Book excerpt: This is the first book in more than thirty years on the playwright who is arguably Shakespeare's most important tragic predecessor. In Lukas Erne's book, The Spanish Tragedy - the most popular of all plays on the English Renaissance stage - receives the extensive scholarly and criticaltreatment it deserves, including a full reception and modern stage history. Yet as Erne shows, Thomas Kyd is much more than the author of a single masterpiece. Don Horatio (partly extant in The First Part of Hieronimo), the lost early Hamlet, Soliman and Perseda, and Cornelia all belong to whatemerges in this study for the first time as a coherent dramatic oeuvre.