Prefaces to Shakespeare: Love's Labor Lost Book

An arranged marriage between the Spanish king's niece, Bel-Imperia, and the Portuguese viceroy's son, Balthazar, brings an end to a war between Spain and Portugal. However, Lorenzo, Bel-Imperia's brother, is outraged when he discovers she loves Horatio, the Spanish Marshall's son. With Balthazar, Lorenzo plots to make things right, it involves murder. Lorenzo is cunning and lies easily, ready to cross anyone who gets in his way, but he's unaware a Ghost of a man who was murdered is waiting and watching with Revenge.

The Spanish Tragedy is written by Thomas Kyd, a contemporary of Shakespeare and who wrote this play roughly one and half decades before Shakespeare's Hamlet is performed. Some refer to this as the lost Ur-Hamlet play. Reading it, I can understand why as there are a lot of similarities aside from the revenge tragedy.
Both plays have a play in a play, in Hamlet it's to prod a king's guilty conscience, in The Spanish Tragedy it's to expose a big lie and highlight a murder.

Both plays have a character who is perceived by others to be losing their mind, in Hamlet it's Hamlet, in The Spanish Tragedy it's Heironimo, Lorenzo's father.

In both, these scenes provide a comical break from the dramatic tension. The character Hamlet and Heironimo are both driving the action by plotting vengeance on the ones who robbed them of a loved one with murder. Like Hamlet, death runs hand in hand with revenge with a big body count at the end.
What makes this different from Hamlet is Kyd faintly structures it like a Greek drama, where the scenes with Ghost and Revenge are a chorus that bridge the action. Kyd also personifies revenge, not letting the reader/viewer forget what's behind the fate of those who've done wrong.

I liked reading Hamlet but some of the main characters came across as a function to help Hamlet move the action of the play along, in The Spanish Tragedy this responsibility is distributed between several characters. I thought this made the characters rounder making the drama stronger. I also found Kyd's scene with how the play in a play was being watched realer. But what I liked the most about this play, aside from the language and its poetry, is the fusion of Elizabethan and Greek tragedy. Just thinking about it it sounds strange but in this play it works and works brilliantly. It was good to finally read this play.