August 15, 1594: English playwright Thomas Kyd died in London at age thirty-five. The author of ‘The Spanish Tragedy’, he was well known in his own time but fell into obscurity until 1773 when Thomas Hawkins, an early editor of The Spanish Tragedy, discovered that Kyd was named as its author. He may have been the author of a Hamlet play pre-dating Shakespeare’s, which is now known as the ‘Ur-Hamlet’.