Thomas Kyd's remarkable play The Spanish Tragedy acknowledges in its title a national identity other than its author's. Notoriously, its denouement presents a babel of languages – Latin, Greek, Italian, French – likely to have been unfamiliar, at least in colloquial form, to the great majority of its earliest audiences. Yet the play's critical record shows that with few exceptions modern interpreters have paid scant attention to the national politics of The Spanish Tragedy, or to the association of these politics with questions of linguistic difference. I want in this essay to sketch in the framework of political (and religious) associations that would attach to Spain and Spaniards in English minds of the 1580s, or a prominent faction among them at least, and to identify so far as I can how such associations might properly influence our understanding of the play. Much has been written about the play's immensely fertile treatment of revenge; about its wonderfully adroit structure of ironies; about its preoccupation with personal and social justice; about its melodramatic excitements and its hero's eloquent introspection (taken up and sophisticated in Shakespeare's Hamlet). I wish to take nothing away from any of these interpretations; I have indeed tried elsewhere to contribute to them. I wish only to ask whether we can bring the play even more sharply into focus, and put ourselves more fully in touch with its original structure of feeling, if we attend to questions of nationality and language.