Thomas Kyd

Thomas Kyd was an English playwright of the Elizabethan age, baptised in London on 6 November 1558 and buried on 15 August 1594. The son of a scrivener, he was enrolled at the Merchant Taylors' School, where Edmund Spenser and Thomas Lodge were among his fellow students, and there is no evidence that he went on to a university. He is remembered above all as the author of The Spanish Tragedy, probably written in the mid to late 1580s and printed in 1592, which was one of the most popular plays of its time and set new standards in plot construction and character development. Kyd also translated work by Torquato Tasso and Robert Garnier, wrote Soliman and Perseda, and is thought by some scholars to have written an early Hamlet play, now called the Ur-Hamlet. He fell into obscurity until 1773, when his authorship of The Spanish Tragedy was rediscovered.