragedy as circa 1589.)

He then says in a footnote:  "Though in part the Maciavellian figure has an 
older ancestry, going back to the "Vice" of medieval Morality drama ..."

Mediterranean excess would seem to be not the least of reasons for Salgado's 
relative anonymity.

Also:  "[Kyd] is also widely believed to have been the author of an earlier  
version of Hamlet (sometimes referred to as the Ur-Hamlet) on  which 
Shakespeare drew when he came to write his celebrated  tragedy....."

Harold Bloom on the same subject writes:  

"The origins of Shakespeare's most famous play are as shrouded as Hamlet's 
textual condition is confused.  There is an earlier Hamlet that Shakespeare's 
drama revises and overgoes, but we do not have this trial work, nor do we 
know who composed it.  Most scholars believe that its author was Thomas Kyd, 
who wrote the archetypal revenge play The Spanish Tragedy.  I think, though, 
that Peter Alexander was correct in his surmise that Shakespeare himself 
wrote the Ur-Hamlet, no later than 1589, when he was first starting as a 
dramatist.  Though scholarly opinion is mostly against Alexander on this ..."