Spenser, Kyd, and the Authorship of the Spanish Tragedy

"This book maintains that Edmund Spenser and not Thomas Kyd is the author of The Spanish Tragedy in 1590/1592. My argument is based on the strength of the internal evidence and not on computermetric, linguistic statistics, or parallel passages. The Spanish Tragedy and Spenser's works are united by sources, themes, methods, and language to the point of authorial equation. Thomas Heywood provided the only attribution of the play to Kyd in 1612, but given the depth of the learning, the apocalyptic context of the anti-Spanish theme, and the literary, rhetorical, and metadramatic sophistication of The Spanish Tragedy, it is much more probable that Spenser wrote it and not the nearly anonymous journeyman writer Kyd. Throughout the book for purposes of argument and clarity, I refer to Kyd as the author of The Spanish Tragedy. However, at the conclusion, I replace Kyd with Spenser as the author based on the evidence presented"--