Goldfarb has a Ph.D. in English and has published two books on the Victorian author William Makepeace Thackeray. In the following essay, Goldfarb explores the significance of the Alexandro-Villuppo episode in The Spanish Tragedy.

What a nightmare world of murder, revenge, deceit, and betrayal does Thomas Kyd create in The Spanish Tragedy. As Hieronimo says in act 3, scene 2, his world is "no world, but [a] mass of public wrongs / Confus'd and fill'd with murder and misdeeds"—all this before Hieronimo contributes to the accumulation of murders by engineering the deaths of Balthazar, Lorenzo, and the duke of Castile, which are then followed by the suicides of Bel-imperia and himself. Earlier in the play, Lorenzo sends the servants Serberine and Pedringano to their deaths, being especially deceitful in the way he handles Pedringano. And, of course, there is the treacherous murder of Horatio, which sets the main...