The Spanish Tragedy

Not bad for a debut, Will.

Elizabethan audiences loved a good revenge tragedy full of bloody murders and brutality, and the success of Thomas Kidd's The Spanish Tragedy had already proven just how hungry those audiences were for that kind of visceral, edge-of-your-seat storytelling.

Shakespeare obviously decided to give them what they wanted.

And more.

And of course, as we'll get to, thinking of Head to Hamlet, there are also places where we can remember, where we can speak to imaginatively people who have died, where we can recreate them in different ways.

People often mention Constance from King John and her expression of grief for her son as a way for Shakespeare more directly to express grief and the text that isn't mentioned very often for obvious reasons but it's The Spanish Tragedy which is written by Kidd but there are these editions from 1602 five editions and they are just new moments in the play.

To back up a little, the play is about the death of a son, the murder of a son, and it's a revenge play, but a lot of the content deals with mourning, the father mourning the death of his son.

The additions from 1602, which some people think Shakespeare wrote, I am one of the people who thinks Shakespeare wrote these additions, are just extra speeches, extra bits of a father expressing grief for his son.

I mean, I mentioned Hamlet earlier.

I mean, there was, there was, uh, Thomas, um, Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, which has elements that mirror what happens in Hamlet.

There's even a reference to a play that predates Shakespeare's Hamlet called the Ur-Hamlet, U-R-hyphen-Hamlet.

We...

So I maybe do one or maximum of two productions a year and some of the professional training.

I'd like to get my teeth into the Spanish tragedy.

I would like to do that.

Nothing like tackling the prototype.