Bare Facts, Endless Tragedies

Were one to be sunk in candlelit reverie and a light abruptly switched on, the start would be no less sudden and complete than it is to turn from the ghosts and ghastly statues of the previous chapter to the quintessential revenge play sans revenger: Arden of Faversham. Thomas Kyd wrote it some time before 1592, likely in collaboration with William Shakespeare.¹ The murderers Black Will and Shakebag lie in wait for their victim under the cloak of night, but this play’s darkness is not that from which Old Hamlet emerges, or in which the Aeschylean beacon lights. It more