Playwright steps out of the shadows as Shakespeare’s ‘tutor’
THOMAS KYD, the early modern playwright, was William Shakespeare’s “tutor”, research has revealed.
Digital comparisons of texts by both show for the first time the extent of Kyd’s impact on Shakespeare’s phraseology, verse style and overall stagecraft.
The research was done by Dr Darren Freebury-Jones, a leading Shakespearean scholar, who said: “We may regard [Kyd] as a tutor to Shakespeare.”
Using a mix of computational and more traditional ways of analysing everything from verse style to vocabulary, he discovered Shakespeare “shares a statistically significant number of phrases” with Kyd.
He explained: “What I’ve found is that Shakespeare seems to have had Kyd’s language at the forefront of his mind. He actually incorporates lines from Kyd’s plays.”
The True Chronicle History of King Leir – attributed to Kyd – is acknowledged as a source for King Lear but, in his history play King John, Shakespeare borrowed from Leir’s line, “And think me but the shadow of myself”, for Louis the Dauphin’s speech, “The shadow of myself formed in her eye”.
Dr Freebury-Jones, a lecturer in Shakespeare Studies, is a specialist in early modern attribution studies, focusing on Shakespeare, Kyd and Marlowe, as well as lesserknown contemporaries.
He said: “People write about Marlowe’s influence … but Shakespeare seems much more influenced by Kyd.”
It is known Shakespeare was influenced by Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy which, like Hamlet, is a revenge tragedy featuring a play within a play.
The Bard also contributed additions to the 1602 edition of The Spanish Tragedy.
However, Dr Freebury-Jones presents new evidence in a forthcoming book, Shakespeare’s Tutor: The Influence of Thomas Kyd, published this week by Manchester University Press.
He said it answered longstanding questions over whether Kyd, who had been credited as sole author of only three plays, wrote King Leir, Arden of Faversham, a crime drama, and Fair Em, a comedy.
Each will appear in a 2024 edition of Kyd’s works, edited by Sir Brian Vickers.
Dr Freebury-Jones, its associate editor, argues: “Modern scholarship has committed an injustice when it comes to Kyd’s legacy.”