It seems to me that The Spanish Tragedy of Kyd has been underrated through misunderstanding, as I shall try to show in this article. The question may seem remote, but the play is commonly regarded as the surviving analogue to the Ur-Hamlet of Kyd, so has a considerable bearing on Shakespeare's Hamlet; or at least on what the first audience thought Shakespeare was doing when he rewrote the old favourite, a thing which they had laughed at even before they decided it was out of date.

So far as I have seen, critics always take for granted that the ghost of Andrea has no point; Kyd was crude, and anyhow he was copying Seneca. I think the point was obvious at the time, so obvious that it did not get stated in the text. Andrea has suffered the fate of Uriah; the father and brother of Bel-imperia, that is, the duke of Castile and Lorenzo, had arranged to have him killed in battle so that they could marry her to Balthazar the prince of Portugal. Presumably they informed the enemy prince, who killed him in the battle, where he was going to be sent and how he could be recognised. There is a reason for not mentioning this (though I agree that one would expect the ghost to say it at the end) because the ghost is part of the audience, and it has been arranged by the queen of Hades that he must discover what happened to him, without being told.