Although Thomas Kyd may not have a comparably extensive list of well-known works that clutter his resume, he does possess one in particular that is critically important; The Spanish Tragedy. Being his most noteworthy work, The Spanish Tragedy is responsible for the introduction of an abundance of game changing ideals such as "the iambic pentameter, the five act structure, the play within a play, causality, the Machiavellian villain, the soliloquy, the blank verse, and the Revenge Tragedy" (Nance); single handedly opening new doors and paving uncharted roads in Elizabethan Theatre for other writers to follow in the years to come. It goes without being said that these concepts are all staples in the world of not only early modern English theatre, but theatre in itself. These groundbreaking and impactful concepts can be seen being used by countless other playwrights who followed, such as Christopher Marlowe, the Jacobean playwright John Fletcher, Thomas Middleton, and even the dramatist labeled as "the greatest writer in the English language"- Shakespeare himself. .
In distinguished plays such as Hamlet, one can see traces of Kyd's influence in aspects like that of the Machiavellian character Claudius, Hamlet's play within a play, and the most obvious of all, the fact that Hamlet, in and of itself, is a "Revenge Tragedy". Undoubtedly, Kyd is the one whom these contributions have been relatively attributed to in the world of academia and in the institutionalized sphere of scholarly-based knowledge; however, in the real world--made up of the average human sponge that gathers their knowledge from less than scholarly sources-- Shakespeare is the one who is praised for his ingenious depictions of these contributions in works such as Hamlet and Othello. He is the one that people instinctively think of when they hear the term "Revenge Tragedy".
