The Spanish Tragedy was one of the early modern theatre's most enduringly popular plays and even the most resistant of Thomas Kyd's critics have had to acknowledge the undeniable emotional appeal, the sheer dramaturgical force, which invigorates this early revenge narrative. Few, however, even among his more receptive readers, would be inclined to praise Kyd as a deft classicist, let alone one who subtly marshals the materials of ancient philosophy as a means of shaping the profound theatrical effects for which he is more generally appreciated. In this regard, Kyd has never fully recovered from Thomas Nashe's blistering attack delivered in his preface to Robert Greene's Menaphon (1589). Surveying contemporary writers and bemoaning upstarts with little apparent learning, Nashe excoriates those who ‘leave the trade of Noverint whereto they were borne, and busie themselves with the indevors of Art’, an opening salvo likely directed at Kyd, a scrivener's son who practised the trade before turning dramatist and translator. Much of Nashe's ensuing critique takes specific issue with authorial misapprehension of classical literature, and the portrait that emerges is of a poet of little facility with ancient texts and ideas. When Nashe scoffs how ‘English Seneca read by candle light yeeldes manie good sentences,’ he presumably mocks Kyd's rendering of ‘ad lumina’ (‘until dawn’) as ‘by candlelight’ in his edition of Torquato Tasso, and also suggests such an author of limited capacity remains dependent on vernacular editions of classical texts. Nashe's sketch depicts a parvenu of small knowledge but unbounded enthusiasm for ancient literature. ‘If you intreate him faire in a frostie morning,’ Nashe maintains, ‘he will affoord you whole Hamlets, I should say handfulls of tragical speaches.’ With a passing allusion to the ‘Kidde in Aesop’, likely a forced pun on Kyd's own name, Nashe turns to inveigh against those who would, as Kyd does in The Spanish Tragedy, ‘thrust Elisium into hell’, another apparent muddling of classical sources. Out of their element, dependent upon vernacular editions, quite possibly imprecise in their own translations, excessive, even slavish, in their devotion to Seneca, and confused regarding the details of classical narrative, the targets of Nashe's invective, of whom Kyd seems paramount, become mere interlopers characterised by their ‘home-born mediocritie’.