Thomas Kyd was an English dramatist, the author of The Spanish Tragedy, and one of the most important figures in the development of Elizabethan drama.

Although well-known in his own time, Kyd fell into obscurity until 1773 when Thomas Hawkins discovered that Kyd was named as its author by Thomas Heywood in his Apologie for Actors . A hundred years later, scholars in Germany and England began to shed light on his life and work, including the controversial finding that he may have been the author of a Hamlet play pre-dating Shakespeare's.