Academics assign five more plays to hand of Thomas Kyd

The number of plays attributed to Thomas Kyd has more than doubled in a major new edition featuring the 16th-century writer’s output.

- Dalya Alberge

The forthcoming second volume of The Collected Works of Thomas Kyd makes a substantial case for his sole or part-authorship of plays previously attributed to William Shakespeare or Christopher Marlowe.

Kyd’s traditionally accepted dramas are the revenge play The Spanish Tragedy, the love tragedy Soliman and Perseda and the classical tragedy Cornelia.

But his canon now includes works such as Arden of Faversham, a domestic tragedy which is attributed solely to Kyd and “not at all” to Shakespeare, as others had assumed.

The critical edition of Kyd’s collected works presents him as a “tragically neglected major playwright”. Its nine scholars argue that the restored oeuvre situates Kyd as a leading Elizabethan dramatist, unjustly overshadowed by his great contemporaries, as well as “broadening our understanding of a golden period of literature and theatre”.