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Frank Ardolino, Apocalypse & Armada in Kyd's Spanish Tragedy. Kirksville, MO : Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1995, xviii + 187 pp. (Sixteenth Century Essays & Studies Volume 29), ISBN 0-940474-31-X, S 35.
An exercise in critical topicality, Apocalypse & Armada in Kyd's Spanish Tragedy considers Kyd's popular revenge tragedy to be "a syncretistic play governed by related codes of pagan and apocalyptic justice which endow Hieronimo's act of revenge with a historical necessity that raises his personal vengeance to the level of nationalistic retribution" (x-xi). Ten years after publishing Thomas Kyd's Mystery Play : Myth and Ritual in 'The Spanish Tragedy' (New York : Peter Lang, 1985), Ardolino finds new mysteries to plumb in the subtext of Kyd's tragedy.
Drawing upon sixteenth-century commentaries on the Books of Daniel and Revelation as well as upon selected dramas in the Protestant tradition, Ardolino argues that The Spanish Tragedy can be read as both a Reformation "Play of Daniel" and a dramatic representation of the Apocalypse. Motifs of "revelation, lawsuit, and redemption" (xiv) associated with the apocalyptic tradition are, according to Ardolino, paralleled in the rhetorical and dramatic patterns of the play. However, in the absence of contemporary evidence that Kyd's tragedy was linked either to Daniel...