Mourning Thomas Kyd's Lost Works

This article examines the related questions of mourning, knowledge, and authorship in Thomas Kyd's elusive corpus. In The Spanish Tragedy, Isabella cannot mourn her murdered son until she knows "the author of this endles woe"; her melancholic state helps us revisit fragments from Kyd's lost works preserved in two 1600 anthologies, Bel-vedére, or, The Garden of the Muses and Englands Parnassus. Drawing together bibliographic criticism, theoretical writing from Sigmund Freud to Gillian Rose, and a consideration of Hamlet and the infamous ur-Hamlet, this article argues that Kyd's fragments, taken from their settings, are characterized by a melancholic loss that uncannily replays the preoccupations of his drama.