Eric J. Griffin discovers the rhetorical strategies through which the Hispanophobic perspectives now known as the Black Legend of Spanish Cruelty were written into English cultural memory.

The Expense of Spirit integrates feminist and historicist critical approaches to explore the dynamics of cultural conflict and change in English Renaissance drama.

"The Spanish Tragedy" by Thomas Kyd. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.

The specter of Spain rarely figures in our discussions of the drama that is often regarded as the crowning achievement of the English literary Renaissance. Yet dramatists such as Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, and William Shakespeare are exactly contemporary with England's protracted conflict with the Spanish Empire, a traditional ally turned archetypical adversary. Were these playwrights really so mute with respect to their nation's Spanish troubles? Or have we failed—for reasons cultural and institutional—to hear the Hispanophobic crosstalk that permeated the drama no less than England's other public discourses? Imagining an early modern public sphere in which dramatists cross pens with proto-imperialists, Protestant polemicists, recusant apologists, and a Machiavellian network of propagandists that included high government officials as well as journeyman printers, Eric Griffin uncovers the rhetorical strategies through which the Hispanophobic perspectives that shaped the so-called Black Legend of Spanish Cruelty were written into English cultural memory. At the same time, he demonstrates that the English were as ready to invoke Spain in the spirit of envious emulation as to demonize the Spanish other as an ethnic agent of intolerance and oppression. Interrogating the Whiggish orientation that has continued to view the English Renaissance through a haze of Anglo-American triumphalism, English Renaissance Drama and the Specter of Spain recovers the voices of key Spanish participants and the "Hispanized" Catholic resistance, revealing how England and Spain continued to draw upon shared traditions and cultural resources, even during the moments of their most storied confrontation.

The Spanish Tragedy, highly influential and popular in its time, established a new genre in English theatre - the revenge play or revenge tragedy. The plot of ""The Spanish Tragedy"" contains several violent murders and includes as one of its characters a personification of Revenge. This work was often referenced in works written by other Elizabethan playwrights, including William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Christopher Marlowe. Many elements of The Spanish Tragedy, such as the play-within-a-play appear in Shakespeare's Hamlet. Thomas Kyd is also frequently proposed as the author of the lost Ur-Hamlet play that was one of Shakespeare's primary sources for Hamlet)

Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: Gut, University of Bonn (Institut f r Anglistik, Amerikanistik und Keltologie), course: Revenge in the Renaissance, 9 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Sinister, unearthly, sometimes even all-knowing: Ghosts and metaphysical entities accompany stories, legends and and superstitious tales throughout the centuries. They are doomed as evil and satanic, or used to illustrate morality by "settling" their earthly bussiness with human evil-doers. They might even be good, yet can never completely to be trusted. Their connection with the dead makes them attractive as characters with powers above the human boundries. In the Elizabethan drama as in contrast to modern dramas, supernatural events and entities such as ghosts, apparitions, dreams and visions play a major and sometimes even crucial role in the plot. In this paper I would like to take a closer look at the Elizabethan fascination with the "unseen", how authors implemented it into their plays and what roles these ghosts and dreams played. Introductory I will look at the general view of the unnatrural from the Renaissance perspective. In order to stay within the proper range of this paper I have chosen a selection of four tragedies written by four different playwrights. In each of the plays, a ghostly character appears, mostly in dreamlike visions. I would like to discuss the scenes in which these characters appear and compare the characters with another in the conclusion of the paper.

The first fully-fledged example of a revenge tragedy, the genrethat became so influential in later Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, TheSpanish Tragedy (1589) occupies a very special place in the history ofEnglish Renaissance drama. Hieronimo, Knight-Marshal of Spain duringits war with Portugal, fails to obtain justice when his son is murderedfor courting Bel-Imperia, the Duke of Castile's daughter, and decidesto take justice into his own hands… This new student edition has been freshly revised by ProfessorAndrew Gurr to incorporate the latest stage history and criticalinterpretations of the play. It also appends the scenes that were addedin 1602, discusses Elizabethan attitudes to revenge, the Senecanfeatures of the play and the significance of the Anglo-Spanish conflictin the 1580s.