The Spanish Tragedy, or Hieronimo is Mad…
March 1592 CE
The Spanish Tragedy, or Hieronimo is Mad Again, written between 1582 and 1592 by Thomas Kyd,establishes a new genre in English theater, the revenge play or revenge tragedy.
Its plot contains several violent murders and includes as one of its characters a personification of Revenge.
Many elements of The Spanish Tragedy, such as the play-within-a-play used to trap a murderer and a ghost intent on vengeance, appear in Shakespeare's Hamlet. (Thomas Kyd is frequently proposed as the author of the hypothetical Ur-Hamlet that may have been one of Shakespeare's primary sources for Hamlet.)
No details on the earliest performances of the play in the late 1580s have survived.
Lord Strange's Men stage a play that the records call Jeronimo on March 14, 1592; their big hit of the season, they will repeat it sixteen times to January 22, 1593.
It is unclear whether Jeronimo was The Spanish Tragedy, or The First Part of Hieronimo (printed in 1604), the anonymous "prequel" to Kyd's play, or perhaps either on different days.
Highly popular and enormously influential in its time, references and allusions to The Spanish Tragedy abound in the literature of its era.