The Spanish Tragedy was the first great classic from the Elizabethan period of playwriting, along with Marlowe"s Tamburlaine. Set during the 1580s in Spain, England"s greatest enemy, for seventy years the play was the most quoted play in English, providing the model for all its successors, even Hamlet. As the greatest of Elizabethan revenge tragedies it first marks out in challenging form the morality of revenge, and then uses a play within the play to kill off all the victims and one of the two revengers. The chief revenger is left to bite out his own tongue on stage before he kills himself. This student edition contains a lengthy introduction and background on the author, date and sources, themes, critical interpretation and stage history, as well as a fully annotated version of the playtext in modern spelling.