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Bible Encyclopedias
Thomas Kyd
1911 Encyclopedia Britannica
or Acquaintance. If he is to be believed, he shrank at once from Marlowe as a man "intemperate and of a cruel heart" and "irreligious." This, however, was said by Kyd with the rope round his neck, and is scarcely consistent with a good deal of apparent intimacy between him and Marlowe. When, in May 1593, the "lewd libels" and "blasphemies" of Marlowe came before the notice of the Star Chamber, Kyd was immediately arrested, papers of his having been found "shuffled" with some of Marlowe's, who was imprisoned a week later. A visitation on Kyd's papers was made in consequence of his having attached a seditious libel to the wall of the Dutch churchyard in Austin Friars. Of this he was innocent, but there was found in his chamber a paper of "vile heretical conceits denying the deity of Jesus Christ." Kyd was arrested and put to the torture in Bridewell. He asserted that he knew nothing of this document and tried to shift the responsibility of it upon Marlowe, but he was kept in prison until after the death of that poet (June 1, 1593). When he was at length dismissed, his patron refused to take him back into his service. He fell into utter destitution, and sank under the weight of "bitter times and privy broken passions." He must have died late in 1 594, and on the 30th of December of that year his parents renounced their administration of the goods of their deceased son, in a document of great importance discovered by Professor Schick. The importance of Kyd, as the pioneer in the wonderful movement of secular drama in England, gives great interest to his works, and we are now able at last to assert what many critics have long conjectured, that he takes in that movement the position of a leader and almost of an inventor. Regarded from this point of view, The Spanish Tragedy is a work of extraordinary value, since it is the earliest specimen of effective stage poetry existing in English literature. It had been preceded only by the pageantpoems of Peele and Lyly, in which all that constitutes in the modern sense theatrical technique and effective construction was entirely absent. These gifts, in which the whole power of the theatre as a place cf general entertainment was to consist, were supplied earliest among English playwrights to Kyd, and were first exercised by him, so far as we can see, in 1586. This, then, is a more or less definite starting date for Elizabethan drama, and of peculiar value to its historians. Curiously enough, The Spanish Tragedy, which was the earliest stage-play of the great period, was also the most popular, and held its own right through the careers of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Fletcher. It was not any shortcoming in its harrowing and exciting plot, but the tameness of its archaic versification, which probably led in 1602 to its receiving "additions," which have been a great stumblingblock to the critics. It is known that Ben Jonson was paid for these additional scenes, but they are extremely unlike all other known writings of his, and several scholars have independently conjectured that John Webster wrote them. Of Kyd himself it seems needful to point out that neither the Germans nor even Professor Boas seems to realize how little definite merit his poetry has. He is important, not in himself, but as a pioneer. The influence of Kyd is marked on all the immediate predecessors of Shakespeare, and the bold way in which scenes of violent crime were treated on the Elizabethan stage appears to be directly owing to the example of Kyd's innovating genius. His relation to Hamlet has already been noted, and Titus Andronicus presents and exaggerates so many of his characteristics that Mr Sidney Lee and others have supposed that tragedy to be a work of Kyd's touched up by Shakespeare. Professor Boas, however, brings cogent objections against this theory, founding them on what he considers the imitative inferiority of Titus Andronicus to The Spanish Tragedy. The German critics have pushed too far their attempt to find indications of Kyd's influence on later plays of Shakespeare. The extraordinary interest felt for Kyd in Germany is explained by the fact that The Spanish Tragedy was long the best known of all Elizabethan plays abroad. It was acted at Frankfort in 1601, and published soon afterwards at Nuremberg. It continued to be a stock piece in Germany until the beginning of the 18th century; it was equally popular in Holland, and potent in its effect upon Dutch dramatic literature.
Kyd's works were first collected and his life written by Professor F. S. Boas in 1901. Of modern editions of The Spanish Tragedy may be mentioned that by Professor J. M. Manly in Specimens of the Pre-Shakespearean Drama, vol. ii. (Boston, 1897), and by J. Schick in the Temple Dramatists (1898). See also Cornelia (ed. H. Gassner, 1894); C. Markscheffel, T. Kyd's Tragodien (1885); Gregor Sarrazin, Thomas Kyd and sein Kreis (1892); G. O. Fleischer, "Bemerkungen fiber Thomas Kyd's Spanish Tragedy" ( Jahresbericht der Drei-Konigschule zu Dresden-Neustadt (1896); J. Schick, "T. Kyd's Spanish Tragedy" ( Literarhistorische Forschungen, vol. 19, 1901); and R. Koppel, in Prolss, Altengl. Theater (vol. i., 1904). (E. G.)
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Chisholm, Hugh, General Editor. Entry for 'Thomas Kyd'. 1911 Encyclopedia Britanica. https://www.studylight.org/encyclopedias/eng/bri/t/thomas-kyd.html. 1910.
