23 Taking revenge for his son Horatio’s murder, Hieronimo calls up a deeply resonant cultural-historical narrative to which the early mod- ern English theatre returned again and again. Indeed, Thomas Kyd also employed it in Soliman and Perseda, the inset play of The Spanish Tragedy expanded to (or condensed from) a full-length drama. 1 The per- formance of ‘the tragedy /Of Suleiman, the Turkish emperor’ (4.4.1–2), introduced to the assembled court by the Spanish king in the penulti- mate scene, was not the frst theatrical representation of what this study styles the ‘1453 narrative’—the impact of, and the west’s cultural response to, the fall of Constantinople—and it may well be that Kyd is calling up specifc theatrical representations of the revenge fantasy now lost to us. 2 Be that as it may, it is surely telling that Hieronimo’s plot device is self-consciously theatrical, a play-within-a-play, for such CHAPTER 2 1453 and All That © The Author(s) 2017 M. Hutchings, Turks, Repertories, and the Early Modern English Stage, Early Modern Literature in History, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46263-3_2 1 The uncertain date of The Spanish Tragedy makes it impossible to be sure of the order of composition, though the scholarly consensus is that Soliman and Perseda, printed in 1592, is the later play; The Spanish Tragedy may be as early as 1582 or as late as 1592: most modern editors opt for c.1587 (and elide the issue of whether it pre- or postdates 1 Tamburlaine). See Lukas Erne, Beyond ‘The Spanish Tragedy’: A Study of the Works of Thomas Kyd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), and ed., Soliman and Perseda (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014). This sequence of composition is followed in this study. 2 The earliest would seem to be a lost play, ‘The Blacksmith’s Daughter’ (c.1576–79), the evidence for which is a comment by Stephen Gossen, discussed later in this chapter.