Corresponding stage directions in plays attributable to Kyd

Abstract

Thomas Kyd (1558–1594) deserves to be ranked among Christopher Marlowe (with whom he shared lodgings), Shakespeare, and John Lyly as one of the greatest Elizabethan dramatists. The son of Anna Kyd and Francis Kyd, a scrivener (a professional scribe), he attended Merchant Taylors’ School, which also boasted such alumni as Thomas Lodge, Lancelot Andrewes, and Edmund Spenser. It is probable that Kyd was at some point engaged in his father’s trade. Freeman noted that “Kyd’s handwriting, as it survives in two letters of 1593–4 to Sir John Puckering, is remarkably clear and formal,” which suggests the “training of a scrivener” (12). Dekker, in his pamphlet A Knight’s Conjuring (1607), linked “industrious Kyd” with the actor John Bentley and the poets Thomas Watson and Thomas Achelley (STC 6508, sig. K8–L1); while in his eulogy on Shakespeare, published in the First Folio (1623), Ben Jonson placed “sporting Kyd” among Shakespeare’s peers (Bevington et al. 5.639). Dekker and Jonson’s respective epithets, “industrious” and “sporting,” suggest that Kyd’s canon was considerably larger than the surviving plays now acknowledged as his, and that he may have written comedies. In a general essay published in the Times Literary Supplement in 2008, Vickers argued for a new Thomas Kyd canon, ascribing to him—alongside the traditionally accepted plays The Spanish Tragedy (1587), Soliman and Perseda (1588), and Cornelia (1594)—King Leir (1589), Arden of Faversham (1590), and Fair Em (1590), as well as parts of Henry VI Part One (1592) and Edward III (1593). Vickers’s attributions were rejected by several scholars using different systems, largely arithmetico-statistical, based on word frequencies (Taylor and Egan). However, my own research has collected a wide range of evidence in support of Vickers’s “expanded” Kyd canon, encompassing prosody, phraseology, linguistic idiosyncrasies, use of sources, and overall dramaturgy (FreeburyJones). Here I should like to present my findings for stage directions in some of these putatively Kydian plays, specifically those directions beginning with the formulation “Then they.” In his 2014 monograph Determining the Shakespeare Canon: Arden of Faversham & A Lover’s Complaint, MacDonald P. Jackson argues for Shakespeare’s part-authorship of Arden of Faversham. He convincingly rebuts Martin Wiggins’s suggestion that the domestic tragedy was written by an “enthusiastic amateur” rather than a “theatre professional” (Wiggins 285–86), but it is curious that many of Jackson’s counter-examples are drawn from Kyd’s Soliman and Perseda, rather than works penned by his proposed candidate: Shakespeare. Wiggins argues that the dramatist responsible for the domestic tragedy did not take into account the problems associated with some of his stage directions, especially Shakebag’s falling into a ditch (285–86). But Jackson points out that “Soliman and Perseda makes much greater demand on the spectators’ imagination” (107), especially when Soliman orders the Lord Marshal to throw two men from a tower top: “Then they are both tumbled down.” Jackson cites the following stage directions from Arden of Faversham during the course of his argument that a dramatist with practical experience of the theater could have been responsible for Arden of Faversham: “Then they lay the body in the countinghouse”; “Then they bear the body into the fields.” He also points out that stage directions in Soliman and Perseda “lapse into the past tense” (106), citing the following instance: “Then they play, and when she hath lost her gold, Erastus pointed to her chaine, and then she saide.” In summary, Jackson counters Wiggins by noting that the co-