Thomas Kyd

Thomas Kyd (3 November 1558 – 16 July 1594) was an influential dramatist, poet and translator. His The Spanish Tragedy was one of the most popular plays on the Elizabethan or Jacobean stage.

Quotes

The Spanish Tragedy (1592)

Oh eyes, no eyes, but fountains fraught with tears;
Oh life, no life, but lively form of death;
Oh world, no world, but mass of public wrongs,
Confused and filled with murder and misdeeds.

• Evil news fly faster still than good.
  • Act I, sc. iii

• In time the savage bull sustains the yoke,
  In time all haggard hawks will stoop to lure,
  In time small wedges cleave the hardest oak,
  In time the flint is pierced with softest shower.
  • Act II, sc. i

• Where words prevail not, violence prevails;
  
But gold doth more than either of them both.
  • Act II, sc. i

• What outcries pluck me from my naked bed
  And chill my throbbing heart with trembling fear.
  • Act II, sc. v

• Oh eyes, no eyes, but fountains fraught with tears;
  Oh life, no life, but lively form of death;
  Oh world, no world, but mass of public wrongs,
  Confused and filled with murder and misdeeds.
  • Act III, sc. ii

• Thus must we toil in other men's extremes,
  That know not how to remedy our own.
  • Act III, sc. vi

• Dost thou think to live till his old doublet will make thee a new truss?
  • Act III, sc. vi

• For what's a play without a woman in it?
  • Act IV, sc. i

Misattributed

Though sometimes treated as being by Kyd, these quotations are taken from the lines added after his death to the 1602 edition of The Spanish Tragedy. They have been variously attributed to Jonson, Dekker, Webster and Shakespeare.

• My son – and what's a son? A thing begot
  Within a pair of minutes, thereabout:
  A lump bred up in darkness.
  • Act III, sc. xia

• Duly twice a morning
  Would I be sprinkling it with fountain-water.
  At last it grew, and grew, and bore, and bore,
  Till at the length
  It grew a gallows, and did bear our son,
  It bore thy fruit and mine: O wicked, wicked plant.
  • Act III, sc. xiia

• As I am never better than when I am mad; then methinks I am a brave fellow; then I do wonders: but reason abuseth me, and there's the torment, there's the hell.
  • Act III, sc. xiia

External links

• Thomas Kyd at the Lumniarum website
• The Spanish Tragedie at Project Gutenberg
• The Spanish Tragedy for a modern audience
• "Perverse justice in Kyd's Spanish Tragedy" by John Nettles, at University of Georgia