Thomas Kyd

Thomas Kyd was born in 1558 to Francis and Anna Kyd. Little is known about Kyd’s life, but his father was a successful scrivener, so it is likely the Kyds were a comfortable middle-class family. In the late 1560s, Kyd enrolled in the Merchant Taylors’ School, a new private boys’ school in London that opened in 1561 and is still in operation today. It is not known if Kyd ever attended university, but there is evidence to suggest that he worked as a scrivener for a short time. In the 1580s, Kyd found fame as a respected playwright whose talent rivaled that of William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe. Like Kyd himself, little is known about his work; however, a handful of plays have been positively attributed to him, including The Spanish Tragedy, which was initially published anonymously. While the exact time during which The Spanish Tragedy was written is not known, it is suspected to have been written in the mid- to late 1580s, with the earliest surviving edition printed in 1592. It is also known that Kyd wrote The Householder’s Philosophy—a translation of Torquato Tasso’s Italian play, Padre di Famiglia—in 1588, and in 1594, he published a translation of a French play by Robert Garnier entitled Cornelia. It is strongly suspected that Kyd was also the author of two other important Elizabethan plays—King Leir and the Ur-Hamlet—which were wildly popular in Kyd’s day and served as the inspiration for Shakespeare’s King Lear and Hamlet, respectively. In 1587, Kyd was commissioned by a nobleman, as Christopher Marlowe later was as well, to work as a secretary and write plays. The two playwrights shared living quarters for a time, until May 12, 1593, when Kyd was arrested on suspicion of heresy. The room that he shared with Marlowe was searched by authorities and heretical papers were discovered. Kyd was imprisoned and tortured, and he eventually told authorities that the papers in fact belonged to Marlowe and that Marlowe was indeed an atheist. Marlowe was killed just weeks later on May 30, 1593, under mysterious circumstances involving government officials. Kyd was eventually released from prison and fervently maintained his innocence, but he was never able to recover his reputation. Kyd died of unknown causes, alone and deeply in debt, sometime in December of 1594. He was just 35 years old.