ABSTRACT
Thomas Kyd's masterpiece, though extraordinarily successful in its day, has been more notorious than renowned since that time, and much of the interpretive criticism it has occasioned has tended to enhance its notoriety. This chapter argues a case for the careful contrivance and artistic unity of effect of The Spanish Tragedy as it has been preserved for us by proposing historically possible resolutions of some of the major difficulties that criticism has encountered. Hieronimo has promised that with him we shall witness "the fall of Babylon, Wrought by the heavens in this confusion". Hieronimo's duty is clearly spelled out in the Mosaic code, which Protestants believed to be quite as much the word of God as anything else in the two testaments. In the biography in William Baldwin's Treatise of Morall Philosophic, the death of "Zeno Eloates" is vividly recounted.
