Dramatist, probably born in London, about 1557, and educated at Merchant Taylors’ School, was most likely brought up as a scrivener under his father. His bloody and bombastic tragedies early brought him reputation, specially the two plays having for their hero Jeronimo, marshal of Spain. The first was not published till 1605; the second was licensed in 1592 as “The Spanish Tragedy.” Kyd translated from the French (1594) a tedious tragedy on Pompey’s daughter Cornelia, almost certainly produced “The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune” (1582) and “Solyman and Perseda” (1592), and has been credited with a share in other plays. He is supposed to have died in poverty in 1595. His name survives in Jonson’s “sporting Kyd and Marlowe’s mighty line.”

The Spanish Tragedy, 1594

  These scenes (of Hieronimo’s madness), which are the very salt of the play (which without them is but a caput mortuum, such another piece of flatness as Locrine), Hawkins, in his re-publication of this tragedy, has thrust out of the text into the notes; as omitted in the second Edition, “printed for Ed Allde, amended of such gross blunders as passed in the first;” and thinks them to have been foisted in by the players.—A late discovery at Dulwich College has ascertained that two sundry payments were made to Ben Jonson by the theatre for furnishing additions to Hieronimo. There is nothing in the undoubted plays of Jonson which would authorize us to suppose that he could have supplied the scenes in question. I should suspect the agency of some “more potent spirit.” Webster might have furnished them. They are full of that wild solemn preternatural cast of grief which bewilders us in the “Duchess of Malfy.”

  Possesses merits and a character of his own. In direct and vivid energy of language, in powerful antithesis of character, and in skilful and effective construction of plot, in the chief qualities that make a good acting play, “The Spanish Tragedy” will bear comparison with the best work of any of Shakespeare’s predecessors. That it passed through more editions than perhaps any play of the Elizabethan age is not at all surprising; it offered many points for ridicule to the wits of the time, but its unflagging interest and strong emotions of pity and suspense went straight to the popular heart.

  He lacked Marlowe’s sensitive ear, his joy in the roll of golden periods. But his dialogue, at its best, has the quality of passionate directness and simplicity essential to the highest dramatic achievement. The love-scenes, short as they are, between Belimperia and Horatio touch a responsive chord in our hearts, and the mingled agony and rage of Hieronimo are rendered with masterly power. In this complex delineation of character Kyd made a notable step forward, and he may justly claim to be the pioneer of introspective tragedy in England. Yet the moral basis of the play is crude in the extreme. A wild insatiable fury of revenge is the sole animating impulse of all the chief personages, and suffices to condone every atrocity, even the murder of the innocent Duke of Castile. But, in spite of defects, “The Spanish Tragedy” is an organic creation, and fully deserved its widespread influence. It holds a unique place in dramatic literature, reaching back to “Gorboduc,” and forward to Shakspere’s early plays, probably even to “Hamlet” and “King Lear.”

  Kyd is a sort of English Lazare de Baïf, the choragus who directed the new dramatists and led them off. His early plays have disappeared, and Kyd’s archaic “Spanish Tragedy,” acted in 1587, shows him still in the trammels of pseudo-classicism. This fierce play, nevertheless, is pervaded by a wild wind of romantic frenzy which marks an epoch in English drama.

  Kyd’s style in the “Spanish Tragedy” is indeed made up of the more vulgar elements in Seneca’s and Marlowe’s plays, without the intellectual quality that distinguishes either. From Seneca he borrows ghosts and “sentences;” Marlowe provides him with precedents of rant and bloodshed. By the help of these hints, Kyd managed to put together a tragedy utterly devoid of any true tragic motive, but not wanting in striking scenes and melodramatic effects, and acceptable accordingly to that public taste which is always caught by loud noise and glaring colours. The “Spanish Tragedy” is, I think, plainly written in emulation of Marlowe’s “Jew of Malta.” Like that tragedy it represents an action of cold-blooded murder followed by a sanguinary revenge. But whereas Marlowe gives a certain intellectual interest to his play, by making the Jew the victim of injustice in a situation contrived with great force and probability, Kyd is utterly unable to produce such a complication among his dramatis personæ as shall prepare the way for the dénouement he has imagined.

General

  A writer that seems to have been of pretty good esteem for versifying in former times, being quoted amongst some of the more fam’d poets, as Spenser, Drayton, Daniel, Lodge, &c. with whom he was either cotemporary or not much later. There is particularly remembered his tragedy “Cornelia.”

  His Tragedies with those of Rotrou, Serre, and others of that time, are of a mean Character. ’Tis evident to any that have read his Tragedies, which are Nine in Number, that he propos’d Seneca for his Model, and he was thought in those days to have happily succeeded in his Design. This Translation is writ in blank Verse, only here and there, at the close of a Paragraph (if I may so speak) the Reader is presented with a Couplet. The Chorus’s are writ in several Measures of Verse, and are very sententious.

  Kyd’s bombast was proverbial in his own day. With him the genius of tragedy might be said to have run mad.

  Kyd was a poet of very considerable mind, and deserves, in some respects, to be ranked above more notorious contemporaries: his thoughts are often both new and natural; and if in his plays he dealt largely in blood and death, he only partook of the habit of the time, in which good sense and discretion were often outraged for the purpose of gratifying the crowd. In taste he is inferior to Peele, but in force and character he is his superior; and if Kyd’s blank-verse be not quite so smooth, it has decidedly more spirit, vigour, and variety. As a writer of blank-verse, I am inclined, among the predecessors of Shakespeare, to give Kyd the next place to Marlow.

  Kyd was a dramatist of high capabilities in both construction and expression. Not that he is evenly excellent in either; but he is able to exhibit the operation of incidents upon character, and to depict with real force the workings of passion deeply moved. Herein lies the vast difference between him and the authors of “Gorboduc.”

  Kyd is the merest nominis umbra of English letters; we hardly know anything of the author of “The Spanish Tragedy,” perhaps of Jeronimo itself, and of Cornelia, except that he existed and was sportively called “sporting.”

  Kyd’s services to English tragedy were, we think, more important than is commonly supposed. He stands midway between two great schools; between the literary and academic school on the one hand, and the domestic and realistic school on the other. Regarded superficially, he might perhaps be confounded with a mere copyist of Italian models…. And yet, with all this, the impression which his plays make on us is very different from the impression made on us by the Italian tragedies. Nor is it difficult to explain the reason. The canvas of Kyd is more crowded; his touch is broader and bolder, his colour fuller and deeper; his action is infinitely more diversified, animated, and rapid; his characters are more human; he has more passion, he has more pathos. If he aims too much at sensational effects, he is sometimes simple and natural.

  Thomas Kyd a satellite of Shakspere. A few years ago the world was startled by the splendid discovery that the mightiest of the planets had a fifth satellite. Four of them had been well known for centuries and had had a glorious place in the history of the stars and light; but the one vassal nearest to his king had been so outshone by the grand luminary that, down to our own day, it had been eclipsed to the eyes of man. Very similar is the case of the nearest vassal of another Jupiter, the Jupiter Tonitruans of the world’s drama. Of his satellites, too, some four had been well known for as many centuries: one especially had, by his own brilliancy and fiery appearance, attracted the general eye; but in this case, too, the satellite nearest to the great luminary had hardly been taken notice of. And if we knew of his bare existence, we knew little or nothing of his orbit, of his history, of his magnitude, of the quality of his light—in short, nothing of all the details we care to know of poet or brilliant star.