Shakespeare's tutor: The influence of Thomas Kyd 9781526164759

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Shakespeare’s tutor

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Shakespeare’s tutor

The influence of Thomas Kyd Darren Freebury-​Jones

Manchester University Press

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Copyright © Darren Freebury-​Jones 2022 The right of Darren Freebury-​Jones to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL www.manche​ster​univ​ersi​typr​ess.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 5261 6474 2 hardback First published 2022 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-​party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

List of tables page vi Acknowledgements vii List of abbreviations viii Introduction: Thomas Kyd’s dramatic oeuvre 1 Kyd’s stylistic individuality 2 Authorship versus influence 3 Kyd’s influence on early Shakespeare 4 Revision 5 Collaboration 6 Kyd’s influence on Shakespeare’s later plays 7 Kyd and Shakespeare: A reappraisal Appendix: Rare tetragrams plus, shared between Kyd’s sole-​authored plays

1 32 58 89 109 142 166 180

References Index

217 231

187

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Tables

1.1 Philip Timberlake ranges for feminine endings in plays by pre-​Shakespearian dramatists page 43 1.2 Ants Oras figures for pause patterns in plays attributed to Kyd 44 2.1 Martin Mueller results for unique tetragrams plus, shared between Shakespeare plays and Kyd’s ‘accepted’ canon 62 2.2 Ants Oras figures for pause patterns in ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘non-​Shakespeare’ scenes of Arden of Faversham 77 2.3 Martin Mueller results for unique tetragrams plus, shared between Shakespeare plays and Kyd’s ‘enlarged’ canon 84 4.1 Ants Oras figures for pause patterns in Henry VI Part One and plays attributed to Kyd 116 5.1 Rhyme patterns in plays attributed to Kyd 150 5.2 Ants Oras figures for pause patterns in Edward III and plays attributed to Kyd 153

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Acknowledgements

A number of excellent scholars have devoted their time and energy in offering me advice and feedback during my researches on Thomas Kyd and Shakespeare’s dramatic relationship. I must thank Martin Coyle, Marcus Dahl, John Drakakis, Paul Edmondson, Mark Hulse, Jeffrey Kahan, Ian Lancashire, Thomas Merriam, Martin Mueller, Lene Buhl Petersen, Richard Proudfoot, Pervez Rizvi, Duncan Salkeld, Marina Tarlinskaja, Brian Vickers, Stanley Wells, Martin Wiggins, and Henry Woudhuysen in particular. The book incorporates substantially revised material from Authorship and Journal of Early Modern Studies. The specific articles are listed in the references under Freebury-​Jones (2017c, 2018, 2019b). I am grateful to the editors of these journals for granting me permission to reprint any part of my essays under the Creative Commons licence. My heartfelt gratitude to my family: my mother, Georgina, father, Wayne, and my brother, Joel; they have made this possible. All the pens that poets ever held could not sum up my debt to them. The same goes to my partner, Emma, for whom I am incredibly lucky. I met with things dying and things new-​born while preparing this book. My oldest friend passed away as I was drafting Chapter 6, and my work on Shakespeare’s recollections of Kyd’s dramas in his later plays is written in Christopher’s enduring memory. My grandmother, Josephine, passed away when the very first draft was completed: she was so supportive of my academic work. Conversely, during the early stages of my time lecturing in Stratford-​upon-​Avon, Emma and I discovered that we were going to have a baby. Oliver Christopher Freebury-​Jones was born on the Ides of March 2019. I hope he will one day read this book, for he certainly inspired me to write it.

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Abbreviations

Ado AF Corn. E3 Err. FE H5 1H6 2H6 3H6 Ham. Hek. HP JM Jn KL Lr Mac. MP MND Oth. R2 R3 Rom. S&P Shr. SLWT

Much Ado about Nothing Arden of Faversham Cornelia Edward III The Comedy of Errors Fair Em Henry V Henry VI Part One Henry VI Part Two Henry VI Part Three Hamlet Hekatompathia The Householder’s Philosophy The Jew of Malta King John King Leir King Lear Macbeth The Massacre at Paris A Midsummer Night’s Dream Othello Richard II Richard III Romeo and Juliet Soliman and Perseda The Taming of the Shrew Summer’s Last Will and Testament

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xi

Abbreviations Sp. T. TGV Tit. Volp.

The Spanish Tragedy The Two Gentlemen of Verona Titus Andronicus Volpone

ix

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Introduction: Thomas Kyd’s dramatic oeuvre

Christopher Marlowe was as dead as a doornail. His death had been mysterious: accused of posting bills about London threatening Protestant refugees, he had been stabbed in the right eye in a Deptford house by Ingram Frizer, while awaiting a decision on his case by the Privy Council. Robert Greene was also deceased, having railed against the world of commercial theatre on his deathbed. So when Thomas Kyd died in August 1594, the path was cleared for the young dramatist William Shakespeare. The ghosts of these dramatic predecessors, each of whom had come to an ignominious end, would haunt Shakespeare throughout his writing career. Much has been written on Shakespeare’s relationship with the former playwrights, but modern scholarship has committed an injustice when it comes to Kyd’s legacy, failing to recognise the extent to which he influenced Shakespeare and, as I argue in this book, the full extent of his surviving dramatic corpus. The injustice that Kyd has faced in death echoes the final years of his life. Marlowe and Kyd shared lodgings in London, and as the authorities suspected Marlowe of writing the heretical poem posted on the walls of the Dutch church in Broad Street on 5 May 1593, Kyd was arrested and possibly tortured. A year later Kyd would die in disgrace, despite being an innocent man. Readers will probably agree that it is a tragedy that Marlowe died at the age of just twenty-​nine. We can only wonder at what other works of dramatic genius he would have produced were it not for his untimely death. But it is an injustice that few scholars over the years have mourned Kyd’s passing at the age of thirty-​five. The fact of the matter is that Kyd deserves to be ranked among Marlowe, Shakespeare, and John Lyly as one of the greatest Elizabethan dramatists.

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Thomas Kyd (1558–​ 94) is traditionally accepted as the sole author of three surviving plays: The Spanish Tragedy (1587), Soliman and Perseda (1588), and Cornelia (1594), a translation of Robert Garnier’s French drama Cornélie (1573).1 Kyd also seems to have written a lost Hamlet (1588) play, which preceded Shakespeare’s version, and he translated Torquato Tasso’s Padre di famiglia, known as The Householder’s Philosophy (1588). 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. Arthur 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’ (1967: 12). Thomas 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 (1607: sigs K8v–​L1r), while in his eulogy on Shakespeare, published in the First Folio (1623), Ben Jonson placed ‘sporting Kyd’ among Shakespeare’s peers (Bevington et al., 2012: 639). Dekker and Jonson’s respective epithets, ‘industrious’ and ‘sporting’, suggest that Kyd’s canon was much larger than the three surviving plays now acknowledged as his, and that he may have written comedies. There have been considerable advances in our understanding of Kyd’s dramatic oeuvre since Lukas Erne’s important study of Kyd’s ‘thematic’ and ‘dramaturgical fingerprints’ (2001: xi). My chief contention is that there is an urgent need for a scholarly re-​ evaluation of Kyd’s contributions to drama and, especially, his impact on Shakespeare’s development as a playwright. I propose that this book will shed new light on Kyd’s place in the early modern canon, and will reveal the remarkable extent to which Shakespeare was influenced by his dramatic predecessor. Brian Vickers notes that ‘the degree to which’ Shakespeare ‘was influenced by Kyd’ is ‘a topic that deserves a full study’ (2020: 176). Here I provide just such a study, the first of its kind, whilst offering new insights into the dramaturgical and stylistic habits that define Kyd’s corpus. As Erne rightly puts it: ‘The question of what Kyd wrote should really be the starting point for any further investigation’ (2001: xi). I begin with the three extant plays that scholarly consensus assigns

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solely to Kyd, and the similarities that reveal a single author’s creative consciousness.

Kyd’s accepted sole-​authored canon The Spanish Tragedy was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 6 October 1592 for Abel Jeffes. Lord Strange’s Men revived the play that year; they performed the tragedy on sixteen occasions at the Rose playhouse between 14 March 1592 and 22 January 1593 (Foakes, 2002: 17–​19). However, 1587 or earlier is the most likely date of the play’s composition. The play, printed anonymously in every sixteenth-​and seventeenth-​century edition, was attributed to Kyd by the bookseller Edward Archer in 1656. The anonymity of these editions is not unusual; to offer just one example, the Tamburlaine (1587) plays were not published under Marlowe’s name until 1820. In 1773, Thomas Hawkins identified Kyd as the play’s author (1773: 2) through Thomas Heywood’s reference in his An Apology for Actors (1612) to ‘M. Kid, in his Spanish Tragedy’ (Heywood, 1612: sig. E3v). Kyd’s authorship of this play is uncontroversial. The Spanish Tragedy is fundamentally a revenge play, in which Hieronimo avenges the murder of his son Horatio at the hands of Lorenzo and Balthazar. However, as Alfred Harbage puts it, Kyd tends to combine ‘comic methods with tragic materials, thus creating a species of comitragedy’ (1962: 37). Lorenzo, the prototypical Machiavellian villain in Elizabethan drama, fears that Balthazar’s servant Serberine will betray him; he therefore eliminates any intermediaries by ensuring that Pedringano kills Serberine and is subsequently caught by the King’s Watch. We find Kyd’s distinctive mixture of black comedy and tragedy in 3.6 when Pedringano mocks his executioner upon the scaffold, in the mistaken belief that an empty box, delivered by a Page, contains his pardon. Prior to this moment, the Page succumbs to curiosity and opens the box, only to discover that Lorenzo has tricked Pedringano. The Page addresses the audience in prose and prepares them for what Harbage describes as a ‘sensationally lethal turn’ in Lorenzo’s knavery, which provokes an ‘oddly mixed response –​of amusement and horror, revulsion and admiration’ (Harbage, 1962: 37). Kyd’s

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affective blend of humour with Senecan horror is indicative of the playwright’s dramaturgical inventiveness. The Ghost of Andrea and the allegorical figure of Revenge ‘serve for Chorus in this Tragedie’ (Sp. T., 1.1.91) and divide the play’s acts with commentary on the action, which follows Roman playwright and philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca’s division of acts separated by choruses.2 As Jordi Coral points out, Kyd’s device of having Revenge and Andrea watch over events follows ‘the Senecan Chorus –​often in conjunction with an infernal Prologue’, which ‘casts a shadow of fatality over the unwitting characters, whose actions thus appear to obey a supra-​human as well as a human logic’ (2007: 16). Kyd’s drama adheres to a providential design in which events reflect the wills of deific or allegorical figures. His play also conforms to the terms of the theatrum mundi, in which ‘a supernatural figure’ acts as a ‘cosmic playwright yet a playwright who also’ performs ‘the role of spectator, serving as audience to its own creation’ (Drawdy, 2014: 6). In Seneca’s tragedies, the Chorus sometimes intervenes in the play’s action; for example, the Chorus in Thyestes admonishes Atreus. Similarly, in Kyd’s play, the choric figure of Revenge fulfils his promise and Andrea is avenged. Kyd’s drama contains two different patterns: while his characters appear to be ‘entirely at the mercy of supernatural powers’, they also ‘shape their own destiny’ through intrigue (Erne, 2001: 103). It is fitting that Hieronimo –​who acts as the very instrument of revenge –​temporarily replaces the supernatural Chorus after the performance of the playlet Soliman and Perseda by delivering an epilogue, thus allowing Revenge to fulfil his promise and intervene in the action of the play. Hieronimo’s playlet is drawn from Henry Wotton’s A Courtlie Controversie of Cupids Cautels (1578), which is a translation of Jacques Yver’s Le printemps d’Yver (1572) and was published in 1578 by Francis Kyd’s acquaintance Francis Coldocke (Freeman, 1967: 51). Kyd also drew from Wotton’s A Courtlie Controversie of Cupids Cautels for his Turkish tragedy, Soliman and Perseda, which was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 20 November 1592 and was printed by Edward Allde for Edward White. Although, like The Spanish Tragedy, the play was printed anonymously, Kyd has been the ‘only serious candidate’ for the play’s authorship since Thomas

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Hawkins assigned it to him in his collection of plays titled The Origin of the English Drama (1773), and ‘Almost every scholar who discusses either the play or the playwright acknowledges the connection’ (Lancashire and Levenson, 1973: 233).3 Given that Hieronimo’s playlet in The Spanish Tragedy and the main plot of Soliman and Perseda are both drawn from Wotton, Soliman and Perseda gives us an example of Kyd’s having reworked his material. Like The Spanish Tragedy, the play revolves around a fatal love-​triangle between Erastus, Perseda, and Soliman, akin to the relationship between Horatio, Bel-​imperia, and Balthazar. The tragedy also contains humour, through the characters of Piston and, in particular, Basilisco, a miles gloriosus, perhaps drawn in part from the Italian commedia dell’arte, which seems to have influenced Kyd throughout his career. Erne suggests that ‘Kyd’s interest in complex stage action and a multitude of props may well have been fostered by the Italian comedies’ (2001: 195). Kyd, as Shakespeare would do after him, toys with generic conventions through exploiting the dramatic potential of blending comedy and tragedy. Kyd’s playfulness with audience expectations is emphasised by Soliman, who, in a theatrically self-​conscious speech, surmises that if he can win Perseda ‘Our seane will proove but tragicomicall’ (S&P, 5.2.143), but he also fears that ‘woes’ will ‘spoile my commedie’ (5.4.8). Kyd’s intolerance of tidy genre definitions can be seen most clearly in the choric frame of the play, for Love, Death, and Fortune argue over the play’s generic outcome. Death, like Andrea, provides a lengthy list of the dead at the play’s tragic conclusion. Furthermore, Soliman and Perseda, like The Spanish Tragedy, features characters involved in plots of intrigue and revenge. Early in the play, Perseda requests Basilisco to ‘work revenge’ on her ‘behalf’ (2.1.76), in the mistaken belief that Erastus has been unfaithful. Later in the play she seeks vengeance for the murder of her husband. Erastus’s murderer, Soliman, also seeks revenge for the deaths of his brothers ‘In controversie touching’ Rhodes (3.1.7). Bel-​imperia plays the role of Perseda in The Spanish Tragedy in order to avenge the murder of her lover, while Perseda avenges Erastus through disguising herself in a man’s apparel and tricking Soliman into kissing her poisoned lips. Soliman and Perseda thus typifies Kyd’s emphasis on Senecan revenge, which is achieved through complex intrigue plots.

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Erastus’s murder in 5.2 of Soliman and Perseda reveals Kyd as the pre-​Shakespearian master of sophisticated stagecraft. Erastus is put on false trial, while Soliman watches from afar and comments on the action; Soliman is in turn spied on by Piston, who also delivers a series of asides. Erne compares this scene to the play-​within-​the-​play in The Spanish Tragedy, which also exhibits Kyd’s ‘interest in multi-​layered action’ (2001: 179). I would add that this scene closely parallels 2.2 of The Spanish Tragedy, for the villains in both plays (Lorenzo and Balthazar in The Spanish Tragedy) comment on the action, as their unwitting victims (Horatio in The Spanish Tragedy) approach death. These villains are in turn spied on by supernatural choruses. When it came to his translation of Garnier’s Cornélie, Kyd’s ‘aim seems to have been to impregnate his text with a stronger sense of the supernatural than he found in the original’ (Erne, 2001: 210), as can be seen most clearly in Cornelia’s dream of the ghost of Pompey, which I expand on in Chapter 3. Cornelia was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 26 January 1594 to John Busby and Nicholas Ling. Unlike The Spanish Tragedy and Soliman and Perseda, the dramatist’s name features on the title page and at the end of the translation; his initials feature in the dedication to the Countess of Sussex. However, Edward Archer’s 1656 catalogue assigns Cornelia to ‘Thomas Loyd’, which demonstrates ‘how rapidly Kyd was forgotten’ (Erne, 2001: 47). Cornelia, despite being a translation, is very much Kyd’s own work, for he translated freely, to the extent that his ‘amendments constitute a second text, which can be considered independently of Garnier’s version’ (Roberts and Gaines, 1979: 133). Some of the finest passages in Kyd’s translation are of his own invention, such as the first eighteen lines of the third act, which contain a number of hauntingly beautiful poetic images: Her murdred love trans-​form’d into a Rose: Whom (though she see) to crop she kindly feares; But (kissing) sighes, and dewes hym with her teares; —​ Sweet teares of love, remembrancers to tyme, Tyme past with me that am to teares converted. (Corn., 3.1.10–​14)

Here Kyd reworks expressions of grief from The Spanish Tragedy and Soliman and Perseda: Sweet lovely Rose, ill pluckt before thy time (Sp. T., 2.5.47) Faire springing Rose, ill pluckt before thy time. (S&P, 5.4.81)

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We can see in these passages that Kyd was apt to repeat words and phrases in related dramatic contexts. We might note in the examples from The Spanish Tragedy and Soliman and Perseda that the shared phrases in bold typeface occupy the exact same place in the verse lines, with other non-​matching words serving the same syntactical and semantic functions. Vickers notes that ‘A writer’s memory can recall extensive linguistic units together with their prosodic frame. Kyd often recalled the physiognomy of a verse-​ line, so to speak, the placing of key words at the beginning and/​ or ending’ (2018b: 452–​3). As I elaborate later in this book, collocation matching, as a text-​specific method, is a valuable tool for establishing Kyd’s authorship.4 The fibrous influence that Seneca exerted on Kyd can be seen clearly in the Chorus, which closes each act and interacts with Cornelia. In this respect the Chorus resembles the superstructures in The Spanish Tragedy and Soliman and Perseda and, as Freeman pointed out, represents an advance on Seneca’s dramatic methods, for ‘Andrea is to be considered more a part of the action than, for example, Tantalus in Thyestes’, while the ‘trio of gods’ are ‘included in the regular act-​scene structure’ of Soliman and Perseda (Freeman, 1967: 141). Judging by the plays explored above, it seems fair to say that Kyd refined Seneca for the Elizabethan stage. All three of these plays were included in the first edition of Kyd’s plays edited by F. S. Boas in 1901. Boas also included The First Part of Hieronimo (1602), a narratologically imperfect prequel to The Spanish Tragedy; for comparison, we might recall the continuity issues in the Star Wars franchise caused by The Phantom Menace. Confusingly, however, Boas rejected an attribution to Kyd: ‘it is the work of a journey man playwright who found in the Induction to The Spanish Tragedy hints from which he manufactured this crude melodrama’, and ‘whose title served as a decoy to the theatre-​ going public and which has had the effect doubtless unforeseen by its author of fatally injuring the fame of Kyd’ (Boas, 1901: xliv). Nevertheless, Erne claims that this play, printed in 1605 by William Jaggard and published by Thomas Pavier, presents a ‘textually corrupt version of parts of Don Horatio’ (Erne, 2001: 20), which he assigns to Kyd. The Spanish Comedy of Don Horatio (1592) is known to have been performed on at least seven occasions by Lord Strange’s Men (Foakes, 2002: 16–​17), and scholars suspect that this

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lost play was also a prequel to Kyd’s most famous tragedy, given that there is parallelism between the play’s title and The Spanish Tragedy, as well as the fact that both plays contain a character named Horatio. These correspondences, however, provide no proof that Kyd was the play’s author. I can find no trace of Kyd’s hand in the verbal fabric of The First Part of Hieronimo, which appears to have been written long after Kyd died in 1594. Furthermore, as I show in Chapter 1, statistical attribution tests have failed to identify Kyd’s prosodic or linguistic habits in that text. Erne’s arguments have not been accepted by other scholars. For instance, Martin Wiggins states that ‘Erne over-​confidently attempts to isolate elements’ of The Spanish Comedy of Don Horatio ‘in the text of the later 1 Hieronimo’ (Wiggins and Richardson, 2013: 143). Unless firm evidence to the contrary arises, it seems safe to reject arguments for Kyd’s hand in The First Part of Hieronimo. But that is not to say other sole-​authored Kyd plays have not survived. A new edition of Kyd’s works to be published by Boydell and Brewer, for which I am Associate Editor, contains –​alongside the three accepted plays explored above –​additional plays.5 My position is that Kyd’s canon of sole-​authored plays should be extended from three extant texts to six, and I elaborate on these additional plays, namely The True Chronicle History of King Leir (1589), Arden of Faversham (1590), and Fair Em, the Miller’s Daughter of Manchester (1590), in relation to Kyd’s dramaturgy. While it will be necessary later in this book to place emphasis on statistical links between these newly attributed and Kyd’s attested plays in particular, I will reveal here that, taken together, these six plays show signs of a common author’s dramatic methods.

Kyd’s ‘enlarged’ sole-​authored canon There is evidence of some confusion in the Stationers’ Register entry of 14 May 1594 as to whether Adam Islip or Edward White owned the rights to King Leir: Islip’s name was crossed out of the record and replaced by White’s. White, to whom Soliman and Perseda was registered, published an unauthorised edition of The Spanish Tragedy in 1592. Like Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and Soliman and Perseda, King Leir was printed with no mention of its author. It is

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significant when an anonymous play has a voluminous history of being attributed to a particular author by multiple scholars, as in the case of Soliman and Perseda. King Leir also has a long history of being assigned to Kyd. Several of the scholars in the pre-​electronic era who attributed anonymous plays to Kyd were well-​read and perceptive, possessing extensive memories of the dramas they had encountered, and were therefore adept at distinguishing authors’ styles. However, the attributions of anonymous plays to Kyd, explored below, should be tested objectively and systematically by new attribution methods, as I do later in this book. Edmond Malone was the first scholar to suspect that Kyd was ‘the author of the old plays of Hamlet, and of King Leir’ (Boswell, 1821a: 316), while F. G. Fleay (1891: 52) proposed Kyd and Thomas Lodge as authors of King Leir. J. M. Robertson asserted in 1914 that there was ‘some reason to think’ Kyd, albeit recasting a play written by Lodge, as suggested by Fleay, was the play’s author (1914: 109). Robertson expanded on his attribution in 1924, arguing that the ‘play is ascribable to Kyd on the score’ of ‘the naturalness of the diction … the orderly planning and complication of the action throughout’, and ‘the frequent parallelism both in action and in phrase to those of Kyd’s ascertained plays’ (1924: 387). William Wells also argued for Kyd’s authorship of King Leir, for it is ‘a play of simple, undisguised realism, with few flights of fancy. Its sentiment is extraordinarily naive, in content and expression, and yet, in its way, powerful. This accords with Kyd’s characteristics’ (1939: 434). We might question the somewhat pejorative tone of Wells’s statement here, but he rightly dismissed any arguments for Lodge as part author, for ‘the style of Leir is uniform throughout, one poet alone is involved’ (437). Wells observed that King Leir is ‘abounding in feminine endings’, and ‘this points directly to Kyd, for none but he, among the pre-​ Shakespearian dramatists, wandered far from the normal ten-​ syllable line’ (438). This was an especially astute observation, given that so-​called ‘feminine endings’, meaning verse lines concluding in extra unstressed syllables, were particularly rare in the plays of Shakespeare’s dramatic predecessors. Paul V. Rubow, having identified numerous parallels of thought, language, and corresponding plot features, also ascribed King Leir to Kyd (1948: 145–​55). He cited several distinctive word associations that co-​occur with Kyd’s

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attested plays, indicative of a single authorial mind. To offer one example, Rubow pointed out that Andrea’s account of his journey to Pluto’s court at the beginning of The Spanish Tragedy, ‘I saw more sights then thousand tongues can tell, /​Or pennes can write, or mortall harts can think’ (Sp. T., 1.1.57–​8), is matched in King Leir when the King’s companion, Perillus, warns the Messenger ‘of grisly hell, /​Such paynes, as never mortall toung can tell’ (KL, 19.1737–​8).6 Rubow was unaware of the attribution to Kyd by Wells, so the evidence these scholars presented and the conclusions they reached were entirely independent of each other. In Chapter 1 I show that the observations of scholars such as Wells and Rubow on Kyd’s use of feminine endings and the dense network of individual linguistic choices linking this play to other works ascribed to him can be tested through quantitative analysis. King Leir is characteristic of Kyd’s drama in that the play is concerned with intrigue, disguise, and deception throughout. The play begins with Leir’s attempt to trick his daughter Cordella into marrying the Irish King, while Gonorill and Ragan conspire to ‘aggravate’ their father ‘in such bitter termes, /​That he will soone convert his love’ for Cordella ‘to hate’ (KL, 2.193–​4). The Gallian King and Mumford disguise themselves as pilgrims, using the aliases Will and Jack. Towards the end of the play, assisted by Cordella, they disguise themselves as country folk. Much of the play’s comic intrigue revolves around the Messenger figure. In Scene 12 he enters with letters from Cornwall to be delivered to Leir, but Gonorill intercepts him and opens the letters herself. We might compare the Messenger’s lines, ‘Madam, I hope your Grace will stand /​ Betweene me and my neck-​verse, if I be /​Calld in question, for opening the Kings letters’ (12.996–​8), with the Hangman’s line in The Spanish Tragedy: ‘You will stand between the gallowes and me?’ (Sp. T., 3.7.26). The Hangman’s imploration follows the Page’s illicit opening of the box that supposedly contains Pedringano’s pardon. Here we see idiosyncratic recurrent phrasal patterns in related dramatic contexts. Karen Cunningham points out that, in The Spanish Tragedy, Kyd exploits the ‘ambiguous potential’ of letters and that he had ‘a personal history of being immersed in the documentary practices of his day’ (2002: 111). Throughout King Leir, the dramatist makes ingenious use of letters in his intrigue plotlines. Gonorill incenses

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her sister against Leir through exchanging a letter for one that claims Leir has been slanderous, while Ragan orders the Messenger to show Leir Gonorill’s incriminating letter ordering his murder. Similarly, in The Spanish Tragedy, Bel-​imperia writes to Hieronimo, implicating Horatio’s murderers. Nevertheless, Hieronimo ponders whether Bel-​imperia is attempting to incense him against Lorenzo in order to endanger his life; the Hangman eventually confirms the conspirators’ guilt when he discovers Pedringano’s letter to Lorenzo. Kyd’s ‘complex views’ on ‘letters as a crucial means of forming alliances’ (Cunningham, 2002: 111), exhibited in his acknowledged works, are echoed in the treatment of the Ambassador in King Leir. The Ambassador hopes to deliver a letter inviting Leir to France, but he is accused of ‘a fayn’d Ambassage’ (KL, 22.1940) and is maltreated by Ragan and Cambria. In Chapter 6 we will explore the ways in which Shakespeare was influenced by Kyd’s theatrically inventive use of letters. Like The Spanish Tragedy and Soliman and Perseda, King Leir toys with its audience’s generic expectations. For instance, the Gallian King, following his wedding, asks Cordella: When will these clouds of sorrow once disperse, And smiling joy tryumph upon thy brow? When will this Scene of sadnesse have an end, And pleasant acts insue, to move delight? (16.1230–1)

We might recall Soliman’s hope that ‘Our seane will proove but tragicomicall’ (S&P, 5.2.143). Kyd’s drama features what Miles S. Drawdy describes as a ‘certain breed of dramatic self-​ consciousness that reveals itself by a systematic reliance upon the theatrum mundi as a foundation for both visual imagery and textual framework’ (2014: 25–​ 6). Like Kyd’s accepted plays, King Leir also exhibits the influence of Seneca. For instance, Leir, betrayed by his daughters, takes on the role of the self-​cursing protagonist, as can be found in Seneca’s tragedies. It is also notable that Perillus –​rather like Antigone in Seneca’s The Phoenician Women, who follows blind Oedipus –​accompanies the King and persuades him not to kill himself. We might note a correlation between Leir’s self-​inflicted misery and Oedipus’s self-​inflicted blindness. Perillus asks the audience: ‘Ah, who so blind, as they that will not see /​ The neere approch of their owne misery?’ (KL, 6.577–​8). Perillus,

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like Seneca’s choruses, comments ‘on the words and actions of the characters’, and he is ‘sympathetic to, and expressive of, the problems of the hero’ (Shelton, 1978: 40). Alexander Maclaren Witherspoon argued that it was the French tragic poet Robert Garnier who provided ‘the important innovation’ of introducing ‘a confidant’ for the lead character ‘to address’ (1924: 27). This provides another important link with Kyd, who seems to have been influenced by Garnier long before he came to translate his closet drama, Cornélie; the General’s Speech in 1.2 of The Spanish Tragedy was modelled partly on Garnier’s description of the Battle of Thapsus in Cornélie. Garnier was in turn influenced by Seneca’s revenge tragedies, while Kyd, as Erne points out, ‘claims Seneca emphatically as his ancestor’ (2001: 81). It seems to me that, although King Leir could be regarded as a comedy, which concludes happily with the restoration of divine order, Kyd’s debt to Seneca’s revenge tragedies is unmistakable. Arden of Faversham was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 3 April 1592. It was published in Quarto that year by Edward White, who also published Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and Soliman and Perseda, and owned the rights to King Leir. Abel Jeffes was fined 10s for publishing an illegal edition of Arden of Faversham that same year; White was also fined for publishing an edition of The Spanish Tragedy, which belonged to Jeffes. Lukas Erne notes that the ‘quick succession’ of The Spanish Tragedy, Soliman and Perseda, and Arden of Faversham ‘is intriguing’, and speculates that the reason why these plays ‘were published by the same stationer around the same time may be that Kyd sold White the manuscripts’ (2014: xvi). The printer of the play appears to have been Edward Allde (Wine, 1973: xix), who also printed Soliman and Perseda and owned rights to the title of King Leir in 1624. In terms of printer and publisher provenances, the links to other plays attributed to Kyd are patent, but none of the Quarto editions of Arden of Faversham mentions the author’s name. In his 1656 catalogue, which assigns Kyd’s Cornelia to ‘Thomas Loyd’, Edward Archer attributed the play to Richard Bernard, a clergyman and author of an edition of Terence’s plays in Latin and English. Archer’s list contains a number of impossible attributions, and no scholar has taken this ascription seriously. Conversely, like the plays explored above, scholars have attributed Arden of Faversham to Kyd for over a century on the

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basis of internal evidence. Alongside Soliman and Perseda and King Leir, Fleay proposed Kyd as the play’s author towards the end of the nineteenth century (1891: 29), as did Charles Crawford at the beginning of the twentieth century (1903: 74–​86). Crawford noted that some of the ‘language’ of the play ‘can only be properly appreciated by persons acquainted with the drafting of legal documents’, as Kyd probably was, being ‘the son of a scrivener’ (1906: 105), Francis Kyd, a Writer of the Court Letter. Crawford provided ‘an exhaustive and painstaking examination of Kyd’s work as a whole’ (113) and found that ‘the vocabulary, phrasing, and general style’ of the play ‘are those of Kyd, and that they cannot be mistaken for those of any other author of the time’ (118). He elaborated that the play ‘echoes all parts of Kyd’s work; and, therefore, it is a difficult thing to make choice of illustrations, there being such an abundance of material to substantiate his claim to the play’ (120). Having listed fifty close verbal matches between Arden of Faversham and The Spanish Tragedy and Soliman and Perseda, Crawford concluded that A man’s vocabulary is the surest test by which he can be judged, for no author can jump out of his own language into that of another without betraying himself. His other work will condemn him, and vindicate the wronged party at the same time. It only means the exercise of much patience and minute inquiry to know ‘which is which’. The proof lies before us here: the parallels from Marlowe and Lyly are of an entirely different character from those I have adduced from Kyd himself. I assert, then, that Kyd is the author of Arden of Feversham. (130)

In 1907 Walter Miksch studied the stylistic, metrical, and rhetorical features of Arden of Faversham in comparison with The Spanish Tragedy and Soliman and Perseda and ascribed the play to Kyd. He listed almost a hundred close verbal matches among these texts (1907: 19–​29). The following year C. F. Tucker Brooke agreed with Fleay and Crawford that ‘there are more parallels in feeling and expression between’ the ‘play and the tragedies of Kyd than coincidences will account for’ (1908: xv). The great Australian attribution scholar E. H. C. Oliphant judged that ‘Arden’s claim to rank among the Shakespeare apocrypha is on external evidence absolutely nil; nor is it his on the internal evidence.’ But Oliphant did find that other twentieth-​century scholars had made

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‘a strong case for’ Kyd’s participation, and himself concluded that ‘Kyd was concerned in it’ (1911: 420). H. D. Sykes identified additional verbal matches, including some with Kyd’s Cornelia. He argued that ‘this play has rightly been assigned to Kyd’, for ‘the resemblances between Arden and the unquestioned work of Kyd extend to the most trivial details of phrasing and vocabulary, and the whole weight of the internal evidence supports the conclusion that it is the product of Kyd’s own pen’ (Sykes, 1919: 48–​9). The wealth of evidence amassed by all of these scholars was so considerable that T. S. Eliot proclaimed Kyd an ‘extraordinary dramatic (if not poetic) genius who was in all probability the author of two plays so dissimilar as The Spanish Tragedy and Arden of Faversham’ (1920: 88–​9). Yet more evidence for Kyd’s authorship was provided in 1948 by Paul V. Rubow, who listed over 100 verbal links between Arden of Faversham and Kyd’s works, including Cornelia and The Householder’s Philosophy (1948: 120–​44). For instance, Arden’s lines, To violate my dear wife’s chastity (For dear I hold her love, as dear as heaven) Shall on the bed which he thinks to defile (AF, 1.38–​40)7

share a collocational cluster with Kyd’s expansion of Tasso’s text, revealing the same authorial mind: ‘violate the bandes by so defiling of the marriage bedde, he shall doubtles much confirme the womans chastitie’ (HP, 255). Two years later, Félix Carrère, having analysed verbal parallels and resemblances in characterisation and dramatic situation, argued that the case for Kyd’s authorship was definitive (1950: 21–​85). According to my researches, at least twenty respected scholars associated the play with Kyd during the twentieth century. The fact that so many scholars in different countries should independently ascribe Arden of Faversham to the same author is unique in the history of attribution studies. Without the aid of modern electronic corpora, these scholars could never claim that a locution they associated with an authorial candidate was unique or common. It is significant, then, that many of the shared phrases that scholars such as Crawford, Miksch, and Rubow identified between Arden of Faversham and other plays assigned to Kyd, such as ‘be it spoken in secret here’, ‘Then be not nice’, ‘Why, then, by this reckoning’, ‘all thy kin are worth’, ‘link in liking

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with’, and ‘so slight a task’, turn out to be genuinely rare or unique when tested via largescale corpus methods, as the appendix to this book shows. I shall evaluate these scholars’ observations that this play shares further stylistic and metrical commonalities with those works accepted as Kyd’s in Chapter 1. Arden of Faversham dramatises the real-​life event of Thomas Arden’s murder, which occurred in his own home in Faversham on Saint Valentine’s Day 1551, at the hands of hired war veterans, Black Will and Loosebag (named Shakebag in the play). The play’s primary source appears to have been the second edition of Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1587). The handling of source material is comparable to Kyd’s dramatisation of Wotton’s novella A Courtlie Controversie of Cupids Cautels in Soliman and Perseda. Kyd names and develops the characters of Lucina and Brusor so that they are fully integrated into the action of that play, whilst Soliman, who is ‘subordinate to the two lovers’ in Wotton, but ‘the most complex character’ in Kyd’s play (Erne, 2001: 178), enters the action much earlier. The fleshing out in Arden of Faversham of unnamed figures from Holinshed, such as the painter (Clarke), thus recalls Kyd’s use of source material elsewhere. Moreover, the author introduces the major character of Mosby in the opening scene, whereas he does not appear until later in Holinshed’s narrative. The play creates parallel love triangles: the triangle of Alice–​Arden–​Mosby is akin to Perseda–​Erastus–​Soliman, whereas the Susan–​ Michael–​ Clarke triangle resembles Lucina–​ Ferdinando–​Erastus in the lower plot of Soliman and Perseda. Just as in Kyd’s acknowledged plays and King Leir, ‘the playwright keeps us guessing at what sort of play he is writing’, for ‘he is toying with us’ (Leggatt, 1983: 129). The play could be considered the first black comedy in English. Grisly humour can, of course, be found in Kyd’s earlier dramatic efforts, most notably during the scene between Pedringano and his executioner in The Spanish Tragedy. The professional murderers, Black Will and Shakebag, are incompetent boasters who frequently brag about their exploits in battle. Their characterisation closely echoes Piston and the miles gloriosus, Basilisco, in Soliman and Perseda. Lois Potter observes that ‘Kyd paired his braggart’ Basilisco ‘with a small boy, Piston, who keeps undermining his boasts with asides and cheeky retorts’ (2012: 174). In this respect, Shakebag and Piston serve a practically

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identical dramatic purpose, for they both frequently undermine Black Will and Basilisco. Furthermore, these comic murderers, like Basilisco and Pedringano, as well as the Messenger in King Leir, are central to the play’s plot. As J. M. Robertson put it: ‘the “murderer” business’ in King Leir ‘smacks strongly of’ Arden of Faversham (1924: 387–​8). The play therefore exhibits important elements of Kyd’s dramaturgy and characterisation noted by a number of scholars. Kyd often takes advantage of stage properties to enable the hired murderers to conceal themselves and spy on their unwitting victim, as in Scenes 9 and 14. His mastery of multi-​ layered eavesdropping scenes is evidenced in the moments from The Spanish Tragedy and Soliman and Perseda I mentioned earlier, as well as the ‘split’ Scene 19 of King Leir, in which the Messenger addresses the audience directly as he prepares to kill Perillus and Leir, whose conversation he listens in on. Arden of Faversham is typical of Kyd’s sophisticated staging, which often involves voyeurs concealing themselves before attempting murder. We have seen that the humour of Arden of Faversham is characteristic of Kyd’s attested plays. I should also like to draw attention to the presence of a comic device in Arden of Faversham known as a mondegreen, which is a mishearing or misinterpretation of a word or phrase. In Scene 10, we encounter the following conversation between Michael and his rival Clarke: Clarke.  How now, Michael? How doth my mistress and all at home? Michael.  Who? Susan Mosby? She is your mistress, too? Clarke.  Ay, how doth she and all the rest? Michael.  All’s well but Susan; she is sick. Clarke.  Sick? Of what disease? Michael.  Of a great fever. Clarke.  A fear of what? Michael.  A great fever. Clarke.  A fever? God forbid! (AF, 10.48–​57) To the best of my knowledge, no other scholar has noticed that this device is employed in a strikingly similar context in King Leir, during a conversation between Gonorill and the Ambassador. Here Gonorill is covering up her malice towards Cordella, which is characterised by seemingly involuntary vocalisations:

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Gonorill.  How doth my sister brooke the ayre of Fraunce? Ambassador.  Exceeding well, and never sick one houre,    Since first she set her foot upon the shore. Gonorill.  I am the more sorry. Ambassador.  I hope, not so, Madam. Gonorill.  Didst thou not say, that she was ever sicke,    Since the first houre that she arrived there? Ambassador.  No, Madam, I sayd quite contrary. Gonorill.  Then I mistooke thee. (KL, 18.1394–​402) These humorous passages evince complex collocations of ideas, which suggest a single playwright’s mind. In short, the comic vein of Arden of Faversham is distinctive to not only the attested Kyd plays but also King Leir. There are also correlations between Kyd’s drama and the business of letters in Arden of Faversham. Bradshaw, like Lorenzo in The Spanish Tragedy, as well as Gonorill and Ragan in King Leir, is implicated by a letter, which follows Isabella’s caveat that ‘The heavens are just, murder’ (or in the case of King Leir, attempted murder) ‘cannot be hid’ (Sp. T., 2.5.57). In Scene 3, Michael’s euphuistic letter to Susan is used as a comic device. Erne notes that ‘Euphuism serves Kyd to characterise the languid, effeminate Petrarchan lover’ Balthazar in The Spanish Tragedy (2001: 71). In Arden of Faversham, the dramatist employs the letter, which is a ‘travesty of euphuistic love language’ (McLuskie and Bevington, 1999: 34), to put Michael in difficulties with his master; we might recall also that the Ambassador’s letter proves troublesome in King Leir. Similarities in characterisation can also be seen in the fact that Michael and Balthazar are used as pawns by the scheming villains Mosby and Lorenzo. Mosby’s schemes are strikingly similar to those hatched by Lorenzo in The Spanish Tragedy. Mosby effectively uses his sister, Susan, as bait, just as Lorenzo matches his sister with Balthazar to serve his own Machiavellian purpose. Mosby offers his sister in marriage and therefore pits Michael and Clarke against each other, while Lorenzo pits Pedringano and Serberine against each other. Lorenzo’s plot is comparable to Mosby’s use of intermediaries to despatch sinister business before they are themselves eliminated. Mosby intends to use Greene as an instrument to kill Arden.

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Nevertheless, for all the intrigue that occurs in this play, just as in Kyd’s carefully crafted play The Spanish Tragedy, the conspirators merely accomplish their own deaths. Erne claims that Kyd was portrayed by his contemporaries ‘as a Senecan playwright, a generic image to which Arden conforms badly if at all’ (2001: 222). However, my reading of the evidence suggests that the dramatist responsible for the domestic tragedy was indebted to Seneca, and that the tragedian’s influences pervade the play’s language, structure, and characterisation. John W. Cunliffe compared Mosby’s monologue in Scene 8 to a passage in Seneca’s Hippolytus (Cunliffe, 1893: 88). Mosby states that ‘My golden time was when I had no gold’ (AF, 8.11), which, as is ‘characteristic of Seneca’, contrasts ‘the safety of humble life with the peril of lofty position’ (Pierce, 1971: 70). Furthermore, Mosby’s assertion that ‘The way I seek to find where pleasure dwells /​Is hedged behind me that I cannot back /​But needs must on although to danger’s gate’ (8.20–​2) recalls the Senecan tag (found in Agamemnon) spoken by Hieronimo in The Spanish Tragedy: ‘per scelera semper sceleribus tutum est iter’ (Sp. T., 3.14.6). Mosby’s line therefore follows the Senecan idea, as expressed by Clytemnestra in Agamemnon, of proceeding through bad deeds, or mischief, in order to achieve safety. In the closing moments of the play, Franklin, like Revenge in The Spanish Tragedy, comes to represent ‘the providential playwright of the theatrum mundi tradition’, while Hieronimo ‘assumes an analogous position’ (Drawdy, 2014: 30) when he puts on the play-​ within-​ the-​ play. Furthermore, like the Ghost of Andrea in The Spanish Tragedy and Death in Soliman and Perseda, Franklin provides a list of the dead. The epilogues in The Spanish Tragedy and Arden of Faversham emphasise that divine retribution has been accomplished, for Andrea and Franklin describe the punishments that the villains will go on to suffer. Irving Ribner observed that ‘The action and interest of the Kydian revenge play are sustained by the unsuccessful attempts of the hero to avenge some ghastly crime committed by a diabolical villain’ (1960: 15). The revenger figure in Arden of Faversham appears to be Dick Reede, who desires his land back from the acquisitive Arden. Franklin emphasises in his epilogue that Arden ‘lay murdered in that plot of ground, /​Which he by force and violence held from Reede’ (AF, Epilogue.10–​11).

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Reede vows revenge at the beginning of the play (1.480) and, like Hieronimo, he seeks divine justice: Nay, then, I’ll tempt thee, Arden, do thy worst. God, I beseech thee, show some miracle On thee or thine in plaguing thee for this. (13.29–​31)

Ribner also noted that ‘An especially significant attribute of Kydian revenge tragedy is that the avenger and his plight are treated sympathetically’ (1960: 17). We are apt to sympathise with Reede, given Arden’s procurement of his land, which is a ‘crime’ that ‘God will justly punish’ (Drawdy, 2014: 24). The numerous failed attempts on Arden’s life emphasise ‘the potency of Dick Reede’s appeals to divine justice by foregrounding the haste with which his requests are realised’ (23). I agree with Drawdy that Arden of Faversham belongs to the providential universe of The Spanish Tragedy: The understanding exhibited by these characters that God operates through the effort of man implies the understanding, at least in theory, of their respective playwrights. It is, then, in no way insignificant that Arden of Faversham is often supposed to have been the work of none other than Thomas Kyd. (24)

Will Sharpe notes that ‘On the basis of formal generic predisposition Arden is thoroughly unlike a Shakespeare tragedy’, and wonders why, ‘[i]‌f Kyd had already redefined tragedy a mere three years earlier’ with The Spanish Tragedy, ‘might he not be doing it again with Arden of Faversham?’ (2013: 651). Arden of Faversham shares a number of elements with Kyd’s drama, particularly the notion that supernatural or divine forces can intervene in the play’s action. We may conclude that the play conforms to Kyd’s ‘mixture of Senecan theme and elaborate plotting’ (Erne, 2001: 5), and can therefore be considered the product of a ‘Senecan playwright’ (222). Fair Em was ‘Imprinted at London for T. N. and I. W.’, which, as Standish Henning suggests, ‘probably stands for Thomas Newman and John Winnington’ (1980: 1). The play ‘bears a printer’s device associated with John Danter’ (Manley and MacLean, 2014: 105) and is known to have been performed by Lord Strange’s Men, as stated on the title page of the undated First Quarto edition. This comedy was probably performed privately as a compliment to Sir Edmund Trafford, a friend and colleague of Henry Stanley, in 1590 (Thaler, 1931: 647–​58; George, 1991: xxxi, 180–​1). In 1898

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Josef Schick identified Wotton’s A Courtlie Controversie of Cupids Cautels as the source for the William the Conqueror plotline in Fair Em (1898: v–​xliii). Kyd is the only undoubted Elizabethan playwright to use A Courtlie Controversie of Cupids Cautels as a source for his dramatic works and, as we have seen, Wotton’s translation was printed by Kyd’s father’s acquaintance, Francis Coldocke. The story in Wotton’s collection is a tragedy, and ends with Lubeck’s execution and William’s suicide. The dramatist responsible for Fair Em transforms the tragic tale into a comedy. I have shown here that Kyd eschews tidy genre definitions, which can be seen most clearly in the choric frame of Love, Death, and Fortune in Soliman and Perseda. Richard Proudfoot notes that the ‘[s]‌hared source’ for Fair Em and Soliman and Perseda ‘speaks strongly for common authorship, as does’ the ‘ingenious reversal of genre in the dramatisation of both source stories’.8 To the best of my knowledge, Brian Vickers was the first scholar to attribute this play to Kyd (2008b), and we shall test his claims in Chapter 1, but it is worth noting that he was anticipated by Paul V. Rubow, who identified verbal parallelisms between the comedy and Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy sixty years earlier (1948: 132–​3). I have suggested elsewhere that our understanding of Thomas Nashe’s famous diatribe against Kyd in his preface to Robert Greene’s Menaphon (1589) can be informed by a reading of Greene’s attack against the author of Fair Em (Freebury-​Jones, 2017d: 252–​ 4). Kyd, like Shakespeare, did not have a university education. He was therefore also open to criticism from the University Wits. Nashe’s attack has helped scholars, beginning with Malone, to identify Kyd as the author of the so-​called Ur-​ Hamlet. Nashe alludes to ‘the Kidde in Aesop’, who has left ‘the trade of Noverint’ (i.e. a scrivener) and now meddles ‘with Italian translations’ (McKerrow, 1958: 316–​17), as Kyd had done with his translation of Tasso’s Padre di famiglia. Nashe claims that Kyd bleeds Seneca ‘line by line’ in order to ‘affoord you whole Hamlets’ (316–​17). He derides the opening of The Spanish Tragedy in particular, for Kyd ‘thrusts Elisium into hell’ during Andrea’s account of his descent into the lower world (316–​17). Nashe also claims that Kyd is prone to ‘bodge up a blanke verse with ifs and ands’ (316–​17), which parodies a line from The Spanish Tragedy: ‘What, Villaine, ifs and ands? offer to kill him’ (Sp. T., 2.1.77).

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Erne endorses the long-​held view that Kyd was indeed the subject of Nashe’s attack (and therefore the author of the old Hamlet play) in the preface to Greene’s Menaphon: the possible allusions to Kyd’s father being a scrivener, Kyd’s debt to Seneca, his very name, his new occupation as a translator, his ‘intermeddling’ with an Italian translation, the ‘home-​born mediocrity’ of this translation, and Kyd’s ‘thrusting Elysium into hell’ in The Spanish Tragedy, I.i.72–​5, make it more than likely that Nashe’s target is indeed Kyd. (2001: 147)

Erne elaborates that ‘Italian translations were a rare phenomenon in the years up to 1589 and Nashe could expect that his literary readership would easily identify an allusion to Kyd’s The Householder’s Philosophy’ (149). According to Henslowe’s diary, the old Hamlet play was performed at Newington Butts on 9 June 1594, by the Admiral’s and/​ or Chamberlain’s Men (Foakes, 2002: 21). Two years after the record of its performance, Thomas Lodge alluded to the play in his Wit’s Misery (1596): ‘looks as pale as the vizard of the ghost which cried so miserably at the Theator like an Oyster wife, Hamlet, revenge’ (1596: 56). Greene ridiculed the author of Fair Em in his Farewell to Folly (1591). Thomas H. Dickinson noted that ‘There are indications that Greene would have been quite willing to ridicule Kyd’, for ‘Nash, in the same preface to Menaphon in which he had ridiculed Marlowe, satirises Kyd’ (1909: xxxvi). In fact, the opening of Greene’s attack, ‘some … will carpe’ and ‘Others will flout’ (Grosart, 1881–​6: 232), resembles Kyd’s hint ‘at the existence of hostile critics’ (Boas, 1901: lxxvii) in his dedication to Thomas Reade in The Householder’s Philosophy: ‘Let others carpe’ (HP, 233). In Farewell to Folly, Greene criticises the dramatist’s use of ‘Biblical paraphrases, the first from I Peter 4:8 and the second from Romans 2:15’ (Henning, 1980: 64) as ‘simple abusing of the Scripture’ (Grosart, 1881–​6: 232–​3). Greene also criticises the dramatist’s use of plots ‘distild out of ballets’ and his borrowings from ‘Theologicall poets, which for their calling and gravitie, being loth to have anie profane pamphlets passe under their hand, get some other Batillus to set his name to their verses’ (232–​3). In a letter to Sir John Puckering, Kyd ‘projected a poem on the conversion of St Paul’ (Erne, 2001: 220). Kyd thus fits Greene’s profile of a poet who

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writes works ‘of theological cast’ (Baldwin, 1959: 515). Greene’s image of ‘a man’ who ‘hath a familiar stile and can endite a whole yeare and never be beholding to art’ (Grosart, 1881–​6: 232–​3) recalls Nashe’s attack against Kyd: ‘that run through every art and thrive by none, to leave the trade of noverint whereto they were born and busy themselves with the endeavours of art’ (McKerrow, 1958: 316–​17). Greene’s line, ‘he that cannot write true Englishe without the help of Clearkes of parish Churches, will needs make him selfe the father of interludes’ (Grosart, 1881–​6: 232–​3), suggests that the author of Fair Em was a professional copyist, but had turned to playwriting. Furthermore, as Eric Sams pointed out, ‘There is no direct evidence that Kyd was ever a churchman of any persuasion’ but ‘his scrivener father Francis had been a churchwarden at St Mary Woolnoth’s in Lombard Street, not far from Cripplegate’ (1995: 93). Nashe’s claim that the author of Hamlet could ‘scarcely Latinize’ his ‘neck verse’ (i.e. a verse set before a person claiming benefit of clergy) may also allude to the fact that Kyd’s father was a churchwarden (McKerrow, 1958: 316–​17). It is possible that, in his allusion to ‘Saint Giles without Creeplegate’ (Grosart, 1881–​6: 233), Greene was following Nashe in evoking Kyd’s name. Saint Giles –​the protector of rams and deer –​was a Christian hermit from Athens who, while living in southern France, was crippled when a hunter’s arrow, intended for his companion, a young deer, wounded him. More significant, perhaps, is the fact that the vicar of St Giles’s Church at the time (between 1588 and 1605, having taken over as rector of the church after Robert Crowley) was Lancelot Andrewes, Kyd’s schoolfellow. Both Nashe and Greene label the subject of their respective attacks as a ‘plagiarist, and dunce’ (Henning, 1980: 66), or, as T. W. Baldwin put it, a ‘degreeless person’ who produces plays that are ‘compared favourably with the work’ of better-​educated dramatists (1959: 515). Baldwin argued that Nashe and Greene were both attacking the same author (514–​20). To my eyes, Greene’s attack is practically identical to Nashe’s invective against Kyd and his education at Merchant Taylors’, as well as his background as a scrivener. The external evidence is bolstered by the fact that Fair Em shares many links of thought and dramaturgy with Kyd’s oeuvre. For example, the play features clever intrigue plots, which are characteristic of Kyd’s interest in complex causality. Henning notes

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that Fair Em ‘depends for its structure on the intrigues used by various characters to arrive at desired ends’ (1980: 94–​5). William and Lubeck decide to ‘travel in disguise, /​To bring’ Blanch ‘to our Britain Court’ (FE, 1.70–​1).9 In King Leir, the Gallian King and Mumford disguise themselves and, upon meeting Cordella, travel to France so that the King and Cordella can marry. Cordella is King Leir’s daughter, while the heroine of Fair Em is of the gentry, for she is the daughter of Sir Thomas Goddard. Both female protagonists have been banished; both Leir and William the Conqueror recognise that banishment is unjust and therefore revoke it, concluding the respective plays happily. Fair Em and King Leir contain separate plotlines that eventually interconnect in a happy conclusion. The dramatic structures and plot situations in these plays could hardly be more alike. However, William and Blanch’s disguises threaten the play’s happy resolution. Zweno of Denmark is furious that William, who is disguised as Sir Robert of Windsor, has stolen his daughter, Blanch, away. William, however, believes that he has eloped with Mariana. Zweno vows: Not all the protestations thou canst use Shall save thy life. Away with him to prison! (12.34–​5)

Zweno and William have been duped by Mariana, who devised the ‘substitution plot’ with ‘Machiavellian skill’ (Quarmby, 2012: 109). This moment duplicates Kyd’s thought process in The Spanish Tragedy. The Viceroy is convinced by the scheming Machiavellian villain Villuppo that Alexandro is responsible for his son’s death. He orders: Away with him; his sight is second hell. Keepe him till we determine of his death: If Balthazar be dead, he shall not live. (Sp. T., 1.4.89–​91)

Fortunately, the characters involved in both plays realise that they have been deceived. Another aspect of Fair Em that recalls Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy as well as the newly attributed play King Leir in particular is the illicit opening of a letter, or a box in the case of Kyd’s tragedy. Blanch, like Gonorill, takes a letter from a messenger that is not addressed to her (the letter was to be delivered to Mariana) and, just as Ragan does at the conclusion of King Leir, she tears the letter in pieces.

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Similarly, in The Spanish Tragedy, Hieronimo tears up the petitions given by the commoners. Fair Em and King Leir share the stage business of intercepted letters, while Kyd, ‘[t]‌hrough Bel-​imperia’s letters’ in The Spanish Tragedy, investigates ‘the meanings of circulating, intercepting, and authenticating documents’ (Cunningham, 2002: 111). Mariana, upon gathering together the fragments of the letter, discovers Sir Robert of Windsor’s true identity, while Hieronimo identifies his son’s murderers. Much of the play’s comedy revolves around the character of Trotter, the miller’s man. He is typical of Kyd’s comic characters in that he is well integrated into the structure of the play. Like Basilisco in Soliman and Perseda, Trotter tries to woo the play’s heroine and, like Mumford in King Leir, his antics puncture the romantic elements of the play. Trotter deliberately misinterprets Em, who ‘promised to do anything to recover my health’ (FE, 5.21), and attempts to get her hand in marriage. This device of misinterpreting a character’s words for comic effect recalls the examples of mondegreens in King Leir and Arden of Faversham, for there is a discourse of illness. Trotter tells Em that he is sick (it is in fact love-​sickness and the comic technique is employed somewhat more successfully here) but that ‘the phismicary tells me that you can help me’ (5.12–​13). While Trotter’s role as servant-​clown and confidant seems traceable in part to the role of the Zanni in the Italian commedia dell’arte, there are indications that Fair Em is influenced by Seneca’s revenge tragedies, despite its generic status as a romantic comedy. Many of the play’s characters lust for revenge: Zweno vows revenge against Lubeck and Sir Robert of Windsor for stealing away his daughter; Demarch speaks of ‘revengement of a private grudge /​By Lord Dirot lately proffered me’ (13.40–​1); and Valingford seeks revenge against Manvile. It is this characteristic admixture of, as Harbage put it, ‘comic methods with tragic materials’ (1962: 37), that helps to define Kyd’s oeuvre. I should like to conclude this introduction to Kyd’s sole-​authored canon, as I see it, by briefly examining claims that Kyd was not responsible for a lost Hamlet play. Kyd’s authorship of the so-​called Ur-​Hamlet is important in terms of our understanding his influence on Shakespeare, as well as my argument that Nashe’s attack on the dramatist responsible for this lost play and Greene’s attack against the author of Fair Em are aimed at a single playwright.10

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Terri Bourus contends that the 1603 First Quarto edition of Hamlet published by the bookseller Nicholas Ling, long held to be a corrupt derivative of Shakespeare’s play (i.e. the version reflected in the Second Quarto and Folio text) transmitted through the imperfect memories of actors and/​or audience members, represents an early version of Shakespeare’s play referred to by Nashe in 1589. Shakespeare appears to have begun his playwriting career circa 1591, so this version of Hamlet would antedate his entire dramatic corpus as we know it. Bourus does not trust the testimony of Lodge and compares his use of the phrase ‘Hamlet revenge’, which appears to derive from the lost play (it does not occur in any of Shakespeare’s texts), to popular misquotations from movies such as Casablanca. This could be considered anachronistic, something that Bourus stresses scholars should avoid, while her point that many of these misquotations ‘involve misplaced or interpolated vocatives’ (Bourus, 2014: 146) would seem to undermine her argument that the use of the vocative, ‘boy’, uniquely emphasises Hamlet’s youth in Q1 (2014: 107), for these interpolations could also be the result of actor or audience memory. Similarly, the fact that Yorick has been dead ‘this dozen year’ (Ham., 16.86), and that the fee paid for Hamlet’s father’s picture is ‘a hundred –​two hundred –​pounds’ in Q1 (7.276–​7), suggests vague numerical recollection, rather than revision.11 Bourus also notes that the phrase ‘Hamlet revenge’ features in Dekker’s Satiromastix (1601), and is contrasted with Horace, ‘a.k.a. Ben Jonson, who in his brief and unsuccessful career as an actor had performed “Suleiman” ’ in Paris Garden. Bourus suggests that ‘the simplest explanation’ for allusions that collocate ‘Hamlet’ and ‘revenge’ is that they ‘refer to the same play, Shakespeare’s’, rather than to a lost play by Kyd (149–​50). But if Dekker were invoking Kyd’s Turkish emperor, Soliman, just as, in the same passage, he was taunting Jonson for playing Hieronimo with a group of strolling players, it is not difficult to imagine that the allusion to Hamlet similarly refers to a Kyd play. As George Ian Duthie noted: ‘we are safe in assuming that the reference cannot be to a Hamlet Shakespearian in whole or in part, since presumably Shakespeare’s work would not be ridiculed by his own company in his own theatre’ (1941: 77). Although Bourus does not trust contemporary witnesses such as Lodge, she is willing to take Nashe’s satirical comment on

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‘two penny pamphlets’ literally, noting that The Householder’s Philosophy ‘was not, as Erne implies, a two-​penny pamphlet: it contains eight and a half sheets of paper, and would have cost four pence’. Bourus continues: ‘Erne’s own argument here rules out Kyd, since none of his extant works was a two-​penny pamphlet’ (2014: 165). We might ask ourselves: how many two-​ penny pamphlets translating Italian were written by Shakespeare in the late 1580s? Bourus also considers the notion that ‘Shakespeare in the early seventeenth century wrote an entirely new play to replace an older Hamlet play written by someone else’ to be unlikely: ‘revision is the more economical hypothesis, not only intellectually but also financially’ (2014: 150–​1). But this is to gloss over the fact that, to offer just a couple of examples, Shakespeare wrote an entirely new play to replace an older King Leir play written by someone else (Kyd, by my argument), as well as a new King John (1596) to replace an older play written by another dramatist: George Peele’s The Troublesome Reign of King John (1589). The theory that Shakespeare based a new play on an old one has precedence, and Shakespeare’s company were demonstrably willing to pay the costs for such adaptations. Let us imagine that the text of King Leir had not survived: in such a scenario, it is easy to envisage a similar monograph being produced, proposing that Shakespeare wrote King Lear (1605) in the late 1580s, and that the play performed in April 1594 at the Rose theatre, by the ‘Quenes men & my lord of Susexe to geather’ (Foakes, 2002: 21), was an earlier version of Shakespeare’s tragedy. In 1942, Alfred Hart provided strong evidence that the 1603 text of Hamlet does not derive from an older play, noting that ‘Q1 contains 15 per cent’ feminine endings ‘compared with 23 per cent in Q2’, and that lines from the conjectured ‘old play have no less than 18 per cent’. He elaborated: ‘Does the theory of double revision require that the old Hamlet, which probably goes back to 1589, contained what would then be a unique proportion of double endings?’ (Hart, 1942: 299). Bourus does not cite Hart in her monograph, while her observations concerning the presence of ‘demonstrably old-​fashioned’ stylistic markers, such as ‘hath’ instead of ‘has’, and obsolescent word choices such as ‘whilom’, do not provide strong evidence that Q1 derives from the 1580s, given that Bourus supplies no comparative data for other suspected

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‘bad Quartos’ (2014: 171), i.e. texts considered to be corrupt and derivative.12 For example, the 1602 ‘bad Quarto’ text of The Merry Wives of Windsor (1597) significantly decreases the number of ‘has’ in relation to ‘hath’, and increases the number of old-​fashioned third-​person singular form ‘doth’. Should this be taken as evidence that the play derives from the 1580s? Bourus also fails to make a sustained comparison between Q1 and any ‘good Quarto’ to support her claim that ‘known and necessary agents of normal transmission will account’ for the superabundance of textual errors in Q1 (88). Were we to accept the theory that Q1 reflects an early version of Shakespeare’s play, we would also have to acknowledge: that at the beginning of his career, Shakespeare’s grammar was exceptionally poor for a student at King Edward VI Grammar School; that he was particularly prone to garbled and incoherent speeches; that he was also prone to homonymic blunders such as ‘impudent’ for ‘impotent’, ‘Martin’ for ‘matin’, ‘right done’ for ‘writ down’, and ‘ceasen’ for ‘season’; that he had a proclivity for ‘padding phrases’ such as ‘ “contents me not”, “I prithee”, “And”, “Marry”, and so on’; and that he wrote hundreds of lines of ‘fustian verse’ (Vickers, 1993: 5). If Shakespeare or piratical actors/​spectators were not responsible for this –​to adopt Andrew Gurr’s phraseology –​‘disastrously brief and erratic version of Hamlet’ (2015: 171), then the integrity and competence of the printers (i.e. Compositor A’s short-​term memory, and typesetters in Valentine Simmes’s shop), to whose defence Bourus devotes a chapter (2014: 11–​33), must be called into question. As Vickers points out: ‘There are numerous instances in English publishing history during Shakespeare’s life of books which had been printed by persons not having a legal title to the copy, in texts which were sometimes seriously defective, being replaced by authentic texts’, and ‘the two Quartos of Hamlet could be described in exactly the same terms’ (1994: 15). Bourus criticises the ‘anachronistic claims about piracy’ (2014: 8) made by other scholars and states that ‘Projecting our own experience and assumptions onto the blank screen of the past is a mistake that is extraordinarily easy for any of us to make’ (76). Indeed, Bourus demonstrates this on several occasions, such as when she defends the handwriting of Elizabethan players by telling readers that ‘I have known highly educated professionals who scribble more indecipherably than actors of my acquaintance’ (37), or when

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she attacks ‘proponents of memorial reconstruction’, who have suggested the actor who played Marcellus was an actor-​ pirate, thus: ‘I have met one or two incompetent amateur actors in my lifetime in the theatre, but I have never encountered any creature who matches this cartoon profile’ (43–​4). Such statements run contrary to Bourus’s caveat that ‘ “the past is a foreign country”, where they did things differently than we do’ (76). Bourus also criticises Laurie E. Maguire for conceding that Q1 could ‘possibly’ be a memorial text (Maguire, 1996: 256), suggesting that Maguire ‘suffered, here, uncharacteristically, from a failure of nerve’ (Bourus, 2014: 40). Memorial reconstruction, whether due to actors or spectator-​ reporters, may no longer be of the fashion, as ’twere, but it seems to me that Q1 is largely the product of aural memory, in a time ‘when the aural rather than the visual understanding was much greater than in our own time’ (Tobin, 2012: 22). The play appears, as Thomas Heywood might put it, to have been ‘coppied onely by the eare’ (1608: sig. A2r). More recently, MacDonald P. Jackson has established in an exemplary article that ‘where Q1’s wording is closest to Q2’s, that wording was not present in an Ur-​Hamlet of the late 1580s’ (2018: 36). Jackson demonstrates this through analyses of prosody, run-​on lines, vocabulary tests, and the rate at which the rhetorical figure hendiadys occurs. All of his results place Q1 closest to plays that Shakespeare composed in the early 1600s, severely weakening Bourus’s case. I agree with Jackson that ‘the possibility that the printer’s copy for Q1 bore a text that has been partly or largely transmitted by memory cannot yet safely be dismissed’ (17). The evidence for Kyd’s authorship of the old Hamlet therefore remains strong. Kenneth Muir claimed that ‘The revelation of the Ghost, the feigned madness, the play-​scene’, and ‘the closet-​scene’ could all be ‘found in the old play’ (1957: 114). However, as Janet Clare points out, the fact is that we know almost nothing of the old play’s ‘style, technique, content or to what degree it underwent a transformation in Shakespeare’s hands’, although we can be confident that ‘it was affective and popular before it was superseded by Shakespeare’s Hamlet’ (2014: 168). Nonetheless, the fact that ‘the play to which the arguably most famous piece of English literature is heavily indebted’ (Erne, 2001: 150) was probably written by Kyd says much for his influence on Shakespeare’s drama.

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In Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia, the character of Thomasina discusses the famous burning of the Ancient Library of Alexandria, which led to a devastating loss of knowledge and literature. She says to her tutor, Septimus: ‘Oh, Septimus! –​can you bear it? All the lost plays of the Athenians! Two hundred at least by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides –​thousands of poems –​Aristotle’s own library brought to Egypt … How can we sleep for grief?’ (1993: 50). Scholars wishing to compare Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1600) to the lost play are apt to share Thomasina’s sentiment. However, it is worth bearing Septimus’s response in mind: By counting our stock. Seven plays from Aeschylus, seven from Sophocles, nineteen from Euripides, my lady! You should no more grieve for the rest than for a buckle lost from your first shoe, or for your lesson book which will be lost when you are old. We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. (50)

It is unlikely that we will ever retrieve Kyd’s Hamlet or ascertain the authorship of The Spanish Comedy of Don Horatio, but the recount of Kyd’s stock I have proposed here –​namely a canon of six surviving sole-​authored plays as opposed to the traditionally accepted three –​will lead to a reconsideration of the playwright’s position in early modern drama. As I elaborate in the following chapters, it seems possible that Shakespeare’s dramatic output, including two of the four major tragedies, was, in part at least, dependent on processes of adaptation and collaboration with Kyd and owed much to the scrivener’s son. Having explored some of the dramaturgical similarities among the six plays that I argue were written solely by Kyd, Chapter 1 presents evidence for their stylistic homogeneity. This analysis of Kyd’s style serves the purpose of not only determining his authorial individuality beyond reasonable doubt, but establishing the ways in which he influenced Shakespeare’s style. Chapter 2 deals with the thorny issue of distinguishing authorship and influence, which is crucial to this study as a whole. I demonstrate that the sensational claims for Shakespeare’s hand in Arden of Faversham do not bear close scrutiny, and I situate that text in the context of links between other plays in the ‘extended’ or ‘enlarged’ Kyd canon and Shakespeare’s drama. The chapter draws

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upon large electronic corpora in order to explore the intertextual relationships between the two dramatists, whilst also drawing upon the idea of Shakespeare’s aural, or ‘actor’s’, memory. Chapter 3 proceeds to examine the influence of Kyd’s dramaturgy on Shakespeare’s early plays, including such elements as vengeful female characters and foreboding dreams, as well as dramatic structure and multi-​layered staging. The chapter then demonstrates that Shakespeare elaborated on Kyd’s dramatic devices, and that close study of the plays themselves reveals that, in doing so, he recycled aspects of Kyd’s idiom. In the fourth and fifth chapters, I propose that the relationship between Kyd and Shakespeare extended to revision and collaboration. Chapter 4 examines the internal evidence for Kyd’s hand in Henry VI Part One (1592). Here I contend that Shakespeare’s chronicle history play was originally written by Kyd and Nashe for Lord Strange’s Men, and that Shakespeare subsequently added three scenes for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. This chapter also surveys arguments for Shakespeare’s authorship of the 1602 additions to The Spanish Tragedy in order to explore further Shakespeare’s approach towards revising his dramatic predecessor’s work. In Chapter 5 I examine claims for Kyd’s hand in Edward III (1593) and argue against the idea that Shakespeare revised an earlier text, for internal evidence suggests that Shakespeare planned and composed the play directly with Kyd. The chapter therefore contends that Kyd was one of Shakespeare’s earliest co-​authors and proceeds to analyse the ways in which this collaboration influenced the development of Shakespeare’s style and dramaturgy, using Henry V (1599) as a case study. Chapter 6 demonstrates that Shakespeare continued to engage with Kyd’s dramas later in his career when he was an established playwright. I extend previous scholars’ arguments that many characters and moments in Kyd’s plays prefigure those found in Shakespeare’s works. My study concludes by calling for a reassessment of Kyd’s legacy as a major dramatist of the period, whose relationship with Shakespeare was far more extensive than has been thus far acknowledged. It is a relationship that has the potential to revolutionise our understanding of Shakespeare’s dramatic development.

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Notes 1 I have used Wiggins and Richardson (2012, 2013) for the most likely dates of first performances throughout this book. 2 All references to Kyd’s accepted works in this book are to Boas (1901). 3 For other examples of earlier scholars attributing Soliman and Perseda to Kyd see Fleay (1891: 26); Sarrazin (1892: 42); Ward (1899: 311); Routh (1905: 49–​51); Edwards (1966: 23); Freeman (1967: 166). 4 All matching words or lemmas occurring no more than five times in plays first performed on the public stages in London during the decades 1580–​1600 are placed in bold throughout this book. I expand on my criteria for rarity in Chapter 1. 5 Brian Vickers (ed.), The Works of Thomas Kyd (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, forthcoming). 6 All references to King Leir in this book are to Greg (1907). 7 All references to Arden of Faversham in this book are to Wine (1973). 8 I wish to thank Proudfoot for sharing his thoughts with me in email correspondence (7 October 2015). 9 All references to Fair Em in this book are to Henning (1980). 10 For discussion on the possible relationships between the Ur-​Hamlet, Q1 Hamlet, and the German variant Der bestrafte Brudermord, see Hulse (2020: 208–​343). 11 All references to Q1 Hamlet in this book are to Thompson and Taylor (2006). 12 It is worth pointing out that the adverb ‘whilom’ features in the play-​ within-​the-​play of Q1 Hamlet, which seems to have been written in deliberately archaic language and is therefore of little use for dating purposes.

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1 Kyd’s stylistic individuality

At a time when imitatio, parodia, and translatio formed the bedrock of the Elizabethan education system, and in a genre where authors were drawing from the same stage conventions and theatrical ­ vernacular –​indeed, sometimes the same generalised vocabulary –​we might ask ourselves: how can we define authorial identity? Firstly, it is important to stress that no writer operates in a vacuum and that, although it sounds paradoxical, an artist’s influences and their acquisitive practices help us to distinguish their voice. We have seen that Kyd’s dramatic methods were inspired by the likes of Seneca, Robert Garnier, John Lyly, and the Italian comedies. Although Elizabethan dramatic texts are hybrid and polyvocal, it is the manner in which an author fuses his influences, his materials, and communes with these voices, that offers us flashes of insight into his working methods, the very ticking of a mind whose components long ago ceased working, and individualises him. We can define an author’s stylistic individuality as the convergence of elements in his dramas –​sensitively interpreted according to genre and chronology –​operating largely on a sub-​stylistic level. This aspect of my study therefore moves beyond an exploration of dramaturgical likenesses among Kyd’s plays and avails itself of the terminology of early modern authorship attribution studies. Attribution studies aim to distinguish the author or authors of a play by identifying stylistic features that discriminate one writer from another. Scholars since the nineteenth century have attempted this through attentive study of verse habits; authorial preferences for particular word forms; and parallels of thought, language, and overall dramaturgy between authors’ attested works and putative

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plays. A large number of unresolved questions in this subject area nevertheless remain: we have already seen that many plays of the period were published anonymously, or were attributed erroneously in play lists and even on title pages. Elizabethan playing companies appear to have been more concerned with advertising themselves than advertising their authors. The palimpsestic nature of some play texts can render author identification difficult: many plays were (or are suspected of having been) composed by several playwrights, or were revised by later authorial hands. Moreover, some surviving texts are of questionable quality: the provenance of works such as Q1 Hamlet is difficult to determine. Many scholars continue to debate whether some texts are the products of actor and/​or spectator memories or were produced through shorthand transmission by scribes attending performances. An author’s stylistic traits can therefore be obfuscated by multiple agents, from scribes to compositors and even actors, presenting a challenge for data-​driven studies in particular. A plurality of methods is therefore needed in order to make a solid case for common authorship of these complex historical documents, these artefacts that are at once performative and literary in nature. This chapter surveys some methodologies employed for the purpose of discriminating early modern dramatists according to the fundamental principles of authorial style: namely analysis of verse habits, vocabulary, use of rhyme, and parallelisms of language and thought. A particularly useful contribution to verse studies was made by Philip Timberlake in 1931. Timberlake provided a comprehensive examination of feminine endings in English blank verse drama up to 1595. He gave strict counts and percentages for these feminine endings (those not including proper names), as well as overall percentages. His findings revealed that Shakespeare employed feminine endings with more frequency than any of his Elizabethan contemporaries, including Greene (whose plays have a range of 0.1–​ 1.1), Peele (1.5–​ 5.4), and Marlowe (0.4–​ 3.7). For example, Shakespeare’s earliest plays, according to Martin Wiggins’s chronology (Wiggins and Richardson, 2013), Henry VI Part Two and Part Three (1591), average high percentages of 10.4 and 10.7 respectively (Timberlake, 1931: 86–​94), which presents an obstacle for scholars attempting to give large parts of the Henry

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VI trilogy to Marlowe, who ‘only once reaches 8.0 per cent’ in ‘single long scenes’ (45), i.e. those consisting of over 100 verse lines, and whose dramatic output reaches a peak average of 3.7 per cent feminine endings for Edward II (1592). It is beyond the purview of this study to repeat all of the evidence for Shakespeare’s sole authorship of Henry VI Part Two and Part Three, but it should be noted that all of the stylometric arguments in support of attributing large parts of these texts to Marlowe or other non-​Shakespearian dramatists have been subjected to detailed rebuttals.1 Importantly, Timberlake discovered that Kyd ‘was customarily using feminine endings with a frequency surpassing that of any’ pre-​Shakespearian ‘dramatist whom we have considered’ (52–​3), meaning that the high percentages for plays that have been attributed to Kyd give us fascinating insights into that playwright’s stylistic individuality. Moreover, these percentages suggest that Shakespeare followed Kyd directly in his high usage of unaccented eleventh syllables concluding verse lines, given that none of his dramatic predecessors provide comparable figures. Ants Oras also made a significant contribution to the study of authors’ verse styles. In 1960, Oras studied ‘the phenomenon of pauses’ and the ‘positions they appear in the verse, and in what ratios compared with other positions in the line’ (1960: 1–​2). He suggested that ‘less conscious pause patterns’ could help to answer questions of authorship (2). Oras recorded patterns in the earliest editions available for plays by several Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists, which were ‘formed by all the pauses indicated by internal punctuation’, termed A-​patterns (3). He noted that these patterns show ‘the greatest continuity’ (13) in terms of authorial metrical development. The remarkable similarities in patterns for same-​ author plays examined by Oras suggest that punctuation marks, be they authorial or compositorial, ‘keep within the rhythmical climate of the time’ (3), and are thus useful for identifying a dramatist’s prosodic characteristics. Even in the case of Shakespeare’s sparsely punctuated contributions to the collaborative play The Booke of Sir Thomas More (1601), the playwright ‘left spaces between some words for punctuation marks to be added later, perhaps when he decided what degree of emphasis was needed’ (Vickers, 2002b: 39). Oras provided raw figures for the plays he examined, as well as percentages for each position in the

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verse line. Furthermore, he provided graphs, known as ‘frequency polygons’, showing these percentages in visual form. Marina Tarlinskaja is a prosodist who examines weak, or odd (called ‘non-​ictic’), and strong, or even (‘ictic’), syllables in verse. Tarlinskaja notes that ‘[s]‌trong syllabic positions of the iambic metrical scheme only tend to be filled with stressed syllables’, while ‘[w]eak syllabic positions only tend to be unstressed’ (2014: 17). Different strong and different weak positions ‘accept dissimilar numbers of deviating stresses depending on the period, genre, and preferences of a poet’ (17). Such stress patterns can therefore prove useful for identifying authors and establishing chronology. Tarlinskaja notes that ‘[u]nstressed grammatical monosyllables (the, to, and, is) tend to cling to the following or the preceding adjacent stressed lexical (content) word’ (19). These clinging monosyllables are called ‘clitics’, and ‘[p]otentially stressed clitics that precede their stressed “host” and, as it were, lean forward’ are known as ‘proclitics’, while ‘those that follow a stressed word’ and ‘lean backwards’ are called ‘enclitics’ (21). Tarlinskaja also examines strong syntactic breaks in plays, which occur ‘at the juncture of sentences or a sentence and a clause’ (24) and are the Russian school of versification’s equivalent of Oras’s pauses. However, Tarlinskaja relies ‘solely on syntax’ (22), which means that ‘doubts and choices are inevitable’ in her manual analyses of plays (15). For example, there are numerous ways in which a line’s monosyllables can be stressed. It is also worth acknowledging that metrical differences do not always indicate differences of authorship; we would naturally expect deviations between a play such as Cornelia, which is written in heroic verse, and a domestic tragedy such as Arden of Faversham, irrespective of authorship. Although attribution scholars are apt to interpret Tarlinskaja’s results in different ways, hers is a useful method for discriminating dramatists. In 1975, David Lake was able to differentiate Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton’s hands through linguistic preferences. He argued that ‘synonym ratios’ (such as ‘whilst’ and ‘while’) ‘have great virtue for authorship work’, for they are ‘probably not affected by anything except personal preference’ (1975: 127). Lake’s examination of Dekker and Middleton’s plays revealed some stable characteristics in terms of linguistic preferences, perhaps because many of Dekker and Middleton’s texts were ‘printed

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from autograph copy’ (74). Lake acknowledged that ‘synonymous connectives’ such as ‘between, betwixt’ are ‘too infrequent to provide reliable ratios in isolation’ (127). Lake also examined exclamations (such as ‘tush’), claiming that the ‘main advantage of exclamations as criteria of authorship is that they are relatively unpredictable from the context of dramatic situation’ (11), while colloquialisms (such as ‘ay, but’) can also provide ‘discriminators of authorship’ (13). Researchers undertaking computations of such markers for attribution purposes should identify which linguistic quirks are relatively stable in a dramatist’s uncontested plays (i.e. are not genre or character sensitive) and therefore provide useful markers. Scholars should also be wary of mediating factors such as scribal interference. For instance, there are linguistic and phrasal links between plays attributed to Kyd, including King Leir and Arden of Faversham, and Robert Yarington’s plagiaristic text Two Lamentable Tragedies (1595). This serves to emphasise a direct connection between these additional plays and Kyd, given that Yarington ‘was apprenticed to the scrivener, Francis Kyd (father to Thomas Kyd) in 1578’ (Hunter, 1997: 543). Yarington may have had access to Kyd’s manuscripts and could have been involved in making fair copies of his plays.2 An author’s word choices are strongly determined by genre and scenic context. Early modern drama is a distinctive medium containing a multitude of characters, each of them speaking with individualised voices. High-​status characters are likely to speak in a more dignified manner than low-​status characters, and dialogue delivered by clowns is liable to differ considerably from the speeches of tragic figures. Social interaction and attitude will also affect the use of pronouns such as ‘thou’ and ‘you’. The ratios for such forms should be interpreted by consulting the texts themselves, as in the case of, to offer one example, Kent’s addressing Lear by the former following Cordelia’s banishment in King Lear. Vocabulary tests involving both ‘lexical’ words and so-​called ‘function’ words are doubtless affected by the fact that an author’s word choices are geared towards the creation and conveyance of meaning. Function words have low semantic content and are thus said to operate ‘below an author’s conscious process of shaping words and concepts into coherent utterances’ (Vickers, 2012: 22). They perform ‘essential grammatical functions’ and ‘include the definite and indefinite

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articles, conjunctions, prepositions, pronouns’, and ‘auxiliary verbs’ (Vickers, 2002b: 90). These markers have some discriminatory power in authorship studies, but ‘it is only from the actual reading experience of the texts in question that one can discover which function words will prove to be reliable markers’ (91). Moreover, words such as ‘and’ or ‘of’ are dictated by the playwright’s choice of lexical or content-​bearing words so as to enable his characters to express themselves. Pervez Rizvi has demonstrated via largescale automated searches that ‘non-​function words exercise an influence over the function words that follow them’ (Rizvi, 2020a: 329), such as in the case of the adjective ‘devoid’, which is consistently followed by ‘of’ in early modern plays. Scholars investigating playwrights’ vocabularies should therefore take account of all words in a play rather than limiting their studies to either function words or lexical words (Craig and Kinney, 2009; Greatley-​Hirsch and Elliott, 2017: 139–​ 81), or just a small handful of words (Jackson, 2017c: 182–​93), such studies relying on problematic assertions concerning a writer’s linguistic unconscious. Computations of the frequency with which dramatists employed compound adjectives, such as ‘gold-​abounding’ (S&P, 1.3.59) and ‘cloud-​compacted’ (2.1.88), can also provide useful evidence for attribution studies. Shakespeare employed adjectival compounds with more frequency and inventiveness than many of his fellow dramatists, including Marlowe, who generally eschewed them in his plays. However, as we shall see later in this book, Kyd also compounded adjectives with some frequency. Perhaps Shakespeare’s debt to Kyd extends to this aspect of the dramatist’s lexicon. In 1932, Muriel St Clare Byrne demonstrated that verbal parallelisms can offer valuable evidence in authorship attribution studies, provided scholars adhere to the following criteria: parallels may be due to plagiarism, either conscious, unconscious, or coincidental, rather than common authorship; mere verbal parallelism is of little value in comparison to parallelism of thought coupled with some verbal parallelism; and mere accumulation of parallels is of no significance (1932: 24). These criteria still hold true. Byrne pointed out that scholars need to conduct a ‘negative check’, ensuring that words, phrases, and images are distinctive to an author and cannot be paralleled in the plays of other dramatists. Byrne explicitly refers to ‘acknowledged plays of the period’ (24),

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not non-​dramatic genres, and in this investigation of Kyd’s dramatic voice I adhere to a ‘basic principle of authorship studies, that in comparing the styles of … writers we must compare like with like –​that is, by analysing works from the same genre, or the same medium’ (Vickers, 2002a: 145). Earlier scholars, such as Charles Crawford, William Wells, and Paul V. Rubow, were able to identify Kyd’s hand through the traditional discipline of reading his plays closely and highlighting instances of authorial self-​repetition. Such approaches, paying close attention to the verbal fabric of plays and combining qualitative with quantitative research methods, remain essential in authorship attribution. There are several modern methods for identifying authorial self-​ repetition in early modern plays. Following Brian Vickers, who contends that ‘an author’s individuality will be more visible if we can identify his preferred groupings of words’ (2008b: 13), I originally employed WCopyfind in order to highlight strings of words shared between old-​spelling texts downloaded from the database Literature Online, or LION.3 This anti-​plagiarism software has the advantage of producing results that are ‘objectively identified’ (Jackson, 2012: 161) and ‘replicable by any other scholar’ (Vickers, 2018b: 458). It can be set to highlight any specified n-​gram (consecutive word sequence) length within a pair of electronic documents, from two adjacent words upwards, and can even identify –​within a fraction of a second –​approximate matching utterances, such as sequences that differ slightly in terms of syntactical arrangement or spelling, through adjusting the ‘Minimum % of Matching Words’ and ‘Most Imperfections to Allow’ values. I checked the rarity of matches highlighted by the software against the surviving corpus of plays first performed on the public stages in London, during the ‘appropriate time frame’ of 1580–​1600 (Jackson, 2014: 16), in Literature Online. The software, originally designed to expose student plagiarism, is not without disadvantages when it comes to the purpose of examining drama, however: it is impossible to compare results for all plays of the period concurrently, and it is a painstaking process to check the rarity of each highlighted phrasal structure by using the search functions in LION. Fortunately, there has been a recent innovation, which has the potential to revolutionise corpus linguistic approaches to early modern drama: Pervez Rizvi has developed an electronic corpus of

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527 plays dated between 1552 and 1657, titled Collocations and N-​ Grams.4 Searches of the normalised and lemmatised texts –​derived from Martin Mueller’s corpus Shakespeare His Contemporaries and the Folger Shakespeare Library Editions website –​allow a wider range of matches to be discovered than by searches using original spelling or unlemmatised forms of words.5 In corpus linguistics, the root form of each word (the lemma) is counted, so that ‘kind hearts’ is matched with ‘kind-​hearted’, to offer one example. Rizvi’s results for automated searches enable scholars to check for every contiguous word sequence shared between plays. Rizvi’s database also enables users to search for all discontinuous word sequences, i.e. matching phrases separated by intervening words. For instance, the linguistic choices ‘distressful’ and ‘wound’ cluster in The Spanish Tragedy and Arden of Faversham, but in no other play of the period. Unlike n-​grams, these words are not adjacent; they are separated by non-​ matching words: ‘looks’ and ‘to’ in Arden of Faversham, and ‘of’ and ‘my’ in The Spanish Tragedy. Although collocations are of considerably less use than n-​grams for statistical purposes, they can provide excellent markers for a single authorial thought process when studied according to their contexts of use. Rizvi’s database has the advantages of plagiarism software in terms of its objectivity and reproducibility, but it does not require time-​consuming searches of databases such as LION. I was therefore able to check results drawn from using WCopyfind and Literature Online with recourse to Rizvi’s Collocations and N-​Grams in order to provide the most comprehensive analysis of Kyd’s word associations in comparison with his Elizabethan contemporaries yet undertaken. A phrase four words in length, such as ‘I swear by heaven’, which co-​occurs with Arden of Faversham and Cornelia, will contain different types of n-​grams: one tetragram (the four-​word phrase as a whole), two trigrams (the three-​word phrases ‘I swear by’ and ‘swear by heaven’), three bigrams (the two-​word phrases ‘I swear’, ‘swear by’, and ‘by heaven’), and four single words. These are what Rizvi would call ‘formal’ n-​grams. The four-​word phrase itself would also constitute what Rizvi calls a ‘maximal’ n-​gram, in which case it would only be counted once. I draw from his spreadsheets listing ‘maximal’ matches for qualitative purposes throughout this book, although I also cite some quantitative data pertaining to unique (i.e. occurring only in two plays in

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Rizvi’s corpus) ‘formal’ n-​grams. Rizvi notes on his website (Rizvi, 2017) that, in the case of researchers who are examining phraseology ‘for qualitative analysis, then maximal matches, and therefore counts of maximal matches, are appropriate. On the other hand, if we are looking at, say, 4-​grams, in isolation to other N-​grams, then of course we must use formal matches.’ The verbal links I present adhere to David Lake’s categorisations of ‘combinations of more than one word’ and ‘grammatical or semantic’ patterns (1975: 14). Vickers explains that Where earlier linguistic theories held that users of natural language selected single words to be placed within a syntactical and semantic structure, it now became clear that we also use groups of words, partly as a labour-​saving device, partly as a function of memory. Such verbal economy is particularly prevalent in the drama written for the public theatres, where constraints of time demand speedy composition, characters fall into a set of roles with attendant speech patterns, and the verse line easily admits ready-​made phrases. It is hardly surprising that many dramatists frequently repeat themselves. (2014: 111)

Plagiarism software and large electronic corpora help us to identify ‘idiolect markers’, which are ‘combinatorial, embedded in an author’s long-​term memory, and repeated. We recognise them by unconscious pattern matching similar to what enables us to quickly make out a face in a crowd’ (Lancashire, 2010: 4). This method is arguably more reliable than computations of the frequencies with which dramatists use single words, for an author’s brain ‘may process language one word at a time, but it also deals with word-​ strings, ready-​made phrases or collocations in which some words frequently recur in regular combinations’, while ‘in any lexicon the set phrase (or “phraseme”) is the numerically predominant lexical unit, outnumbering single words roughly ten to one’ (Vickers, 2009: 43). In the case of authorial self-​repetition, the surrounding text will be demonstrably the same in lexicon, prosody, and other features of style as the phrases repeated, whereas in the case of verbal borrowings the surrounding text is often quite different, and these phrases will co-​occur with plays that are later in time of composition and performance according to the sound chronology provided by Martin Wiggins (Wiggins and Richardson, 2012, 2013). Common authorship or deliberate imitation become the likeliest explanations

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when a play shares a large number of word combinations peculiar to a dramatist. When such parallels of wording also pertain to complex modes of expression, it is reasonable to conclude that the results point towards a single author’s idiolect. I therefore combine traditional reading-​based approaches with modern methods of collecting parallels in order to examine Kyd’s self-​repetition. The most convincing contributions to attribution scholarship anchor data-​driven approaches in an understanding of theatrical context and sensitive readings of dramatic works. Throughout this book, I examine shared locutions according to the dramatic contexts in which they co-​occur. Having surveyed methods designed to distinguish dramatists according to the fundamental principles of authorial style, we are now in a position to investigate Kyd’s stylistic individuality by comparing each of the newly attributed plays to the stylistic ranges for his attested plays. Such a battery of tests can be relied upon to identify a known author. Emphasis must be placed on correspondences between Kyd’s known dramas and each of the putative texts, but it would be negligent not at least to acknowledge links among the newly attributed plays as well. The case for an ‘enlarged’ Kyd canon of six sole-​ authored plays relies on a dense network of correspondences among all works ascribed to him. I begin with an examination of Kyd’s prosodic habits.

Kyd’s verse style In his analysis of feminine endings in Kyd’s three accepted plays, Philip Timberlake acknowledged that ‘Kyd varied surprisingly in his practice’ (1931: 46) and that ‘[t]‌he late plays by (or attributed to) Kyd are the only non-​Shakespearean works that rival Shakespeare’s high rate’ (78–​9). Kyd leaps from a low percentage of 1.2 per cent (with a range in long scenes of 0.0–​3.3) in The Spanish Tragedy to 9.5 per cent for Cornelia (with a range of 2.4–​13.1). Soliman and Perseda averages 10.2 per cent (with a range of 5.3–​14.8). Timberlake compared the result for Soliman and Perseda to the high percentage for Cornelia and noted that ‘the evidence’ for Soliman and Perseda ‘is at least strong enough to make it very probable that Kyd is the author’ (50). In fact, Tarlinskaja suggests that Kyd

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was ‘the first Elizabethan playwright to discover feminine endings’ (2014: 111). The striking difference between the percentages for The Spanish Tragedy and Soliman and Perseda, supposedly written within a year of each other, could suggest that the former play was composed earlier in Kyd’s career than scholars have suspected. Conversely, Kyd’s sudden use of feminine endings could be a response to his fellow lodger Marlowe’s ‘mighty line’ (Bevington et al., 2012: 639). Either way, Kyd was the innovator here, and Shakespeare followed his lead as opposed to Marlowe’s largely end-​ stopped verse style with its avoidance of feminine endings. The three additional plays in the ‘enlarged’ sole-​authored canon reveal a stylistic continuum: Kyd continued to employ feminine endings at a uniquely high rate throughout his career. I noted in the introduction that William Wells, independently of Timberlake, identified Kyd as the author of King Leir because that play is ‘abounding in feminine endings’ (1939: 438). Timberlake recorded an average of 10.8 per cent feminine endings in King Leir, with a strict range in long scenes of 9.4–​16.8, which corresponds to the 10.2 per cent for Soliman and Perseda and 9.5 per cent for Cornelia (1931: 61–​ 2). Tarlinskaja points out that ‘King Leir could be attributed to Kyd on the basis of feminine endings alone’ (2014: 105). Timberlake did not suspect Kyd’s authorship of Fair Em. He was therefore puzzled by his results for that play, stating that ‘one is hardly prepared to find a play of such undistinguished verse exceeding in use of feminine endings the practice of such leading dramatists as Marlowe and Greene’ (1931: 63–​4). Fair Em averages 6.5 per cent feminine endings (with a range of 5.5–​9.3). Timberlake came to the unlikely conclusion that the play had been ‘originally composed in Poulter’s measure (or possibly in straight fourteeners) which has been altered’ during revision ‘to make the play blank verse throughout’ (63–​6). Nonetheless, Fair Em exhibits Kyd’s practice, unique among Shakespeare’s predecessors, of admitting a high proportion of feminine endings. In his study of Arden of Faversham, Timberlake recorded an average of ‘6.2 per cent of feminine endings with a range in long scenes of 0.9–​ 12.9 per cent. Soliman has 10.2 per cent, and a range of 5.3–​14.8 per cent’ (52). That figure of 6.2 per cent for feminine endings in Arden of Faversham, perhaps written in the same year as Fair Em, fits neatly into the range for Kyd’s accepted

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plays. Timberlake endorsed the attribution of Arden of Faversham to Kyd on the basis of this metrical evidence, noting that the high rate was ‘not entirely surprising. Kyd was a gifted playwright with a keen perception of dramatic values, and his metrical development may find its explanation in that fact’ (52). He concluded that Kyd ‘was following nobody’, for he ‘freely admitted feminine endings because he saw their fitness for dramatic speech’ (52–​3). Table 1.1 contains the ranges for pre-​Shakespearian dramatists’ sole-​authored plays, as well as the ranges for Kyd’s accepted plays, The Spanish Tragedy, Soliman and Perseda, and Cornelia, and the additional plays in his ‘enlarged’ canon, King Leir, Arden of Faversham, and Fair Em. Timberlake’s results, calculated by dividing the figures for feminine endings per play by the total number of verse lines, rule out other authorship contenders for plays in the ‘enlarged’ Kyd canon, such as the more regular metrists Greene, Peele, and Marlowe, whose percentages within their dramatic works are manifestly too low. The overall range for the six plays I attribute solely to Kyd –​1.2 to 10.8 per cent –​reveals the evolution of that dramatist’s versification style. Ants Oras’s pause profiles for The Spanish Tragedy and King Leir, in particular, reveal homogeneity in patterns ‘formed by all pauses indicated by internal punctuation’ (1960: 3), as can be seen most clearly in the frequency polygons Oras provided for these plays (41–​2). As we might expect in plays of the period, both texts feature fourth-​position peaks, while the percentages for the ninth position are in fact identical. More significant is the fact that the percentages for ‘first half’ pause patterns –​that is ‘the ratio of such Table 1.1  Philip Timberlake ranges for feminine endings in plays by pre-​Shakespearian dramatists Greene Lodge

0.1–​1.1 1.0

Marlowe

0.4–​3.7

Peele

1.5–​5.4

Kyd’s ‘accepted’ plays

1.2–​10.2

Kyd’s ‘contested’ plays

6.2–​10.8

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pauses before the fifth position i.e. in the first half of the line’ –​ are also identical, while the percentages for ‘pauses after an even-​ numbered syllable’ (i.e. syllables 2, 4, 6, and 8) are very close (4). Having divided the number of punctuation marks after each of the nine positions in verse lines by the total number of pauses in the whole play, Oras also observed that, in Arden of Faversham, ‘that distinctly non-​Shakespearian play’, we can see ‘a period pattern’ (31). Nevertheless, I reproduce his findings in order to exhibit the close relationships among some of these percentages. The figures for Soliman and Perseda, Fair Em, and Cornelia are the results of my own computations (Table. 1.2). Assembling this data into one table effectively demonstrates the ‘special physiognomy’ (Oras, 1960: 23) of Kyd’s canon. The figures for pauses in the first half of verse lines and on even-​numbered syllables in Fair Em correspond to the ranges for Kyd’s three accepted plays. We can usefully compare these results to the patterns for Shakespeare’s plays. Notably, no play in Shakespeare’s entire dramatic corpus reaches as high a percentage for pauses on even-​numbered syllables as can be found in Arden of Faversham, whereas Soliman and Perseda is closer than any of Shakespeare’s early sole-​authored plays; nor does Shakespeare reach as high a percentage as that found for the fourth syllable. The pause patterns for plays attributed to Kyd are different from Shakespeare’s preferences at the beginning of his career. Table 1.2  Ants Oras figures for pause patterns in plays attributed to Kyd Play

First half

Even

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

The Spanish Tragedy

78.9

67.5

7.1 15.0 5.7 39.1 15.2 11.4 4.2 1.9 0.4

Soliman and Perseda

60.9

67.8

4.1 9.3 5.5 42.1 19.5 14.5 2.9 1.9 0.2

Cornelia

55.6

58.6

8.2 10.2 5.7 31.6 20.3 13.4 6.4 3.4 0.8

King Leir

78.9

63.0 13.3 13.7 4.2 36.6 14.0 8.7 5.1 3.9 0.4

Arden of Faversham

63.5

71.2

2.2 5.3 3.9 41.5 16.6 22.8 6.1 1.5 0

Fair Em

67.5

62.1

5.1 12.2 12.5 37.7 13.8 10.6 5.7 1.6 0.8

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In her analysis of Kyd’s versification style, Marina Tarlinskaja observes that the ‘three accepted’ Kyd plays have ‘a “dip” on position 6. More rarely, the stressing on 6 and 8 is equal, and even more rarely, the “dip” falls on syllable 8’ (2014: 94–​5). She also notes that in all plays attributed to Kyd, ‘stresses on odd syllabic positions, W, decrease from syllable 1 through 9, and the mean number is below 10 percent’. The First Part of Hieronimo is ‘a glaring exception; its mean stressing on W is above 16.2 percent’ and ‘its mean on W is only 9.1’. Tarlinskaja notes that this ‘is not Kyd’s rhythm’ (96). Furthermore, she observes that the range of proclitic micro-​phrases, ‘200–​250 per 1,000 lines[,]‌characterises all texts of the tentative Kyd canon. The First Part of Hieronimo has 369 proclitic phrases per 1,000 lines, impossibly high for Kyd, and in particular for a play “preceding” The Spanish Tragedy’ (96–​7). Enclitic phrases in the three accepted Kyd plays ‘indicate a hesitant growth: The Spanish Tragedy 16.7 per 1,000 lines and Soliman and Perseda 29.7. A “jump” occurs in Cornelia: 42.8 enclitics per 1,000 lines’, whereas The First Part of Hieronimo has a ‘ratio of 85.1 enclitic phrases per 1,000 lines. This is completely out of Kyd’s range’ (97). The percentage for strong syntactic breaks in The First Part of Hieronimo is ‘different from anything attributed to Kyd’ (98). Tarlinskaja also analysed the prosodic elements of King Leir and discovered that the ratio of enclitic micro-​phrases is ‘close to Cornelia’s: 45.6 per 1,000 lines’, while ‘the preferred location of strong syntactic breaks’ creates ‘a homogenous cluster’, for the ‘maximum of strong syntactic breaks after syllable 4’ is 22.6 in King Leir, which we can compare to The Spanish Tragedy’s 22.7, Soliman and Perseda’s 20.1, and Cornelia’s 20.7 (101–​2). Tarlinskaja records a figure of 9.3 for run-​on lines in King Leir, which is consistent with The Spanish Tragedy’s 9.5 and Soliman and Perseda’s 9.9. Her linguistic-​statistical methods therefore lead her to attribute King Leir to Kyd (90). She also ‘found some features of Kyd’s versification style’ in Fair Em (93). For example, she notes that the ratios of proclitic micro-​phrases in Fair Em and King Leir ‘are very close, and very “Kyd-​like”, at 220–​250 per 1,000 lines’, which is ‘almost the same as in The Spanish Tragedy’, while ‘the mean stressing on’ metrically weak syllabic positions is also ‘Kyd-​like, below 10 percent’ (102). Furthermore, she observes that Fair Em

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conforms to ‘the maximum of strong syntactic breaks after syllable 4’ in Kyd’s plays, which have a percentage of ‘20.1–​22.7 percent’; Fair Em has a percentage of 22.4 (102). Her figure of 14.1 for run-​ on lines in Fair Em is close to Cornelia’s 13.6. Fair Em thus exhibits Kyd’s metrical profile. I examine Tarlinskaja’s data for Arden of Faversham, which exhibits many metrical commonalities with other Kyd plays, in comparison to Shakespeare’s verse style in the next chapter. Tarlinskaja’s analysis reveals that ‘the added texts’ are ‘close to each other in versification form’ and that they ‘resemble Kyd’s own plays; if not The Spanish Tragedy, then Soliman and Perseda or Cornelia’ (105), which are closer to King Leir, Arden of Faversham, and Fair Em in terms of chronology. Tarlinskaja suggests that ‘Kyd’s versification might have evolved. The evolution might have started in King Leir which, together with Soliman and Perseda, was an experiment in feminine endings.’ Conversely, The First Part of Hieronimo ‘stands apart’, and its ‘completely alien’ verse style ‘definitely’ points ‘away from Kyd to a later author’ (105).

Kyd’s phraseology In a general essay published in the Times Literary Supplement in 2008, Brian Vickers combined close study of verbal matches highlighted by anti-​ plagiarism software with analyses of Kyd’s dramaturgy in order to revive and strengthen the case for Kyd’s authorship of King Leir, Fair Em, and Arden of Faversham made by earlier scholars (2008b). Having collected and sifted through several hundred repeated phrases in Kyd’s accepted and newly attributed plays, he reached the conclusion that Kyd’s surviving corpus should be extended from three sole-​authored plays to six. Vickers’s analysis was primarily of the qualitative kind, examining many of these shared phrases in context in order to provide evidence for a single author’s habits of mind. A statistical analysis of Vickers’s claims for an ‘extended’ Kyd canon was provided the following year by Martin Mueller. Mueller created an electronic corpus called Shakespeare His Contemporaries, consisting of over 500 plays dated between 1552 and 1662. Mueller applied a series of statistical tests to the putative

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Kyd texts, leading him to conclude that ‘Vickers is right about the Leir play, Fair Em, and Arden’ (2009b). In a blog post entitled ‘N-​ Grams and the Kyd Canon: A Crude Test’, on his (then) website Digitally Assisted Text Analysis, Mueller explained that he ‘ran an experiment on 318 early modern plays’ and ‘extracted lemma n-​grams from bigrams to heptagrams that were repeated at least once’ (2009a). He computed ‘their distribution across plays’ and discovered that The Spanish Tragedy and Soliman and Perseda are placed above the median (the number separating the higher half of Mueller’s data from the lower half) –​with a percentage of 99.9 –​ for play pairs suggesting ‘characteristic patterns of authorial usage’. Having validated his method on Kyd’s attested plays, Mueller revealed that King Leir and Soliman and Perseda are also placed above the median with a percentage of 96.5. We might note that this percentage is higher than that found for the uncontested Kyd play pair Soliman and Perseda and Cornelia (93.5 per cent). Significantly, Soliman and Perseda and Arden of Faversham are placed ‘in the top quartile for shared two-​ play n-​ grams by the same author’, with a percentage of 99.7. Mueller therefore compared Kyd’s three attested plays as well as the percentages for each of the putative plays and those uncontested dramas. As an additional step, Mueller demonstrated that Fair Em and King Leir are ‘in the top quartile for shared two-​play n-​grams by the same author’, with a percentage of 98, which lends ‘support to Vickers’s argument’ that these plays were written by the same author, while Arden of Faversham and King Leir are given a percentage of 99, which provides compelling evidence for common authorship of these texts. Mueller’s analysis of early modern texts enabled him to establish that ‘two plays by the same author may be expected to share about twice as many unique n-​grams as two plays by different authors’. In another blog post titled ‘Vickers Is Right about Kyd’ (2009b), Mueller applied ‘[d]‌iscriminant analysis to lemma trigrams’ (three-​ word sequences) ‘that occur at least 500 times in 318 early modern plays’, which ‘misclassifies 50 or 16% of 318 plays. It gets 84% right. Of 37 plays by Shakespeare, it gets 34 right.’ Discriminant analysis, which establishes ‘variance between groups on the basis of the combined effect of multiple variables’, assigned The Spanish Tragedy to Kyd with a 96.1 per cent chance, while Soliman and Perseda and Cornelia were given percentages of 85.3 and 79.7

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respectively. Conversely, Mueller’s discriminant analysis tests gave the anonymous burlesque The First Part of Hieronimo a 30 per cent chance of being Kyd’s. Mueller noted that ‘Discriminant Analysis rejects the prequel as Kyd’s. It assigns it to the grab bag of anonymous plays with a 57.4% chance. So it is not fooled by the presence of many shared repetitions between it and The Spanish Tragedy.’ Mueller’s method therefore succeeded in attributing the three attested plays correctly to Kyd. It is significant then that when Mueller applied these tests to the plays newly attributed to Kyd, discriminant analysis assigned King Leir to Kyd with a 99.3 per cent chance and gave Fair Em a 99.5 per cent chance, while Arden of Faversham was given a 97.4 per cent chance of having been written solely by Kyd. Anyone seeking to deny the admission of these new plays to Kyd’s canon would need somehow to account for why ‘Soliman and Perseda and Cornelia, and even, less markedly, The Spanish Tragedy … test as belonging at lower degrees of probability to the “extended Kyd canon” than do Arden of Faversham, King Leir, and Fair Em’ (Jackson, 2021c: 132). The reasonable conclusion, as Mueller puts it, is that ‘Discriminant Analysis very strongly confirms’ that these plays come ‘from the same stable’ as the three accepted Kyd plays, and ‘[i]f you combine my evidence from common trigrams’ with the evidence ‘from rare shared repetitions, you would have to be very sceptical about the power of quantitative analysis not to acknowledge the fact that the claim for an expanded Kyd canon rests on quite solid evidence’ (2009b). Pervez Rizvi notes on his website Collocations and N-​Grams that, having tested eighty-​ six uncontested plays in his corpus, ‘unique n-​grams are better than all n-​grams’ for correctly identifying authors, despite the fact that n-​grams unfiltered for rarity ‘provide a vastly greater amount of data’ (Rizvi, 2017). Rizvi discovered that ‘formal’ tetragrams (four-​word phrases) unfiltered for rarity ‘correctly attribute 82 out of 86 plays, while 5-​grams are not far behind, with 80 out of 86 correct’. He also established that ‘unique 3-​grams and 4-​grams’ are the most reliable phrasal structures for attribution purposes, with unique ‘formal’ trigrams and tetragrams correctly classifying eighty-​three out of eighty-​six texts. In subsequent tests, Rizvi found that the three accepted Kyd plays are all correctly assigned to Kyd according to quantitative analyses of both unique ‘formal’ trigrams and tetragrams, therefore validating the

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methodology. These tests assign Arden of Faversham and Fair Em to Kyd as well. Anyone who denies Kyd’s ‘enlarged’ canon would have to account for why both Mueller and Rizvi’s independent tests should falsely assign these plays to him and yet correctly attribute each of Kyd’s three acknowledged plays. MacDonald P. Jackson has shown that other plays by the same author tend to feature in a ranked list of the top twelve scores for weighted unique ‘formal’ trigram matches with a target play by that author in Rizvi’s database (Jackson, 2019). According to weighted figures in the spreadsheet for Soliman and Perseda, the top two plays are The Spanish Tragedy and Arden of Faversham, while Cornelia also makes the top dozen. Jackson also runs tests using unique ‘formal’ tetragrams, which ‘can perform as well as’ unique trigrams ‘in correctly picking known authors. Occasionally they perform better’ (210). If we rank the plays in the Soliman and Perseda spreadsheet according to unique ‘formal’ tetragrams, Cornelia drops out of the top dozen and is replaced by King Leir. In the spreadsheet for Arden of Faversham, Soliman and Perseda features in the top dozen for unique ‘formal’ trigrams. As a side note, I should point out that Fair Em features in the top dozen in the spreadsheet for Arden of Faversham, and that tragic play is in the top dozen in the Fair Em spreadsheet. Jackson also notes that ‘maximal counts of all unique matches, whatever their length’, can ‘sometimes’ perform ‘rather better and sometimes with about the same degree of success’ as ‘unique formal 3-​grams’ (212).6 In the Soliman and Perseda spreadsheet ranking plays according to all unique ‘maximal’ n-​grams, The Spanish Tragedy, King Leir, and Arden of Faversham are in the top dozen. Elsewhere I have devised a new test and ranked all Kydian play pairs making the top dozen according to weighted figures for unique ‘formal’ trigrams, tetragrams, and all unique ‘maximal’ matches. I show that play pairs involving newly attributed works such as King Leir, Arden of Faversham, and Fair Em feature highly in many cases, and that Jackson’s method strengthens the case for enlarging Kyd’s canon (Freebury-​Jones, 2020b). In order to test the evidence further for Kyd’s phraseology in the six plays attributed solely to him, I recorded contiguous sequences of four or more words and adjusted my figures according to composite word counts. However, using Jackson’s criteria, I recorded

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only tetragrams plus (sequences of four words or more) that occur ‘not more than five times in drama of the period 1580–​ 1600’ (Jackson, 2014: 219). I discovered twenty-​one rare word sequences shared between The Spanish Tragedy and Cornelia (adjusting this total according to the combined word count of these texts gives us a percentage of 0.06 matches), twelve rare word sequences between Soliman and Perseda and Cornelia (0.03 matches), and thirty-​six sequences shared by The Spanish Tragedy and Soliman and Perseda (0.09 matches). By testing the accepted Kyd texts, I was able to provide a negative check that enabled me to compare results for the disputed plays. My tests demonstrate that King Leir is at one with the other Kyd plays in terms of the quantity and quality of matching phrases. King Leir more or less shares the same number of matches with The Spanish Tragedy (0.09 matches) and Cornelia (0.04 matches) as Soliman and Perseda does. King Leir also shares thirty tetragrams (0.07 matches) with Soliman and Perseda. Significantly, Arden of Faversham shares a remarkable forty-​ seven rare tetragrams with Soliman and Perseda (0.12 matches), thirty-​two tetragrams with The Spanish Tragedy (0.07 matches), and fourteen tetragrams (0.04 matches) with Cornelia. Below, I rank these putative Kyd play pairs according to the percentages for rare shared tetragrams plus: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

Arden of Faversham–​Soliman and Perseda Arden of Faversham–​King Leir The Spanish Tragedy–​Soliman and Perseda King Leir–​The Spanish Tragedy Arden of Faversham–​The Spanish Tragedy King Leir–​Soliman and Perseda Fair Em–​The Spanish Tragedy Fair Em–​King Leir Fair Em–​Arden of Faversham The Spanish Tragedy–​Cornelia Fair Em–​Soliman and Perseda Arden of Faversham–​Cornelia King Leir–​Cornelia Soliman and Perseda–​Cornelia Fair Em–​Cornelia

The Spanish Tragedy, Soliman and Perseda, and Cornelia are essentially Senecan tragedies, whereas King Leir (a comedy) and Arden

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of Faversham (a domestic tragedy) are largely based on Holinshed. It is also worth noting that Soliman and Perseda is an extended version of the play-​ within-​ the-​ play from The Spanish Tragedy, and the verbal evidence I have collected suggests that Kyd recycled phrases from this moment in his earlier tragedy when he came to write Soliman and Perseda. It is therefore striking that verbal relations between Arden of Faversham and Soliman and Perseda exceed any other play pair in the ‘enlarged’ Kyd canon. The low rankings for play pairs involving Cornelia are accounted for by the fact that that play is a rather free translation from Garnier’s French, but it is worth noting that Arden of Faversham and King Leir share more matches with that closet drama than Soliman and Perseda does, despite generic differences. We might also note that, despite being an abridged comedy, Fair Em shares denser verbal relations with The Spanish Tragedy than either that play or Soliman and Perseda does with Cornelia. The case for Kyd’s authorship of these newly attributed plays is therefore strong, and we should also acknowledge that a solid case can be made for common authorship of each of the putative texts. Arden of Faversham shares forty rare word sequences with King Leir (0.09 matches); the number of matches between these two plays exceeds that of The Spanish Tragedy and Soliman and Perseda, known to have been written by the same author. The play pairs Fair Em and Arden of Faversham, and Fair Em and King Leir, also have higher percentages than the same-​author pairs: The Spanish Tragedy and Cornelia, and Soliman and Perseda and Cornelia. Readers may consult these matching phrases, many of which evince parallelism of thought as well as of language and have never been highlighted before, in the appendix to this book. This battery of tests confirms Mueller’s judgement that the six plays in the ‘enlarged’ Kyd canon come ‘from the same stable’, and that modern corpus linguistic methods enable us to identify Kyd’s highly individual habits as a phrasemaker.

Kyd’s stage directions In Determining the Shakespeare Canon: ‘Arden of Faversham’ and ‘A Lover’s Complaint’, MacDonald P. Jackson convincingly

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rebuts Martin Wiggins’s suggestion that Arden of Faversham was written by an ‘enthusiastic amateur’ rather than a ‘theatre professional’ (Wiggins, 2008: 285–​6). Wiggins argues that the dramatist responsible for Arden of Faversham did not take into account the problems associated with some of his stage directions, especially Shakebag’s falling into a ditch (285–​6). But Jackson points out that Kyd’s ‘Soliman and Perseda makes much greater demand on the spectators’ imagination’ (Jackson, 2014: 107), especially when Soliman orders the Lord Marshal to throw two men from a tower top: ‘Then they are both tumbled down’ (S&P, 5.2.129 SD). Jackson cites the following stage directions from Arden of Faversham during the course of his argument that a dramatist with practical experience of the theatre could have been responsible for that play: ‘Then they lay the body in the countinghouse’ (AF, 14.249 SD) and ‘Then they bear the body into the fields’ (14.350 SD). 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’ (S&P, 2.1.230 SD). In summary, Jackson counters Wiggins –​who, I should mention, has since joined the editorial board for the new edition of Kyd’s works, which includes Arden of Faversham7 –​by noting that the co-​occurrence of descriptive ‘Then’ directions in Soliman and Perseda and Arden of Faversham does not suggest the hand of an amateur dramatist, given Kyd’s authorship of the former play (Jackson, 2014: 106). However, Jackson does not explore the possibility that the striking correspondences between many of the examples he cites point towards a single professional playwright’s authorship of both plays. As Lukas Erne puts it: the fact that ‘Arden of Faversham and Soliman and Perseda share a distinctive feature unique to play texts of the period, a high number of stage directions starting with “Then” ’, may ‘encourage further speculation in favour of common authorship’ (2014: xvi). In an article titled ‘Corresponding Stage Directions in Plays Attributable to Kyd’ (Freebury-​Jones, 2019a: 16–​17) I show that Arden of Faversham contains five instances of stage directions beginning ‘Then they’. No other publicly performed play of the Elizabethan period matches this count, with the exception of Soliman and Perseda, which contains six instances, including the identical construction ‘Then they fight’, which occurs twice in

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Soliman and Perseda (S&P, 3.1.111 SD; 5.4.59 SD), once in Arden of Faversham (AF, 9.29 SD), and in no other play. Furthermore, I show that only one other Elizabethan play contains a stage direction beginning with the formulation ‘Then they’, and that is King Leir, during the moment when the Brythonic ruler divides his kingdom between his daughters: ‘Then they draw lots’ (KL, 6.550 SD). Arden of Faversham and Soliman and Perseda were both printed by Edward Allde, who also owned rights to the title of King Leir in 1624. However, the 1605 Quarto of the last play was printed by Simon Stafford. It is therefore conceivable that stage directions beginning ‘Then they’ represent the preferences of a scribe or reporter. Nevertheless, I propose in the article that this unique formulation, co-​occurring with three plays that have been attributed to Kyd by generations of scholars on very different grounds, indicates a single playwright’s preferences. As M. L. Wine puts it: ‘the descriptive and literary stage directions’ in Arden of Faversham ‘seem authorial’ (1973: xxx–​xxxi). It is also worth pointing out that Arden of Faversham and Fair Em share sixty-​ eight examples of stage directions featuring the relatively rare two-​word unit ‘Here enters’ (there are sixty-​four instances in Arden of Faversham and four in Fair Em by my count). The abundance of ‘Here’ directions in Arden of Faversham could also suggest the hand of a scribe or reporter, but this stage direction, like ‘Then they’, could equally indicate authorial influence. I suggest that these observations broaden our knowledge of Kyd’s distinctive stage direction formulae.

Kyd’s linguistic habits Thomas Merriam notes that ‘the expression “aye, but” or “nay, but” is used more frequently’ in The Spanish Tragedy, Soliman and Perseda, and Arden of Faversham than in the plays of Marlowe and Shakespeare (1995: 340). There are six instances of the colloquialism ‘ay, but’ in The Spanish Tragedy and eight in Soliman and Perseda. There are seven instances in King Leir and nine in Arden of Faversham. Merriam also observes that ‘The same can be said for the much higher word frequency of “but” ’ in Kyd’s plays, as opposed to plays by Marlowe and Shakespeare, leading him to

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conclude that Kyd is ‘the preferred author of Arden of Faversham’ (340). Merriam’s raw counts for the word ‘but’ reveal striking affinities between some of Kyd’s plays: The Spanish Tragedy has a total of 203 and Soliman and Perseda contains 208, while Arden of Faversham contains 202 instances (Merriam, 1995: 341). According to my count, of the 202 instances of ‘but’ in Arden of Faversham, 105 are placed in the initial iambic foot. The high figure for Arden of Faversham accords with The Spanish Tragedy’s 122. This figure also matches King Leir’s (identical) total of 105. Kyd places ‘but’ in the initial iambic foot once every twenty lines in The Spanish Tragedy and twenty-​three lines in Soliman and Perseda. Turning to the putative texts, ‘but’ occurs in the initial iambic foot once every twenty-​three lines in King Leir, the same rate we find for Soliman and Perseda; once every twelve lines in Fair Em; and once every nineteen lines in Arden of Faversham, which we might compare to Shakespeare’s lower rate of once every twenty-​nine lines in Henry VI Part Two and forty-​six lines in The Taming of the Shrew (1592).8 These high-​frequency linguistic markers reveal the striking homogeneity of plays in the ‘enlarged’ Kyd canon. I hope that future researchers will expand my work on Kyd’s use of ‘but’ by examining other function words according to their prosodic characteristics and contexts of use.

Kyd’s vocabulary Albert Yang has devised an information categorisation method that can be usefully applied to early modern plays. Yang’s methodology relies on word rank order and frequency analysis of all words in early modern texts, as opposed to extrapolating only function words and/​or lexical words, as in many recent studies. Yang counts the occurrences of each word in early modern texts and then ranks them by descending frequency (most frequent to least frequent). The ‘resulting rank-​frequency distribution represents the statistical hierarchy of word usage’ (Yang, 2020: 191) in a text. In his examination of plays by two different authors, Yang studies ‘the shared words used by both’, and by ‘plotting the rank number of each shared word in the first text against that of the second text’ he provides a visual rank order comparison (190). The scatter-​plot comparison of

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two plays produces a diagonal line with the most frequently used words clustering in the lower left corner and the least frequent in the upper right part of the graph. In Yang’s analyses of two plays by the same author, ‘the words’ tend to be ‘tightly centred along the diagonal line, indicating that the rank order of each word is very similar’ (191), whereas in plays by different authors the words tend to be more widely scattered on either side. The ‘distance’ (or ‘dissimilarity index’) between ‘any two texts can be quantified by measuring the scatter of these points from the diagonal line in the rank order comparison plot. Greater distance indicates less similarity and vice versa’ (192). These distances are used to construct a ‘phylogenetic tree’ (a technique used in evolutionary biology), which shows the texts that are most closely related. Yang has applied this method to all of Shakespeare’s accepted plays and the six putatively sole-​ authored Kyd texts. These dramatists’ canons are clearly separated on the phylogenetic tree diagram. Yang points out that there is a close relationship between King Leir and Fair Em (d =​0.157), Soliman and Perseda and Arden of Faversham (d =​0.160), and a distant branch of Cornelia from other texts (average d =​0.228). Importantly, Arden of Faversham, an anonymous play that has been attributed to Shakespeare or Marlowe, has a close relationship with King Leir (d =​0.151) and Soliman and Perseda (d =​0.160). The clustering tree shows that Arden of Faversham is classified between newly attributed plays and uncontested Kyd works. Specifically, the play is classified between the other English plays Fair Em and King Leir and the Turkish tragedy Soliman and Perseda, thereby supporting the theory … that the play should be placed in Kyd’s canon. (193)

Yang’s ‘method attributes some of the newly attributed plays as firmly as Kyd’s uncontested texts’ (196). For instance, The Spanish Tragedy and Soliman and Perseda have a ‘distance’, or ‘dissimilarity index’, of 0.160, which is identical to the figure for Arden of Faversham and Soliman and Perseda and higher (i.e. less similar) than the figures for King Leir and The Spanish Tragedy (d =​0.151) and King Leir and Soliman and Perseda (d =​0.156). It is also worth mentioning that the vocabularies of Arden of Faversham and King Leir (d =​0.151) and Fair Em and King Leir (d =​0.157) are very similar. The closest Kyd play to Shakespeare’s vocabulary is King

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Leir and not Arden of Faversham, as proponents of Shakespeare’s part authorship might believe, while Cornelia is most distant from Kyd’s other plays, reflecting that play’s nature as a translation. The results for respective play pairs are less significant, however, than the fact that overall the method determined that all plays attributed solely to Kyd belong to the same branch, including Cornelia. Yang concludes that the ‘classification’ of Kyd and Shakespeare’s ‘canons in different branches reveals distinct authorship[,]‌and the attribution of King Leir, Fair Em, and Arden of Faversham solely to Kyd, along with the three uncontested plays, is therefore strong’ (196). Having demonstrated the stylistic homogeneity of the ‘enlarged’ Kyd canon, the following chapter evaluates claims for Shakespeare’s hand in Arden of Faversham in order to distinguish authorship from influence. This is critical for a study of Kyd’s impact on Shakespeare’s language and overall dramaturgy, which seems to have been so profound that scholars have had difficulties distinguishing Shakespeare’s early style from Kyd’s.

Notes 1 See Auerbach (2020a); Barber (2020, 2021); Freebury-​Jones (2016a, 2017b); Rizvi (2018, 2019, 2020a, 2021). 2 MacDonald P. Jackson also notes such links but seems unaware of Yarington’s connection to Kyd. See Jackson (2014: 22, 2021b: 72–​4). 3 WCopyfind, http://​pla​giar​ism.bloo​mfie​ldme​dia.com/​wordpr​ess/​softw​ are/​wcopyf​i nd/​ (accessed 22 July 2021); Literature Online, http://​lion. chadw​yck.co.uk (accessed 22 July 2021). 4 Collocations and N-​Grams, www.shake​spea​rest​ext.com/​can/​index.htm (accessed 20 January 2022). 5 The latest incarnation of Shakespeare His Contemporaries, a collaboration between Northwestern University and Washington University in St Louis titled Early Print, is available at EarlyPrint, https://​ear​lypr​int.org/​ (accessed 22 July 2021). Folger Shakespeare Library Editions, www.fol​ ger.edu/​fol​ger-​shak​espe​are-​libr​ary-​editi​ons (accessed 22 July 2021). 6 Despite these acknowledgements, Jackson neglects the equally strong evidence for unique ‘formal’ tetragrams and all unique ‘maximal’ matches in his critiques of the ‘enlarged’ Kyd canon. When it comes to computational analysis, there are several parameters and multiple ways of interpreting data. In confining himself to just one n-​gram weighting

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measure, it seems to me that Jackson misrepresents much of the evidence. See Jackson (2021b, c). 7 Brian Vickers (ed.) (forthcoming), The Works of Thomas Kyd (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer). 8 My computations are based on the verse line totals for these plays, taken from ‘Appendix B: Table B.1’, in Tarlinskaja (2014). It is worth pointing out that of the forty-​five instances of ‘but’ in Scenes 4–​9 of Arden of Faversham, which Jackson gives to Shakespeare, twenty-​five occur at the start of verse lines, at a rate of one every twenty-​one lines. Jackson and his New Oxford Shakespeare colleagues’ claims are detailed in Chapter 2.

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2 Authorship versus influence

In that unique period of flourishing London theatres, Elizabethan dramatists kept a close eye and ear on what every other dramatist was doing, and theatre companies were deeply conscious of what their commercial rivals were producing. Dramatists competed to create new plays within extant genres, experimented by conflating genres, and drew from similar source materials –​from Roman tragedies to English chronicles to Italian novellas and so on –​ in order to tell existing stories in innovative ways. It was also a deeply collaborative period, with dramatists working closely with theatre managers to supply playing companies with fresh material. These playwrights would have also worked with the actors not only during the composition of their plays but even when those texts were fair-​copied, no doubt taking account of any feedback they received when a play was first read to the company, and even during the rehearsal process. Some dramatists, such as Richard Tarlton, Robert Wilson, Ben Jonson, Thomas Heywood, and Shakespeare, were also actors themselves, and would develop an intimate familiarity with plays in which they had performed, which would inform the look, sound, and overall dramaturgy of their own works. Many scholars have been willing to accept the notion that Shakespeare followed the standard practice of borrowing from his fellow dramatists. To offer some examples, Hardin Craig suggested in 1951 that Shakespeare had acted in King Leir and was thus able to recall the play (1951). In 1958, Thomas H. McNeal listed numerous verbal links between Shakespeare’s plays and King Leir. He concluded that Shakespeare borrowed ‘in both phrase and paraphrase’ from the old play throughout his career (1958a: 5). Bart van Es notes that ‘Shakespeare’s early drama is often spectacularly

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imitative and as a result his personal voice is much less distinct’ (2013: 36), while Charles R. Forker has suggested that ‘Much of this assimilation was undoubtedly unconscious, at least in the case of verbal echoes, since Shakespeare seems to have known many of the plays from practical experience in the theatre’ (2010: 127). I wish to show in this chapter that Shakespeare’s ability to weave verbal details from other plays into his own passages is in part attributable to his career as an actor. The first allusion to Shakespeare as an actor and dramatist features in Robert Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit Bought with a Million of Repentance (1592). Greene warns his fellow dramatists and University Wits, Nashe, Peele, and Marlowe, about actors: ‘those Puppets (I meane) that spake from our mouths, those Anticks garnisht in our colours’, and one actor in particular. Shakespeare, or ‘Shake-​scene’, has had the audacity to turn his hand to writing plays: Yes trust them not, for there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers that, with his Tygers heart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-​scene in a country. (Carroll, 1994: 83–​4)

The 1616 Jonson Folio tells us that Shakespeare was one of the ‘principall Comedians’ in Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour (1598) and one of ‘The principall Tragedians’ in Jonson’s Sejanus (1603). Shakespeare is also listed as one of the principal actors in his own plays, in the First Folio. John Davies of Hereford tells us that he often played ‘Kingly parts in sport’ (Grosart, 1878: 26), and an early seventeenth-​century book annotation describes Shakespeare as ‘Our Roscius’ (Nelson and Altrocchi, 2009). I consider it most likely that Shakespeare began his career as an actor-​dramatist for Pembroke’s Men, as proposed by J. O. Halliwell-​ Phillipps during the nineteenth century (1883: 105). Shakespeare seems to have written his earliest plays, such as Henry VI Part Two, Henry VI Part Three, and The Taming of the Shrew, with that company before it disbanded in 1593. A. S. Cairncross argued that Pembroke’s Men ‘existed before 1592, probably as early as 1589’, and that it was ‘Shakespeare’s company, as it was, for a time at least, Kyd’s’ (1960: 344). Similarly, Terence Schoone-​Jongen points

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out that ‘Pembroke’s 1592–​93 court performances indicate it probably had existed long enough to attract the court’s attention, and presumably had actors and/​or writers talented enough to attract such attention’ (2008: 119). He notes that ‘Surviving evidence’ linking Shakespeare’s early acting career with ‘Pembroke’s Men is more plentiful than surviving evidence for some of its fellow playing companies’ (145). It seems likely that, as an actor-​dramatist for Pembroke’s Men, Shakespeare would have developed an ear for useful theatrical utterances. Indeed, T. W. Baldwin suggested that Shakespeare ‘would learn, from acting in the old plays’ of authors ‘such as Kyd’ (1959: 54). I propose that proper acknowledgement of Shakespeare’s beginnings as an actor can tell us much about the hybrid nature of his plays, or what we might call, as Gloucester puts it in Henry VI Part Two, his ‘books of memory’ (2H6, 1.1.97).1 John Tobin notes that because plays were very seldom performed in an uninterrupted run, actors needed powerful memories. It was a time when the aural rather than the visual understanding was much greater than in our own time, but even so, the capacity of actors to hold in their heads a large number of roles from many different plays was extraordinary, and new plays were constantly being added to the repertory. (2012: 22)

The capacious memory Shakespeare required in order to succeed as an Elizabethan player meant that he could draw from a variety of plays for the verbal details of his own works. However, we cannot rule out the possibility that Shakespeare simply remembered other dramatists’ lines from having seen their plays during performance. Consider Hamlet’s recitation of the Player’s speech, which, Lina Perkins Wilder observes, ‘engages directly with the mechanics of recall’ (2010: 121). Hamlet offers ‘the Player a cue line to stimulate his memory of the speech; he misremembers, and he corrects his memory’ (121). Hamlet is able to recall a thirteen-​line speech, with ‘good accent and good discretion’ (Ham., 2.2.469–​70), despite his having only heard the ‘speech once, but it was never acted, or, if it was, not above once’ (2.2.437–​8). It is conceivable that Shakespeare’s ‘prodigious skills of memorisation required for the theatre’ (33) would similarly enable him to recall a number of speeches from plays he had engaged with, either as a spectator or actor. Notably, Lukas Erne observes that ‘Shakespeare, perhaps

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more than anyone else, seems to have specifically profited from Kyd’s works’ (2001: 5). Ben Jonson coupled Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy with Shakespeare and George Peele’s Titus Andronicus (1592) in his Induction to Bartholomew Fair (1614): ‘He that will swear Jeronimo or Andronicus are the best plays yet, shall pass unexcepted at here, as a man whose judgement shows it is constant’ (Butler, 1989: 160). Shakespeare’s earliest tragedy, like Kyd’s most famous play, is written in the Senecan mode. Erne summarises Kyd’s influence over Shakespeare’s subsequent tragedies thus: His second tragedy, Romeo and Juliet, did what only Kyd’s Soliman and Perseda among extant plays had done before on the public stage, namely to place a conflict of love at the centre of a tragedy. His third tragedy, Julius Caesar, covers the same period of Roman history as Kyd’s Cornelia, and Shakespeare’s Brutus may well owe something to Kyd’s. Finally, the chief source of Shakespeare’s fourth tragedy, Hamlet, is undoubtedly Kyd’s work of the same name. (2001: 5)

Shakespeare evidently recalled Kyd’s Soliman and Perseda when he came to write King John, for the Bastard alludes to the miles gloriosus of Kyd’s play in the line ‘Knight, knight, good mother, Basilisco-​like’ (Jn, 1.1.244), while we can trace the influence of Basilisco in Shakespeare’s characterisation of Falstaff (Freeman, 1967: 163). Here I focus specifically on unique word sequences shared between Kyd and Shakespeare’s plays in order to explore Shakespeare’s patterns of verbal borrowing.

Shakespeare’s verbal debts to Kyd’s accepted plays I have profited much from Mueller’s Excel document ‘SHCSharedTetragramsPlus’, which lists play pairs that share large numbers of unique tetragrams plus (sequences of four words or more) within his electronic corpus, which I discussed in the previous chapter.2 Mueller notes that ‘it is quite rare for two plays –​texts that are typically between 15,000 and 25,000 words long –​to share more than one or two of the dislegomena’ (n-​grams that occur in only two plays in Mueller’s corpus) ‘analysed here’ (Mueller, 2014). Mueller’s database lends weight to the hypothesis

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Table 2.1  Martin Mueller results for unique tetragrams plus, shared between Shakespeare plays and Kyd’s ‘accepted’ canon Play Henry VI Part Three

The Spanish Tragedy

Soliman and Perseda

10

9

Titus Andronicus

7

Richard III

7

The Two Gentlemen of Verona

7

Cymbeline

7

Henry VIII

7

9

that Shakespeare recycled details from earlier plays. In Table 2.1 I present Mueller’s data for unique n-​grams of four or more words, shared between Kyd’s accepted tragedies and plays attributed solely or in part to Shakespeare. Although John Southworth argues that ‘Shakespeare’s familiarity with Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy’ was ‘more likely to derive from having acted’ in it (2000: 41), the very popularity of the play presents a difficulty, for many of its phrases seem to have been embedded in the minds of Kyd’s contemporaries. The play was parodied by dramatists such as Nashe, Heywood, John Marston, Dekker, Jonson, Nathan Field, Francis Beaumont, and James Shirley, while Mueller’s database records large numbers of repetitions between the tragedy and sixteen plays by different authors. It is worth noting, however, that no fewer than six of these plays are Shakespeare’s. Conversely, as Arthur Freeman pointed out, ‘That Soliman never attained the popularity of The Spanish Tragedy is evident, both from its scant printing history and the paucity of allusions to it in its own time’ (1967: 158). As Soliman and Perseda is ‘generally assumed to have been printed not long after it was entered in the Stationers’ Register in November 1592’ (Erne, 2001: 157), it seems possible that the verbal affinities with Henry VI Part Three, which was almost certainly on stage by September 1592, given that an explicit allusion to the play occurs in Greene’s prose tract, are due to

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Shakespeare’s aural memory. Erne argues that Soliman and Perseda belonged to Pembroke’s Men ‘until at least 1597’, although ‘we do not know for which company Kyd wrote his play’ (2001: 163). Shakespeare’s ability to recall the verbal details of these texts could therefore be the result of his having acted in them. Southworth tells us that ‘Performing in a play brings to the actor a general familiarity with the text as a whole’, for ‘he needs to give half an ear to what is being spoken on stage if he is not to miss his entrance cues’ (2000: 41). He claims it ‘is apparent’ that Shakespeare played Erastus in Kyd’s Soliman and Perseda (41). Indeed, in Mueller’s spreadsheet we find the unique pentagram (five-​word sequence) ‘And thanks unto you all’, shared between Erastus’s speech ‘And thankes unto you all, brave worthy sirs. /​ Impose me taske, how I may do you good; /​Erastus will be dutifull in all’ (S&P, 1.4.27–​9), and King Edward’s lines ‘Thanks, brave Montgomery, and thanks unto you all. /​If fortune serve me I’ll requite this kindness’ (3H6, 4.8.76–​7). We might note the similar contexts in which this formulation is employed: both characters are thankful and offer requital. However, this is the only unique word sequence between Kyd’s play and Henry VI Part Three that occurs during Erastus’s speeches. Other word sequences in Mueller’s database occur in scenes during which Erastus is on stage. Ferdinando’s interrogative ‘Dasell mine eyes, or ist Lucinas chaine?’ (S&P, 2.1.244) provides a cue for Erastus to speak and matches Edward’s line ‘Dazzle mine eyes, or do I see three suns?’ (3H6, 2.1.25). Perseda’s line ‘And pardon me my lord, for this is he’ (S&P, 4.1.164) also provides a cue for Erastus to speak, while matching (in language, but not in thought) Henry’s prophecy that Richmond will become King: ‘Make much of him, my lords, for this is he’ (3H6, 4.7.75). Some repeated phrases, however, cannot be explained by the theory that Shakespeare played Erastus and recalled his own lines or cue-​lines. Erastus is not present on stage when Amurath, accompanied by Soliman, Haleb, and the Janissaries, says: ‘I would not hence till I had let thee know’ (S&P, 1.5.53). Amurath attacks Haleb for thwarting ‘a Monarchs holy oath’ (1.5.54). Shakespeare recalls this line when Margaret calls Warwick a ‘Proud setter-​up and puller-​down of kings! /​I will not hence, till, with my talk and tears’

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(3H6, 3.3.157–​8). Significantly, the next unique word sequence occurs during Soliman’s speech, and Erastus has been murdered two scenes previously: My last request, for I commaund no more, Is that my body with Persedas be Interd, where my Erastus lyes intombd. (S&P, 5.4.140–​2)

In Shakespeare’s play, the King says ‘Let me entreat—​for I command no more—​’ (3H6, 4.7.59). Erastus is also absent from 2.2 when Basilisco says ‘Why so? I am in honor bound to combat him’ (S&P, 2.2.52), which matches Henry’s contextually dissimilar line ‘Why, so I am, in mind’ (3H6, 3.1.60). Shakespeare thus seems to have been familiar with the language of the play as a whole. Alfred Hart noted that ‘There seems no good reason why any actor who had no part in a scene should be excluded from the stage during its rehearsal’ (1942: 341). It is not unreasonable to suggest that Shakespeare familiarised himself with scenes from Soliman and Perseda during which he was not required on stage. We find a similar pattern to those shared by Henry VI Part Three and Soliman and Perseda in the matches between Kyd’s play and The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1594). Just one of these unique n-​grams, the pentagram ‘not and therefore she is’, is spoken by Erastus, in the line ‘I kept it not, and therefore she is lost’ (S&P, 1.4.123), which matches Thurio’s line ‘I claim her not, and therefore she is thine’ (TGV, 5.4.133). However, other lines provide cues for Erastus, such as Perseda’s declarative ‘And all my former love is turnd to hate’ (S&P, 2.1.152), during the lovers’ quarrel, which provides a unique tetragram match with Proteus’s speech, when he renounces his love for Julia: ‘So the remembrance of my former love /​ Is by a newer object quite forgotten’ (TGV, 2.4.192–​3). All of the remaining unique word sequences occur shortly before Erastus enters, which would seem to support Southworth’s claim. However, Erastus is the male protagonist of Kyd’s tragedy and is therefore on stage for much of the play. The evidence suggests that Shakespeare could have played Erastus, but it is hardly surprising that many of these repeated phrases can be found in scenes during which Erastus is present. We will return to Mueller’s data for unique tetragrams plus later, in relation to Shakespeare’s verbal debts to the additional plays I assign solely to Kyd. Firstly, in light of these findings, it is

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necessary to evaluate claims for Shakespeare’s part authorship of one of these additional plays, namely Arden of Faversham.

The argument for Shakespeare’s hand in Arden of Faversham We saw in the introduction to this book that Kyd’s reputation underwent a transitory resurgence when several nineteenth-​and twentieth-​ century scholars attributed anonymous plays to him. However, MacDonald P. Jackson dismissed the case for his sole authorship of Arden of Faversham in an Oxford B.Litt. thesis (Jackson, 1963), where he first argued for Shakespeare’s hand in the play. Decades later, the attribution board for The New Oxford Shakespeare (Taylor et al., 2016–​17), of which Jackson was a member, decided to include the play in their edition of Shakespeare’s works. The adjunct volume, The New Oxford Shakespeare: Authorship Companion (Taylor and Egan, 2017), which lays out some of the evidence for the inclusion of Arden of Faversham, has been criticised by Joseph Rudman for its ‘borderline ad hominem attacks on “opponents” –​which is not a cabal but individuals who are also established Shakespeare scholars; Eric Rasmussen, Sir Brian Vickers, Darren Freebury-​ Jones, and others’, while exemplifying ‘experimental bias’, despite containing ‘methodological flaws and statistical faux pas in many of the individual papers and the volume in general’ (Rudman, 2019: 703). Similarly, Joseph F. Stephenson points out that some of the claims in the Authorship Companion are ‘presented with a bit more self-​ assurance –​not to mention a bit more personal animus –​than is warranted’ (2018: 1315), while William Proctor Williams observes that ‘Thirteen of the twenty-​five essays in this volume are written, or co-​written, by people on the Advisory Board’, which ‘inspires very little confidence in the fairness and objectivity of what is published here’ (2018: 132). There appear to be two opposing positions in early modern attribution studies, with Brian Vickers on the one side and the New Oxford Shakespeare team on the other, and Vickers’s arguments for an ‘extended’ Kyd canon are thus heavily criticised throughout the Authorship Companion. Authorship studies are a closely scrutinised and sometimes bitterly contested discipline, and

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they can be heavily technical, meaning that the scrutiny and contention are often undertaken by a small group of scholars most invested in competing methodologies. I have no intention of engaging with the sometimes acrimonious tone of such exchanges in this chapter. But I do wish to show that, in practically every respect, the evidence that has been adduced by Jackson and his New Oxford Shakespeare colleagues for Shakespeare’s authorship of the central scenes of Arden of Faversham is compatible with Kyd’s sole authorship of the play. Jackson summarises his arguments for Shakespeare’s authorship of Arden of Faversham’s central scenes in Determining the Shakespeare Canon: ‘Arden of Faversham’ and ‘A Lover’s Complaint’, in which he also suggests that Shakespeare co-​ authored the play with an older dramatist who was probably not Kyd. He criticises twentieth-​ century scholars’ ‘haphazard’ searches for verbal parallels, which were supposedly ‘biased by the scholar’s preconceptions’ (2014: 16). Jackson notes that ‘We need to know how rare such formulas are and who among all dramatists within an appropriate time frame used them’ (16). This is a sensible notion, but Jackson uses the database Literature Online, or LION, to test the rarity of utterances that he himself has selected. It is possible that Jackson had Shakespeare’s patterns of word associations in mind, and not Kyd’s, when conducting his searches. Jackson concedes that this process of determining ‘whether a parallel is close enough to be recorded’ involves ‘an element of subjectivity’, and that ‘no doubt some relevant data have been accidentally overlooked’ (19). This method of picking out potentially significant phrases in each line is pioneering but also time-​ consuming, which may account for why Jackson examines samples of text from just three of the play’s scenes in his monograph. I should also mention that it is questionable whether many of Jackson’s parallels constitute ‘formulas’ (16). Jackson accepts the co-​occurrence of single words or synonyms as valid evidence for authorship in his number-​specific criteria. It seems to me that his case for Shakespeare’s authorship on the basis of verbal parallels is therefore compromised by scholarly ‘preconceptions’ (16) of the kind he warns against himself.3 My evidence suggests that Shakespeare was deeply influenced by the phraseology of plays attributed to Kyd, having perhaps read, seen, or performed in them. Nevertheless, it is important to note

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that plays assigned to Kyd share more n-​gram links with Arden of Faversham than do any Shakespeare texts. Users of Pervez Rizvi’s electronic corpus of 527 plays dated between 1552 and 1657, Collocations and N-​Grams, can download summary spreadsheets for play pairs sharing n-​grams (Rizvi, 2017). The spreadsheet for Arden of Faversham ranks other plays in the electronic corpus according to unique (i.e. occurring only in Arden of Faversham and one other play in the corpus) ‘maximal’ n-​gram matches of any length. The number of matches shared between two plays is divided by the combined word count of that play pair. The summary spreadsheet for this play shows that Soliman and Perseda shares denser n-​gram relations with Arden of Faversham than does any other play of the period. We should also acknowledge that the putative Kyd texts fare well: Fair Em is ranked eleventh and King Leir is ranked fifteenth. If we consult Rizvi’s spreadsheet for Kyd’s accepted play Soliman and Perseda as a test case, we find that The Spanish Tragedy and Arden of Faversham top the list, while King Leir and Cornelia also feature in the top twenty plays. The last play is ranked twentieth, which reveals that the top twenty plays for unique ‘maximal’ n-​grams provide accurate indicators of Kyd’s authorship. The fact that one-​fifth of the plays in the top twenty for this spreadsheet have been attributed to Kyd suggests that authorial self-​repetition is a major factor in these rankings. Conversely, not a single Shakespeare play features in the top twenty for the Arden of Faversham spreadsheet. This statistical fact militates against the case for Shakespeare’s participation in Arden of Faversham: every Shakespeare play of the Elizabethan period that scholarly consensus recognises as collaborative, including Henry VI Part One, to which, as we shall see later, Shakespeare contributed only a few scenes; Titus Andronicus; and Edward III, features several other Shakespeare plays in the top twenty.4 As I demonstrated in the previous chapter, the verbal evidence, whether rare, unique, common, short word sequences, or longer strings of words, based on a variety of weighting measures in large electronic corpora, converges to support the attribution of Arden of Faversham to Kyd, and also supports the theory that the same author was responsible for King Leir and Fair Em. On the other hand, as Mueller points out: ‘there is no good reason to assume that relations between Arden and Shakespeare are particularly dense’.5

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We can see therefore that objective data for shared locutions point away from Shakespeare’s hand in the play but fit the expectations for Kyd’s sole authorship. Jackson, however, proposes that there is a ‘disparity’ in the large number of verbal matches with Shakespeare in the middle portion of Arden as opposed to the those in the remainder of the play, which has suggested to him that Shakespeare was responsible for Scenes 4–​9 (2014: 65), or, more recently, that he wrote Scenes 4–​8 and ‘at least parts of scene 9’ (2020: 117 n. 3). However, Jackson’s observation is based on the distribution of parallels with plays of the period in M. L. Wine’s 1973 edition of Arden of Faversham. As I have shown elsewhere (Freebury-​Jones, 2016b: 54–​5), Jackson overlooks the fact that the overwhelming majority of non-​Shakespeare parallels recorded in Wine’s appendix are with Kyd’s plays, and that adjusting the raw figures according to these dramatists’ overall canon word counts shows that Kyd, on a quantitative basis, is the more likely author of both the ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘non-​Shakespeare’ portions of the play. Jackson concedes that Wine’s parallels were ‘haphazardly derived, largely from articles by proponents of Kyd’s authorship of the play, and untested for rarity’ (2017b: 127), but these criticisms also apply to the Shakespeare parallels, which were partly derived from Jackson’s 1963 thesis, in which he first argued for Shakespeare’s hand in some of the play’s central scenes. In his essay ‘New Research on the Dramatic Canon of Thomas Kyd’, Jackson aimed ‘to demonstrate the inadequacy of Vickers’s case for expanding the dramatic canon of Thomas Kyd’ (2008: 119). Jackson detected more unique three-​word sequences of the period 1580–​96 between Arden of Faversham and Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part Two and The Taming of the Shrew than Vickers had (at that time) discovered with Kyd’s plays. Vickers’s numerical totals were incomplete, being based on his preliminary searches using plagiarism software. The comprehensive results for unique trigrams in Collocations and N-​Grams empirically falsify the claim that in the ‘two-​horse race, Shakespeare beats Kyd’ (Jackson, 2017a: 49).6 My immediate focus here, however, is on the distribution of locutions in relation to the claim that Shakespeare authored the play’s central scenes: Jackson lists forty unique trigrams between Henry VI Part Two and scenes that he does not attribute to Shakespeare in Arden of Faversham. He lists only ten verbal matches between

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Shakespeare’s play and Scenes 4–​9 (eight matches if we restrict the window to Scenes 4–​8) of the domestic tragedy (2008: 110–​12). He also lists thirty-​eight matches between The Taming of the Shrew and scenes outside the middle portion of Arden of Faversham, with just six matches between Shakespeare’s comedy and the portions (four matches when restricted to Scenes 4–​8) he ascribes to Shakespeare (115–​16).7 However we adjust these figures, the overall pattern of unique matches does not support Jackson’s argument that Shakespeare’s contribution is concentrated in the middle portion of Arden of Faversham. The distribution of parallels suggests to me that Shakespeare borrowed verbal details from the play as a whole. In my investigations of unique n-​grams in Pervez Rizvi’s corpus of 527 plays shared between Scenes 4–​9 of the play and those of all authorship candidates, I discovered that multiple tests consistently attributed this portion of the play to Kyd. No fewer than 50 per cent of all unique ‘formal’ trigram matches shared between Arden of Faversham and The Spanish Tragedy co-​occur with these scenes, and 33 per cent of all unique ‘formal’ trigram matches with Cornelia (Freebury-​Jones, 2020b). Jackson has since modified the portion to Scenes 4–​8, which gives different results to those I provided and diminishes an already small sample. Rizvi suggests on his website that it would be ‘irresponsible to base any attributions’ of Scenes 4–​8 on unique n-​gram ‘data’ (that is, unique in Rizvi’s corpus of 527 plays), given that the results are very small and therefore easily skewed (Rizvi, 2017). Jackson examines the number of unique ‘formal’ trigram matches between Scenes 4–​8 and the plays of Shakespeare, Kyd, and Marlowe. He notes that Scenes 4–​8 of Arden of Faversham yield ‘32.075 per cent’ of the fifty-​three unique trigram matches with nine plays he has selected to represent the early Shakespeare canon, and argues that this ‘greatly exceeds chance expectation’ in ‘proportion to scene 4–​8’s length within the play as a whole’, whereas these scenes yield ‘6.897 per cent’ of the total matches with Kyd’s three acknowledged plays, which supposedly ‘falls very far short’ of expectations (Jackson, 2021a: 77). In ‘New Perspectives on Thomas Kyd’s Restored Canon’ (Freebury-​Jones, 2022), I applied Jackson’s technique in order to test scholarly assumptions concerning the distribution of unique

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‘formal’ trigrams in small stretches of text. I divided Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy into incremental segments consisting of 3,329 word-​tokens, identical in size to Scenes 4–​8 of Arden of Faversham, and calculated the percentage of Shakespeare and Kyd unique ‘formal’ trigram matches with each segment in relation to the total number of matches with the play as a whole. I discovered that, by Jackson’s reckoning, Shakespeare would be far more likely than Kyd to have authored the second segment of The Spanish Tragedy, which encompasses parts of 1.4 up to 2.4, given that almost 30 per cent of the sixty matches between Kyd’s play and the nine-​play early Shakespeare canon occur in this section, in comparison to none of the forty-​nine Kyd matches. Kyd’s percentage of 4 for the fifth segment of The Spanish Tragedy is also lower than for Scenes 4–​8 of Arden of Faversham. Jackson’s figures do not militate against Kyd’s sole authorship of Arden of Faversham any more than my data militate against his authorship of The Spanish Tragedy. I obtained similar results for Kyd’s other uncontested plays. For instance, in Soliman and Perseda, Kyd has percentages of 7 (or 6.818 per cent) in the first two respective segments. These percentages are marginally lower than Kyd’s percentage of unique trigram matches in Scenes 4–​8 of Arden. A fundamental weakness in much of the statistical work occurring in the field is that researchers often calculate a rate of occurrence in a play portion and assume that the data are homogeneous in play texts as a whole.8 My control tests reveal that unique ‘formal’ trigram matches are not homogeneously distributed in comparable segments of sole-​authored plays, and thus Jackson’s results cannot be used to support a case for Shakespeare’s, rather than Kyd’s, authorship of the central scenes of Arden of Faversham. Readers may have noticed that, taken as a whole, Jackson’s early Shakespeare canon shares more matches with The Spanish Tragedy (sixty) than it does with Arden of Faversham, suggesting that the domestic tragedy did not exert as considerable an influence on Shakespeare’s phraseology as did other Kyd plays. Authorship would appear to trump influence, in that the total of twenty-​nine unique ‘formal’ trigram matches between Kyd’s three attested plays and Arden of Faversham is far more impressive than Shakespeare’s total of fifty-​three, in proportion to the much larger corpus of nine Shakespeare plays Jackson selects.

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Jackson’s argument that ‘it seems almost certain that more than one playwright was involved’ in the composition of Arden of Faversham is, in any case, unconvincing (2014: 83). Elsewhere, utilising anti-​plagiarism software, I have listed almost forty verbal matches between Scene 8, the so-​called ‘Quarrel Scene’ between Mosby and Alice Arden, and scenes that Jackson does not attribute to Shakespeare in Arden of Faversham (Freebury-​Jones, 2016b). Such phrasal searches derive from the idea that an author is likely to repeat phrases and words at the forefront of his associative memory as he composes a single work. The brain stores recently learned, written, or articulated items phonologically, while the articulatory loop stores verbal information from the phonological store. It might be objected that such neurolinguistic explanations presuppose a particular account of the operations of memory at a time when the disciplines of print culture were relatively new and where those of an oral culture were not yet eliminated.9 However, John Sinclair’s observation that ‘a language user has available to him or her a large number of semi-​constructed phrases that constitute single choices’, which he referred to as the ‘principle of idiom’ (Sinclair, 1991: 110), is applicable to the language of early modern drama and dramatists. While it can sometimes be difficult to determine authorial individuality in a profession where shared idioms were common, we have seen that attribution scholars have long noted that playwrights had particular tendencies towards self-​ repetition. Modern corpus linguistic approaches enable us to discriminate authors’ habitual choices as phrasemakers, or their ‘phraseognomy’, as Sinclair termed it (Sinclair and Carter, 2004: 177), with a degree of precision not hitherto possible, and to differentiate rare or unique word combinations from commonplace idiomatic expressions. Martin Mueller notes that the ‘major finding’ when it comes to analysis of n-​gram links between and within early modern plays is that ‘authors are trumps’, with what he calls the ‘author effect’ being ‘much stronger than any other factor’ (Mueller, 2011). Indeed, some of the complex collocations of words and ideas in Arden of Faversham appear to belong to a single author’s mind, as we can see in Alice’s declarative ‘Ay, now I see, and too soon find it true, /​Which often hath been told me by my friends, /​That Mosby loves me not but for my wealth, /​Which, too incredulous, I ne’er believed’ (AF, 8.106–​9), which gives us

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an internal match (consisting of a ten-​word cluster) with the lines ‘Ungentle and unkind Alice, now I see /​ That which I ever feared and find too true’ (1.205–​6). These lines (by my argument) belong to Kyd’s mental repertoire and parallel The Spanish Tragedy: ‘But now I see that words’ (Sp. T., 3.1.17); ‘Now see I what I durst not then suspect’ (3.7.49); ‘Madame, tis true, and now I find it so’ (4.1.35). We also get a sense of a common author’s grammatical patterning in the following match with The Spanish Tragedy: ‘And thereon will I chiefly meditate’ (AF, 8.121) and ‘But whereon doost thou chiefly meditate? (Sp. T., 2.2.26). Several verbal matches reveal the symmetrical placement of key words in respective verse lines, such as ‘Then is there Michael and the painter too’ (AF, 8.29) and ‘Then is he gone? and is my sonne gone too?’ (Sp. T., 2.5.42), as well as collocations of both thought and language: ‘But what for that I may not trust you, Alice?’ (AF, 8.39) and ‘But to what end? I list not trust the Aire’ (Sp. T., 3.4.82). Rizvi’s discovery that tetragrams unfiltered for rarity ‘correctly attribute 82 out of 86 plays’ and that ‘unique 3-​grams and 4-​ grams’ are the ‘best authorial markers’ (Rizvi, 2017) puts Jackson’s observations on verbal links between the ‘Quarrel Scene’ and Shakespeare plays into perspective. Jackson notes that in his ‘inventory of rare phrases and collocations linking Arden’s Quarrel Scene … to other plays’, which ‘featured many links to Shakespeare’, there was ‘not a single shared tetragram among those “parallels” ’ (2017b: 130). The New Oxford Shakespeare team believes that shorter n-​ grams provide stronger evidence for common authorship, but Jackson has since acknowledged that tetragrams ‘can perform as well as’ trigrams ‘in correctly picking known authors. Occasionally they perform better’ (2019: 210). Rather than providing evidence for Shakespeare’s authorship of Scene 8 of Arden of Faversham, Jackson’s data suggest that the scene does not share especially impressive phraseological links with the Shakespeare canon. Readers who consult the appendix to this book will find that Scene 8 of Arden of Faversham shares eight tetragrams plus with the three uncontested Kyd plays that occur no more than five times in other plays of the period 1580–​1600. It also shares seven rare tetragrams plus with the two other newly attributed sole-​authored Kyd texts. Jackson’s searches for shared locutions of any length that

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occur ‘not more than five times in drama of the period 1580–​1600’ (2014: 219) did not identify any of these links. Although Scene 8 is often considered worthy of Shakespeare on subjective grounds, the quarrel between Erastus and Perseda in 2.1 of Soliman and Perseda is unquestionably similar in terms of both dramatic structure and the verbal swathe of the text. In this scene, the lovers quarrel when Perseda accuses Erastus of adultery. The carcanet she gave him has been discovered in the possession of Lucina. The confrontation between Erastus and Perseda was demonstrably at the forefront of the author’s associative memory when he came to write the lovers’ quarrel in Arden of Faversham. Perseda’s soliloquy contains imagistic parallels, such as ‘my moyst and cloud compacted braine’ (S&P, 2.1.88), in relation to ‘scalding sighes, like blasts of boisterous windes’ (2.1.90), which we can compare to Mosby’s assertion that ‘Continual trouble of my moody brain /​Feebles my body by excess of drink /​And nips me as the bitter northeast wind’ (AF, 8.3–​5). Erastus tells Perseda that ‘till I came whereas my love did dwell, /​My pleasure was but paine, my solace woe’ (S&P, 2.1.102–​3), while Mosby complains that ‘The way I seek to find, where pleasure dwells /​Is hedged behind me that I cannot back’ (AF, 8.20–​1). Perseda’s lines ‘Ah, how thine eyes can forge alluring lookes. /​ And faine deep oathes to wound poor silly maides’ (S&P, 2.1.117–​18) are inverted in Mosby’s sexist speech ‘Ah, how you women can insinuate /​And clear a trespass with your sweet-​ set tongue!’ (AF, 8.146–​7), and share a distinct pattern with Alice’s image: ‘To forge distressful looks to wound a breast’ (AF, 8.56). Jackson dismisses that unique match (2014: 96) on what Vickers calls ‘prejudicial aesthetic’ grounds (Vickers, 2019: 12), but the line in Arden of Faversham also evinces a parallel structure with Perseda’s interrogative: ‘What are thy lookes but like the Cockatrice /​That seekes to wound poore silly passengers?’ (S&P, 2.1.161–​2). Moreover, the placement of trisyllabic adjectives, ‘alluring’ and ‘distressful’, in the iambic scheme signifies not only Kyd’s lexicon but the very timbre of his verse. To consolidate this point, we might recall that in Chapter 1 I mentioned that Kyd is the only dramatist of the period to group the lexical choices ‘distress’ and ‘wound’ (Sp. T., 3.2.14). I have provided just a handful of examples here, but matches with Kyd that appear to be unconscious patterns are legion.10

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Some of the internal repetitions shared between scenes designated ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘non-​ Shakespeare’ by Jackson in Arden of Faversham could be explained by collaborating authors ‘writing dialogue for the same characters in the same settings in a shared plot’ (Craig and Kinney, 2009: 33). However, the majority of repetitions signify a single author’s verbal formulae. To instance just one example: Jackson’s hypothesised unknown co-​author is responsible for the line ‘To let thee know all that I have contrived’ (AF, 1.536), while Jackson proposes that Shakespeare was responsible for the line ‘To let thee know I am no coward, I’ (5.25). What we see here, by my argument, is a single author drawing upon his repertoire of ready-​made phrases. This four-​word unit (which also embraces the subject pronoun ‘I’) cannot be found in Shakespeare’s entire dramatic corpus. Kyd employs it as a formulaic line-​ending in Soliman and Perseda: ‘I have persevered to let thee know’ (S&P, 1.2.21). We find ‘parallelism of thought coupled with some verbal parallelism’, which provides stronger evidence for common authorship than ‘verbal parallelism’ alone (Byrne, 1932: 24), in the match between Franklin’s line ‘What dismal outcry calls me from my rest?’ (AF, 4.87) and Hieronimo’s famous cry: ‘What out-​cries pluck me from my naked bed’ (Sp. T., 2.5.1). Jackson ponders: ‘Why could not Shakespeare, as author of scene 4 of Arden, have recalled one of the best-​known lines in The Spanish Tragedy?’ (2017b: 133). However, the fact that the author of Arden of Faversham couples this line with Hieronimo’s later image of the ‘dismall out-​cry’ (4.4.109) suggests self-​repetition on Kyd’s part. This line is also matched in ‘O was it thou that call’dst me from my bed?’ (3.2.16), and in Soliman and Perseda: ‘What dismall Planets guides this fatall hower?’ (S&P, 1.5.78). The fact that the line is imbricate with Kyd’s idiosyncratic verbal formulations leads me to concur with H. D. Sykes, who pointed out that Kyd was most probably ‘producing, in the phraseology natural to him, just such an incident as he had already used in his earlier play’ (1919: 67). It is striking that, as we have also seen in the lovers’ quarrel in Scene 8, the portions of Arden of Faversham that Jackson attributes most securely to Shakespeare evince undeniable links to Kyd’s dramaturgy, long noted by scholars. Jackson states that ‘If, as seems almost certain, more than one author participated in Arden of Faversham, collaboration must

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have been close, with the co-​authors sharing the same grim vision, though one enlivened by humour’ (2014: 84). But the mixture of comedy and tragedy in Arden of Faversham is characteristic of Kyd’s drama. We cannot stress the ‘innovative nature of Kydian comedy’ too much, for, as Erne rightly points out, this aspect of Kyd’s drama represents ‘a radical generic experiment’ (2001: 85). Other ‘less compelling, but nevertheless of interest’ evidence that Jackson cites, such as the distribution of ‘tush’ and ‘ay, but’, may also be called into question. Jackson notes that the exclamation ‘tush’ is ‘confined’ to the ‘earliest and latest scenes’ of Arden of Faversham (2014: 78). He suggests it ‘can hardly be coincidental that’ this non-​Shakespearian feature (according to Jackson) occurs in scenes outside the middle portion of the play (79). However, this exclamation is not to be found in the second act of The Spanish Tragedy (there are four instances in total), while the two instances within Soliman and Perseda are confined to the play’s opening couple of acts. Should we suppose that Kyd did not write the remaining scenes in these plays? Jackson also argues that as ‘none of the nine instances’ of ‘ay, but’ features in the middle portion of Arden of Faversham, and given that Shakespeare ‘seldom used’ this colloquialism, the play appears to have been written by Shakespeare and another dramatist (79). All six instances of ‘ay, but’ in The Spanish Tragedy feature in the play’s second act, so, according to Jackson’s argument, the remaining acts could be considered Shakespearian. Moreover, on the basis of Jackson’s argument, Shakespeare could have written the third and fourth acts of Soliman and Perseda. Again, Jackson does not appear to have checked other texts to confirm that every author uses linguistic items uniformly throughout his plays. Similarly, Jackson’s claim that compound adjectives in Arden of Faversham are ‘more like the early plays of Shakespeare than like those of Marlowe, Greene, or Peele’ is symptomatic of the scant attention some modern attributionists have afforded Kyd’s candidature (2014: 76). Here Jackson is following Alfred Hart, who argued that Shakespeare had a higher rate of use than his contemporaries (1934: 232–​9). However, as Inna Koskenniemi observes: ‘In the works of Shakespeare’s immediate predecessors one finds the greatest variety of adjectival compounds’, and ‘The highest number of new compounds is found in Kyd’s Soliman and Perseda’ (1962: 31).

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Similarly, Alexander Maclaren Witherspoon pointed out that Kyd’s ‘translation of Garnier’s Cornélie’ is ‘brimful of them’ (1924: 171). Nor are Kyd’s compounds uninventive: Soliman and Perseda contains such examples as ‘pinky-​ey’d’ (S&P, 5.3.7), while Cornelia gives us ‘flaxen-​hair’d’ (Corn., 1.1.59) and ‘fire-​darting’ (5.1.179). The examples Jackson gives for Shakespeare’s authorship, none of which actually occur in the central scenes, such as ‘hollow-​ey’d’ (AF, 2.48) and ‘dry-​sucked’ (3.111), are hardly beyond Kyd’s capacity. In total, there are forty-​two compound adjectives in Arden of Faversham, which we can compare to the totals of thirty-​seven (by my count) in The Spanish Tragedy and fifty-​seven in Soliman and Perseda. The dramatist responsible for Arden of Faversham thus averages one compound adjective every 503 words, which is not as frequent as Soliman and Perseda’s one every 330 words. Jackson counts ten examples of compound adjectives formed by noun plus participle in Arden of Faversham, and argues that this is a Shakespeare marker (2014: 76–​7). However, this total is very close to the seven instances I find in Soliman and Perseda. Moreover, Kyd’s Soliman and Perseda contains ten compound adjectives formed with a present participle (another purported Shakespeare marker), which we can compare to Arden of Faversham’s total of nine. Jackson might have reconsidered his dismissal of Kyd’s candidacy for sole authorship had he examined compound formations in Soliman and Perseda. A particularly innovative aspect of Kyd’s dramatic style that Shakespeare seems to have followed is his liberal use of feminine endings. In his 2014 monograph, Jackson does not acknowledge Philip Timberlake’s study of Arden of Faversham. Given that Shakespeare and Kyd are the only known dramatists of the period with comparably high figures for feminine endings in their dramatic works, we might expect to see such variation in feminine endings between ‘Shakespeare’ portions and those of an older co-​author as identifying the presence of two dramatists. This is not the case: feminine endings are used liberally throughout Arden of Faversham. In my computations, the ‘Shakespeare’ scenes average 6.4 per cent feminine endings, while Jackson’s conjectured co-​author averages a strikingly similar percentage of 6.1, which would be too high for any known Elizabethan playwright except Kyd or Shakespeare.

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I showed earlier that Ants Oras’s figures for Arden of Faversham are different from Shakespeare’s at the beginning of his career. As an additional step, I have tested the putative ‘Shakespeare’ scenes against the remainder of the play in order to determine whether Oras’s method supports or contradicts the hypothesis that Arden of Faversham is co-​ authored (see Table 2.2). As in the case of feminine endings, the percentages for ‘Shakespeare’ scenes correspond to those found for the rest of the play, which we might expect if the play were authored solely by Kyd. Significantly, none of Shakespeare’s plays prior to The Merchant of Venice (1596), which has a percentage of 51.7, has as low a figure for pauses in the first half of the line as the scenes Jackson ascribes to Shakespeare in Arden of Faversham, whereas the percentage is very close to Cornelia’s 55.6. Moreover, no play in Shakespeare’s entire canon has as high a figure for pauses after even-​numbered syllables; no early Shakespeare play dips as low as the percentage found for position 7, whereas Soliman and Perseda’s percentage of 2.9 is close; and no Shakespeare play reaches as high a percentage as that found for position 4: all of the plays ascribed to Kyd are closer in this respect, except Cornelia. In short, the pause patterns do not support the attribution of these scenes to Shakespeare. Jackson has made admirable use of Oras’s methodology previously (2003: 64–​5), but it is regrettable that he did not examine the prosody of Arden of Faversham in his monograph. Table 2.2  Ants Oras figures for pause patterns in ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘non-​Shakespeare’ scenes of Arden of Faversham Play

First Even 1 half

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

Arden of Faversham ‘Shakespeare’

56.5 72.0 2.5 3.7 4.9 45.3 16.8 21.1 3.7 1.9 0

Arden of Faversham ‘non-​ Shakespeare’

52.3 65.9 3.2 5.6 6.4 37.0 18.9 21.7 5.2 1.7 0.2

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Jackson has criticised Marina Tarlinskaja’s 2008 paper ‘entitled “Kyd Canon”  ’, which was ‘posted on the London Forum for Authorship Attribution Studies website’ but ‘cannot currently be viewed’ (Jackson, 2014: 114). Jackson informs readers that Tarlinskaja ‘argued, on metrical grounds, in favour of Vickers’s expansion of the Kyd canon’ (114). He calls Tarlinskaja’s analysis ‘subjective’ (115), and refers readers to her monograph, which allegedly reveals that ‘certain scenes of Arden, including 4–​8, share metrical features with early Shakespeare’ (116). In her book, Tarlinskaja states that Scene 9 is ‘definitely not by Shakespeare’, for it has a dip on position 8, whereas ‘early Shakespeare preferred a “dip” on 6’ (Tarlinskaja, 2014: 106). In contrast to her original attribution to Kyd, Tarlinskaja now suggests that the ‘stress profile’ of Scene 8, with its ‘deep “dip” on syllable 6’, points to Shakespeare (106). However, earlier in the monograph Tarlinskaja points out that Kyd ‘consolidated the stress “dip” on position 6’ in Elizabethan drama (67). Tarlinskaja notes that ‘Scenes 4–​8 contain a substantial “dip” on syllable 6’, which ‘could indicate a typical early Elizabethan text’ or ‘early Shakespeare, and Kyd’ (109). The dip on position 6 in these scenes therefore provides no evidence for an attribution to Shakespeare and/​or deattribution to Kyd. In fact, Tarlinskaja’s figure of 71.8 for these scenes accords with The Spanish Tragedy’s 69.2, Soliman and Perseda’s 68.6, and Cornelia’s (minus Chorus) 70.4. I should also mention that this figure corresponds to King Leir’s 69.2 and Fair Em’s 70.6. According to Tarlinskaja’s data, Kyd prefers a dip on position 6 in The Spanish Tragedy and Soliman and Perseda, while the later stage plays assigned to him by Vickers contain almost equal stressing on positions 6 and 8; King Leir has a figure of 69.8 for the syllabic position 8, and Fair Em a figure of 69.6 (Tarlinskaja, 2014: Table B.1). Arden of Faversham has an almost equal percentage of missing stresses on positions 6 (73.7) and 8 (74.5) overall, just like King Leir and Fair Em, which are closest to the domestic tragedy in terms of chronology, and which Tarlinskaja accepts as Kyd’s in her monograph (93, 105). Tarlinskaja’s figures for the play per scene show that the ‘non-​Shakespearian’ Scenes 12 and 13 also feature a dip on 6, while Scenes 15–​18 and the Epilogue feature a substantial dip on 6, just like Scenes 4–​8. Given that there are signs of what Tarlinskaja calls a ‘conscious versification experiment’ in Kyd’s plays and those of his room-​mate Marlowe –​with Dido, Queen of Carthage (1588) and Edward II, for instance, being ‘quite different

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from Tamburlaine, The Jew of Malta, and Doctor Faustus’ (74) in terms of stressing –​the attribution of play portions with alternating stresses on syllables 6 and 8 to different playwrights is deeply problematic, as Tarlinskaja’s figures for Robert Greene’s attested plays also show (17). Thus, disregarding results for the other newly attributed Kyd plays, Tarlinskaja’s data are compatible with the theory that Arden of Faversham was written solely by Kyd.11 Tarlinskaja also makes an ‘argument for Shakespearian authorship’ on the basis that ‘Run-​on lines prevail’ in Scenes 4–​8 (110). If we consult Tarlinskaja’s ‘Appendix B’, we find that she records an average of 10.8 run-​on lines in these scenes. She also records an average of 9.5 run-​on lines in The Spanish Tragedy, 9.9 in Soliman and Perseda, and 13.6 in Cornelia.12 We might ask ourselves: how does the figure of 10.8, which is in fact lower than Kyd’s Cornelia, suggest Shakespeare’s authorship rather than Kyd’s? This is symptomatic of the dubious ways in which modern scholars have interpreted data to support the case for Shakespeare’s part ­authorship.13 Tarlinskaja’s evidence cannot be justifiably interpreted as lending support to Jackson’s argument. Few scholars have made such profound contributions to authorship attribution studies as MacDonald P. Jackson, but though his decades-​ long work on Arden of Faversham has broadened our knowledge of that play considerably, I cannot agree with his ascription of its central scenes to Shakespeare. On the basis of phraseology, vocabulary, prosody, and versification habits, there is no compelling evidence for Arden of Faversham’s being a co-​authored play, nor for Shakespeare’s hand in the verbal fabric of the text. The stylistic unity of Arden of Faversham points to a single author, and that author is Kyd.

Shakespeare’s verbal debts to Kyd’s contested plays Jackson acknowledges that ‘no Shakespeare play’ seems to have been ‘written before Arden of Faversham’ (2014: 23). Nonetheless, he considers it unlikely that Shakespeare ‘imbibed’ another ‘playwright’s words through hearing them’ during performance (122). He queries: ‘Even if’ Shakespeare ‘had been an actor in Arden of Faversham, why should it be so much more influential than all the other plays in which he acted?’ (24). In the remainder of this chapter, I wish to test further whether Arden of Faversham really exerted a

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greater influence over Shakespeare’s dramatic language than other plays that have been attributed to Kyd. While pursuing this line of enquiry, we should remember that the undated Quarto of Soliman and Perseda is assumed to have been printed not long after it was entered in the Stationers’ Register in 1592, and acknowledge that although King Leir was entered in the Stationers’ Register in 1594, no copy of it seems to have been printed until over a decade later. Mueller contends that King Leir ‘belongs to a very small set of stories to which Shakespeare returned again and again throughout his career’, and that ‘[w]‌ithout The True Chronicle Historie we would not have King Lear or As You Like It, while Richard III, The Merchant of Venice, and Hamlet would be quite different plays. From such a perspective The True Chronicle Historie emerges as a play with a remarkably consequential career’ (1994: 195). I mentioned earlier that Philip Henslowe’s records show that the play was performed in April 1594 at the Rose theatre, by the ‘Quenes men & my lord of Susexe to geather’ (Foakes, 2002: 21). Richard Knowles argues that ‘there being no clear evidence that Shakespeare ever was a Queen’s Man, and some reason to think otherwise, there is accordingly no reason to think that he ever acted in Leir’ (2002: 18). However, plays frequently passed into the repertoires of different companies, and Shakespeare and Peele’s Titus Andronicus is known to have been performed by Pembroke’s Men, Derby’s Men, and Sussex’s Men: as stated on the title page of the First Quarto. I propose that Sussex’s Men acquired the play from Pembroke’s,14 and were therefore able to perform King Leir in conjunction with the Queen’s Men, just as they were ‘able to play “Titus & ondronicus” ’ when Pembroke’s Men collapsed and the play ‘became temporarily derelict’ (Melchiori, 1998: 7). David George has suggested that ‘Sussex’s Men were willing’ to ‘help Pembroke’s all they could’ in 1594, and ‘probably Pembroke’s Men were trying to raise capital for one more try at independent acting’ by selling some of their plays (1981: 323). Whether Shakespeare had acted in King Leir or not, Knowles’s argument that ‘the evidence for Leir’s influence on Shakespeare’s early plays is small at best and illusory at worst’ (2002: 27) is more than countered by Mueller’s data. Returning to Mueller’s automated results in his spreadsheet ‘SHCSharedTetragramsPlus’, we discover that Shakespeare shares

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a large number of unique word sequences with the old play, which suggests that King Leir exerted a considerable influence over Shakespeare’s dramatic language. There are ten unique tetragrams plus that King Leir shares with Henry VI Part Three; eight with Richard III; eight with King John; eight with Henry IV Part One (1597); and seven with Much Ado about Nothing (1598). If we focus on unique n-​grams shared between the old play and Shakespeare’s Richard III, we find that some of these parallels can be found in lines delivered by the (would-​be) murderous Messenger. He tells Leir and Perillus: ‘Feare nothing, man, thou art but in a dreame, /​And thou shalt never wake untill doomes day’ (KL, 19.1616–​17). In Richard III, the Second Murderer prepares to kill Clarence. He reassures his companion: ‘Why, he shall never wake until the great judgement day’ (R3, 1.4.100). There appears to be some substance in Meredith Skura’s argument that King Leir served as a ‘source for the murder of Clarence’ (1993: 285). The characters and plot situations could hardly be more alike. Other recurring n-​grams, however, are contextually dissimilar. The Messenger tells Ragan: ‘I weigh no more the murdring of a man, /​ Then I respect the cracking of a Flea’ (KL, 15.1214–​15). Richard tells Prince Edward: ‘Nor more can you distinguish of a man /​Than of his outward show’ (R3, 3.1.9–​10). The only similarity here, apart from the placement of this four-​word unit in the verse lines, is that both characters are villains, although we might note too that this matching phrase embraces the two-​ word sequence ‘no/​r more’. Other word sequences are also used in different contexts. The remorseful Leir tells Perillus: It may be, if I should to her repayre, She would be kinder, and intreat me fayre. (KL, 10.919–​20)

Shakespeare draws on Kyd’s phraseology for the moment when Richard threatens Queen Elizabeth: Either be patient and entreat me fair, Or with the clamorous report of war Thus will I drown your exclamations. (R3, 4.4.152–​4)

Some of these n-​grams give us a possible insight into Shakespeare’s associative memory, while other unique sequences suggest that Shakespeare was so familiar with the verbal fabric of the play that he could retrieve phrases irrespective of context. As is the case with

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Kyd’s Soliman and Perseda, the parallels are not limited to a single character’s lines or cue-​lines. They suggest an intimate familiarity with the play as a whole. John Jones argues that a study of ‘so-​ called reported texts confirms one’s common sense expectation that having been on-​ stage fortifies the memory of the reporter. (An actor’s recall of his own lines is obviously better again)’ (1995: 43). However, it would be erroneous to group Shakespeare with actor-​ reporters when investigating memorial repetitions. Shakespeare was not an actor-​ reporter attempting to reconstruct whole scenes or speeches. If he had indeed performed in Soliman and Perseda and/​or King Leir, he is likely to have had a ‘general memory for the whole performance’ (Jolly, 2014: 106) as an actor-​turned-​dramatist, which would have enabled him to repeat phrases both consciously and unconsciously. Moreover, as Baldwin suggested, ‘As the play was being planned, constructed, and fitted, he would at least hear, and would doubtless participate in, the discussions which arose between author and actors’ (1959: 55). If Shakespeare had been able to borrow phrases from The Spanish Tragedy, Soliman and Perseda, and King Leir through having read them, he must have somehow acquired copies of these plays prior to publication. It seems more likely that such repetitions are the products of Shakespeare’s aural memory, and that he had either seen the plays during performance or had played in them. In 1933, Joseph Quincy Adams argued that the publication of the 1605 Quarto of the older King Leir was a deliberate attempt to take advantage of Shakespeare’s King Lear. He noted that the title under which the old play was entered in the Stationers’ Register, in 1605, was The Tragicall historie of Kinge Leir, whereas the play was really a comedy with a very happy ending, and no writer handling the Lear story had ever given it a tragic conclusion until Shakespeare put on the boards his entirely altered version. (1933: 136)

The entry of Shakespeare’s tragedy in the Stationers’ Register on 26 November 1607 appears to make an especial effort to avoid confusion with the old play: ‘Master William Shakespeare his historye of Kinge Lear as yt was played before the kinges majestie at Whitehall’ (Bullough, 1973: 269). W. W. Greg asserted that ‘I do not think

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there can be any doubt that the prominence given to the author’s name on the title-​page’ was ‘due to a desire to distinguish the piece as clearly as possible from its predecessor’ (1940: 381). Greg also suggested that the King Leir ‘manuscript which Stafford acquired and printed in 1605’ had ‘presumably remained for the eleven intervening years in the hands of stationers’ (385). Nevertheless, Shakespeare recalls a sufficient number of the play’s details to suggest that he either saw or acted in it, and ‘it would seem that as’ Shakespeare ‘wrote, ideas, phrases, cadences from the old play still floated in his memory below the level of conscious thought’ (397). For example, the Messenger in the old play tells the audience that my sweet Queene will’d me for to shew This letter to them, ere I did the deed (KL, 19.1471–​2)

while Kent, also serving as an envoy, tells the King:        My Lord, when at their home I did commend your highness’ letters to them, Ere I was risen from the place that showed My duty kneeling, came there a reeking post. (Lr, 2.2.203–​6)

Here we see a somewhat tenuous contextual correlation triggering the same combination of words. In the old play, Perillus tells the King ‘I had ynough, my Lord, and having that, /​What should you need to give me any more?’ (KL, 10.890–​1), while Regan spites Shakespeare’s Lear: ‘I dare avouch it, sir. What, fifty followers? /​Is it not well? What should you need of more?’ (Lr, 2.2.410–​11). The character relationships in these examples are markedly different, for Perillus loves Leir and is content with his station in life, while Regan is a schemer who denies Lear his (now) fifty followers. Such verbal echoes are perhaps, as Skura puts it, ‘accidental, like a tune that you hear and find yourself helplessly singing over and over’ (2010: 316). Examined in context, Shakespeare’s verbal borrowings in King Lear are hardly more striking than those contained in his early works, such as Henry VI Part Three and Richard III. I now return to Arden of Faversham to show that the verbal evidence for Shakespeare’s part authorship seems especially weak in light of his relationship with plays that scholarly consensus assigns to Kyd, as well as the contested text, King Leir. Cairncross argued that Arden of Faversham belonged to the repertory of Pembroke’s

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Men, for whom Shakespeare perhaps began his career as an actor-​ dramatist (1960). Nonetheless, Jackson argues that Shakespeare parallels contained in the middle portion of Arden of Faversham must be authorial, for Shakespeare ‘could not have played a role in both’ Scene 6 and Scene 8 of the play (2014: 122). However, as in the cases of Soliman and Perseda and King Leir, Shakespeare’s verbal borrowings from plays attributed to Kyd are not confined to scenes in which he may have acted. In fact, Mueller’s data strongly suggest that Shakespeare was no more influenced by Arden of Faversham than he was by other plays in the ‘enlarged’ Kyd canon. I reproduce Mueller’s results for unique tetragrams in Table 2.3. The plays with the most pervasive influence on Shakespeare’s dramatic language in this table are The Spanish Tragedy and King Leir, not Arden of Faversham. It seems fair to say that if we were not confident in Kyd’s authorship of The Spanish Tragedy and Soliman Table 2.3  Martin Mueller results for unique tetragrams plus, shared between Shakespeare plays and Kyd’s ‘enlarged’ canon Play

The Spanish Soliman and King Leir Arden of Tragedy Perseda Faversham

Henry VI Part Three

10

Titus Andronicus

7

Richard III

7

The Two Gentlemen of Verona

7

9

10 8

8

9

Henry IV Part One

8

King John

8

The Merchant of Venice

7

Much Ado about Nothing

7

Troilus and Cressida

7

Cymbeline

7

Henry VIII

7

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and Perseda, or if we were to collect parallels with King Leir and throw in some impressionistic evaluations of certain passages, along with some misleading data drawn from assumptions about the distribution of linguistic items, it would not be too difficult to provide a superficially impressive case for Shakespeare’s part authorship of these texts. The Shakespeare play with the most matches with Arden of Faversham, according to Mueller’s document, is Richard III, which William Wells regarded as ‘a study in Kydian methods’ (1940: 243). These plays share eight unique n-​grams in total; six of these n-​grams occur in scenes that Jackson does not ascribe to Shakespeare. The evidence therefore supports the theory that Shakespeare appropriated phrases from a play that, like Soliman and Perseda and King Leir, seems to have antedated his whole corpus. The next Shakespeare play with the most unique links with Arden of Faversham, according to Mueller’s corpus, is The Merchant of Venice, with seven matches in total. Only one of these n-​ grams features in a scene Jackson assigns to Shakespeare. The third and final Shakespeare play with a high number of unique matches in Mueller’s corpus is Troilus and Cressida (1602), which also shares seven n-​grams of four or more words, four of which can be found in scenes that Jackson does not attribute to Shakespeare. Mueller’s data also conflict with Jackson’s argument that the accepted Kyd plays are like each other while ‘the putatively Kydian plays’ are not (Jackson, 2014: 114). When Arden of Faversham is tested against over 500 plays for unique n-​grams of four or more words, the play with the most unique matches is Kyd’s Soliman and Perseda, with a total of eighteen. Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and Soliman and Perseda share eight unique n-​grams of four or more words, which corroborates Mueller’s observation that ‘on average plays by the same author share five dislegomena, and the median is four. Roughly speaking, plays by the same author are likely to share twice as many dislegomena as plays by different authors’ (Mueller, 2014). Similarly, Mueller’s document reveals that there are eight unique n-​grams of four or more words shared between King Leir and Kyd’s Soliman and Perseda, which is the same total we find for Kyd’s accepted tragedies. Arden of Faversham and King Leir share eleven unique n-​grams, which also provides compelling evidence for common authorship.

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If we examine some of the n-​grams shared between Richard III and Arden of Faversham, we find that the majority of these matching phrasal structures occur in the opening scene of the play, which Jackson assigns to an unknown co-​author. Thomas Arden speaks of ‘the Lord Clifford, he that loves not me’ (AF, 1.32), while Queen Elizabeth complains of Richard Gloucester, ‘A man that loves not me –​nor none of you’ (R3, 1.3.13). Later in the opening scene of Arden of Faversham, Alice speaks of Mosby, her lover: ‘I know he loves me well but dares not come’ (AF, 1.133). Hastings repeats this verbal formulation in the following lines: ‘I thank his grace; I know he loves me well. /​ But for his purpose in the coronation’ (R3, 3.4.14–​15). Shakespeare is unlikely to have repeated this striking heptagram (seven-​word sequence) without having at least seen Arden of Faversham during theatrical performance. In Scene 14, which Jackson considers to be ‘one of the least Shakespearian’ scenes in the play (2014: 72), we find the unique four-​word unit, ‘me he was murdered’. Arden’s corpse has been discovered behind the Abbey. Franklin tells the Mayor ‘I fear me he was murdered in this house’ (AF, 14.392). In Shakespeare’s play, Richard asks York ‘what should you fear?’ (R3, 3.1.143), his interrogative embracing the verb ‘fear’. York proceeds to speak of his uncle’s ghost, residing in the Tower of London: ‘My grannam told me he was murdered there’ (3.1.145). Both Alice and Richard have committed murder and are confronted by these characters; Richard fears that York has been instructed by his mother. These parallel phrases thus serve a similar purpose. In Scene 5 of Arden of Faversham, which Jackson ascribes to Shakespeare, Franklin asks Michael ‘Is he himself already in his bed?’ (AF, 5.56), to which Michael says of Arden: ‘He is and fain would have the light away’ (5.57). Michael is involved in the plot to murder Arden. Richard asks of his brother ‘What, is he in his bed?’, and Hastings responds ‘He is’ (R3, 1.1.143). Richard, of course, wants the King dead so that he can mount the throne. This match could have been stimulated by Shakespeare’s recollection of the plot against Arden’s life. According to Mueller’s data, the Shakespeare matches with Arden of Faversham are no different from those with other plays in the ‘enlarged’ Kyd canon, in terms of quantity, quality, and patterns of distribution. Nevertheless, these parallel phrases give us a fascinating insight into the nature of Shakespearian

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borrowing. Many of these n-​grams occur in scenes during which Franklin is on stage but, like the matches with Soliman and Perseda and King Leir, we cannot speculate as to which role Shakespeare took (if indeed he had acted in the play), for the co-​occurrence of unique n-​grams suggests a familiarity with the text as a whole. Arden of Faversham has a long history of being attributed solely to Kyd. Nonetheless, Jackson’s study of matching phrases between Shakespeare and Arden of Faversham does not fully acknowledge the relationship between Shakespeare’s accepted plays and Kyd’s dramatic language. I suggest that future studies should take an authorial candidate’s patterns of influence into account and place more emphasis on the chronology of plays. Attribution scholars wishing to assign parts of plays to Shakespeare, or indeed any other authorial candidate, should therefore examine the quantity, distribution, and nature of verbal parallels between that dramatist’s acknowledged works and the plays of rival claimants. It seems not too immodest to propose that the ‘enlarged’ sole-​authored Kyd canon can now be established beyond reasonable doubt.

Notes 1 All references to Shakespeare’s works in this book are to Jowett et al. (2005). 2 All of Mueller’s data discussed in this book are available on my website (Freebury-​Jones, 2017a). 3 For further critiques of Jackson’s method see Vickers (2019) and Hulse (2021). 4 Few modern scholars would be inclined to attribute Arden of Faversham solely to Shakespeare. Duncan Salkeld recognises that ‘ “pragmatic” or “hesitation” markers (common expressions like mild exclamations) are used so consistently in Arden of Faversham that they point to the play as having a single author’ (email correspondence, 4 October 2021). But the whole weight of internal evidence surveyed in this book renders the hypothesis of Shakespeare’s sole authorship, as opposed to Kyd’s, statistically untenable. 5 Email correspondence (9 January 2014). 6 For further discussion see Darren Freebury-​Jones, ‘Kyd, Shakespeare, and Arden of Faversham: Rerunning a Two-​Horse Race’, American Notes and Queries (forthcoming).

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7 Jackson notes eleven additional phrases that are ‘shared only with other early Shakespeare plays’ (2008: 112). But two of these phrases occur in scenes that Vickers attributes to Kyd in Henry VI Part One and Edward III, and one is with 1.2 of Henry VI Part One. No modern attributionist assigns any of the corresponding passages to Shakespeare. 8 See Rizvi (2020b: 32–​3). 9 For further discussion on orality and print culture in the early modern period see Petersen (2010) and Richards (2019). 10 Jackson’s LION method highlights just eight rare word combinations between this scene and Kyd’s three accepted plays. The true count is closer to seventy (Vickers, 2019). 11 I should like to thank Tarlinskaja for sending me her figures for the play per scene in email correspondence (21 March 2016). 12 King Leir has a percentage of 9.3 and Fair Em 14.1 for run-​on lines. 13 All of the computational stylistic tests that supposedly favour Shakespeare’s authorship of passages of Arden of Faversham rather than Kyd’s have been subjected to comprehensive refutations. Readers should consult Auerbach (2018, 2020a, b); Barber (2021); Freebury-​ Jones (2018, 2019b); Rizvi (2018, 2020b, 2021); Rudman (2019); Vickers (2018a). 14 Kyd seems to have begun his playwriting career for the Queen’s Men’s company. However, the dramatist tells us in an extant letter to Sir John Puckering that he was ‘in the service of a Lord (which would not necessarily exclude him from another enterprise) by 1587–​ 8’ (Freeman, 1967: 13–​24, 181). Kyd’s patron was probably Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, although Erne advances an argument for Henry Herbert, Earl of Pembroke (Erne, 2001: 227–​30).

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3 Kyd’s influence on early Shakespeare

At this point, readers will, I hope, be persuaded that the quantitative evidence explored in the previous pages makes a strong case for Shakespeare’s considerable verbal indebtedness to plays in an ‘enlarged’ Kyd canon. Nonetheless, we will return to data drawn from Pervez Rizvi’s electronic corpus of plays dated between 1552 and 1657, Collocations and N-​Grams (Rizvi, 2017), in order to provide the most comprehensive and systematic account of the influence of Kyd’s phraseology on Shakespeare’s early dramatic efforts ever conducted. We can achieve this by consulting Rizvi’s summary spreadsheets for play pairs involving each of Kyd’s plays, ranked according to all unique ‘maximal’ n-​gram matches. Focusing on the top twenty pairings in The Spanish Tragedy spreadsheet, we discover that Richard III and Shakespeare’s contributions to Titus Andronicus make that list. If we turn to the spreadsheets listing ‘maximal’ matches, we find that Shakespeare was evidently struck by the moment when Pedringano, having been set up by Lorenzo, is caught by the Watch in Kyd’s play, for he duplicated the line ‘To bring the murdered body with us too’ (Sp. T., 3.3.45) in the similar moment when Aaron frames Titus’s sons Martius and Quintus for the murder of Bassianus: ‘Some bring the murdered body’ (Tit., 2.3.300). In Richard III, Shakespeare recalled Kyd’s phraseology in the line ‘Endeavour you to winne your daughters thought’ (Sp. T., 2.3.49) for the moment when Richard is confronted by Queen Elizabeth and the Duchess of York: ‘To win your daughter’ (R3, 4.4.271). He also recalled the declarative ‘all this will come to naught’ (Sp. T., 2.3.50) when he composed the speech delivered by a Scrivener, a character who probably shared Kyd’s occupation: ‘Bad is the world, and all will come to nought’ (R3, 3.6.13).

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It is striking that these unique phrases occur in the space of two lines in Kyd’s play, suggesting that Shakespeare was intimately familiar with the verbal details of 2.3 of The Spanish Tragedy. In the Soliman and Perseda spreadsheet, no fewer than one-​fifth of the top twenty plays are by Shakespeare: The Comedy of Errors (1593), The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Henry V, and Troilus and Cressida. Shakespeare recalled Erastus’s lines ‘By game, or change, by one devise or other: /​ The rest Ile tell you’ (S&P, 2.1.209–​10) when, in The Comedy of Errors, Antipholus of Syracuse says ‘by some device or other /​ The villain is o’er-​raught’ (Err. 1.2.95–​6). Shakespeare remembered a particularly striking turn of words in Perseda’s admonition of Erastus ‘If I were so disgratious in thine eye’ (S&P, 2.1.143) when he composed Richard’s contextually dissimilar confrontation with the Duchess of York in Richard III: ‘If I be so disgracious in your eye’ (R3, 4.4.177). Shakespeare imbibes Kyd’s phraseology but ensures that Richard uses the formal possessive pronoun ‘your’, rather than Kyd’s informal archaism. As we have seen with the earlier match from The Spanish Tragedy, Kyd’s language appears to have been at the forefront of Shakespeare’s mind when he wrote this scene. It is interesting that only one Shakespeare play features in the top twenty for Cornelia: Julius Caesar (1599), which deals with similar subject matter. As Kyd’s translation was written to be read, rather than performed, this would support the theory that Shakespeare’s early borrowings from other Kyd plays derive from aural memory of first-​hand experience in the theatre. Turning to the newly attributed plays, we find that King John and King Lear feature in the top twenty for King Leir. There can no longer be any doubt that Shakespeare borrowed from the language of this play long before it was available in print: he lifted Perillus’s declarative ‘The King hath dispossest himself of all’ (KL, 8.744) for Salisbury’s speech in King John: ‘The King hath dispossessed himself of us’ (Jn, 4.3.23). It is fascinating to see the ways in which some of Shakespeare’s reminiscences of Kyd’s language can be traced from play to play. In King John he borrowed from Leir’s desperate line ‘And think me but the shaddow of my selfe’ (KL, 14.1111) for Louis the Dauphin’s amorous speech ‘The shadow of myself formed in her eye’ (Jn, 2.1.499). Here Shakespeare employed the phraseology in a very different context, but it must have endured in his long-​term memory, for he repeated the sentiment of Leir’s line

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in the exchange between Lear and the Fool in 1.4 of King Lear. Lear asks ‘Who is it that can tell me who I am?’ (Lr, 1.4.212), to which the Fool responds: ‘Lear’s shadow’ (1.4.213). In the Fair Em spreadsheet, Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew makes the top twenty. Matching n-​grams between these plays include Valingford’s speech ‘Father miller, such is my entire affection to your daughter’ (FE, 15.9–​10), which Shakespeare echoes in Tranio’s lines ‘Signor Hortensio, I have often heard /​Of your entire affection to Bianca’ (Shr., 4.1.22–​3). We saw earlier that, unlike all of the plays attributed to Kyd, not a single Shakespeare play cracks the top twenty for the Arden of Faversham spreadsheet; the objective data prove that that play does not have nearly as much linguistic commonality with Shakespeare’s early works as do other Kyd plays. There can be little doubt, however, that Shakespeare was familiar with Arden of Faversham, as correspondences identified by scholars such as MacDonald P. Jackson attest (2014: 9–​39). Looking at some instances in the ‘Quarrel Scene’, Shakespeare was evidently struck by the line ‘That showed my heart a raven for a dove’ (AF, 8.97), which he recycled in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595): ‘Who will not change a raven for a dove?’ (MND, 2.2.120). Shakespeare had earlier associated a ‘raven’ with a ‘dove’ in Henry VI Part Two, ‘Seems he a dove? His feathers are but borrowed, /​For he’s disposed as the hateful raven. /​Is he a lamb?’ (2H6, 3.1.75–​7), and he would rework the image in the compound adjective ‘dove-​feathered raven, wolvish-​ravening lamb’ (Rom., 3.3.76) in Romeo and Juliet (1595). In every instance except the direct, contiguous borrowing in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare collocates this metaphor with the image of a ‘lamb’, a distinctive and innovative union that is not found in Arden of Faversham. All of these Shakespeare plays except perhaps Henry VI Part Two were written when Arden of Faversham was available in print. The image is nevertheless memorable enough to have stayed with Shakespeare had he heard it in rehearsal or performance, although the Midsummer Night’s Dream instance could indicate reading knowledge. Another phrase Shakespeare recalled from this scene is Alice’s declarative ‘And made me sland’rous to all my kin’ (AF, 8.75), which he recycled in Henry VI Part Three: ‘Had he been slaughter-​man to all my kin’ (3H6, 1.6.170). The phraseology in Henry VI Part Three is demonstrably lifted from Kyd: later in Arden of Faversham, Shakebag

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argues that the ‘booties I have took’ (AF, 9.15) would ‘mount to a greater sum of money /​Than either thou or all thy kin are worth’ (9.17–​18), which provides a unique collocation of thought and language with Soliman and Perseda: ‘It was worth more then thou and all thy kin are worth’ (S&P, 1.4.74). Some of the most striking repetitions between the play and Shakespeare occur in scenes that no modern attribution scholar associates with him, such as Shakebag’s line ‘Zounds, I was ne’er so toiled in all my life’ (AF, 12.53), which persisted in Shakespeare’s memory when he came to write the Bastard’s speech in King John several years later: ‘Zounds! I was never so bethumped with words’ (Jn, 2.1.467). Rizvi’s data enable us to recognise these correspondences as evidence of Kyd’s deep, fibrous influence on Shakespeare’s dramatic language. Shakespeare integrates Kyd’s phraseology into the substance of his own language, but reading shared locutions according to dramatic situation and surrounding verbal texture enables us to ascertain different habits of mind. Searching the spreadsheets for Kyd’s plays gives every other dramatist of the period an opportunity to share large numbers of n-​grams with his corpus; users of Rizvi’s database might note that Marlowe’s plays consistently feature in the top twenty for both attested and newly attributed Kyd plays with the exceptions of Fair Em and Cornelia, the latter written after Marlowe’s death. Rizvi observes on his website that, according to n-​gram data, ‘Kyd and Marlowe appear to be almost interchangeable. They were room-​ mates, and Kyd was tortured because some of Marlowe’s words were mistakenly thought to be his’ (Rizvi, 2017). Such patterns of borrowing demonstrate that when investigating any play or play portion suspected to be Kyd’s, we should expect to find strong links with his fellow lodger Marlowe’s language, a subject we will return to in the next chapter. The data, combined with Martin Wiggins’s sound chronology, establish that we should also expect to find strong links between Kyd’s works and Shakespeare’s dramas. Rizvi suggests that Kyd’s influence on ‘the young Shakespeare … faded within a few years of Kyd’s death’, but the evidence for play pairs sharing large numbers of ‘maximal’ n-​grams with Kyd’s texts reveals a fairly consistent pattern of borrowing throughout the 1590s. Kyd’s phraseological influence on Shakespeare persisted for around a decade, demonstrating that his language had a profound impact

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on Shakespeare’s compositions. Shakespeare even returned to Kyd’s plays when composing some of his seventeenth-​ century works. I now wish to explore the ways in which Shakespeare elaborated on Kyd’s dramatic devices in his early plays while simultaneously recycling aspects of Kyd’s idiom.

Vengeful women In an essay titled ‘Kyd’s Authorship of King Leir’, Brian Vickers identifies ‘three features that recur’ in Kyd’s plays: ‘an intrigue plot; the use of comedy in a context involving imminent death; and a vengeful woman, ready for violent action in her own interest’ (2018b: 438). It is this last element of Kyd’s dramaturgy that I focus on here, in relation to the dramatist’s influence on Shakespeare’s early works and, specifically, Shakespeare’s characterisation of Margaret of Anjou. There are several figures that might have provided templates for early modern dramatists, such as Clytemnestra in Aeschylus’s Theban plays and the women who engage in plots of revenge in Seneca’s dramas, but Vickers points out that an Elizabethan playgoing audience would have found it ‘startling to learn that they would shortly see a woman killing a man in revenge’ (448). This occurs in The Spanish Tragedy when Bel-​imperia, in the role of Perseda, exacts revenge against Horatio’s murderers in the play-​within-​a-​play. Indeed, women were more likely to be portrayed as victims in plays of the period, rather than agents. Earlier in the play, however, Bel-​imperia employs the rhetorical device pysma (a torrent of interrogatives) when she castigates Hieronimo for not taking action against his son’s murderers: Is this the love thou bearst Horatio? Is this the kindnes that thou counterfeits? Are these the fruits of thine incessant teares? Hieronimo, are these thy passions? Thy protestations, and thy deepe lamentes, That thou wert wont to wearie men withal? O unkind father, O deceitfull world, With what excuses canst thou shew thy selfe, With what dishonour and the hate of men, From this dishonour and the hate of men?

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Shakespeare’s tutor Thus to neglect the losse and life of him, Whom both my letters and thine own beliefe Assures thee to be causeles slaughtered. (Sp. T., 4.1.1–​13)

Kyd almost invariably reserves the repetition of the anaphoric formulation ‘Is this the’ for female characters. We find the same authorial thought process when Alice reprimands Mosby for wavering from his motive of murdering her husband in Arden of Faversham: ‘Is this the end of all thy solemn oaths? /​Is this the fruit thy reconcilement buds?’ (AF, 1.185–​6). Vickers notes that, like Bel-​imperia, Gonorill and Ragan in King Leir are ‘bothered by the cultural exclusion of women from the male domain of violence’ (450). He elaborates that Kyd, just as he does in his acknowledged plays, ‘emphasises from the outset women’s potential for violence in Gonorill and Ragan’s angry jealousy of Cordella and wish for “revenge” on her’ (450). Perseda in Soliman and Perseda is similar to Kyd’s other female characters, Bel-​imperia, Alice Arden, Gonorill, and Ragan, in that she is a violent woman who requests Basilisco to ‘work revenge’ on her ‘behalf’ (S&P, 2.1.76). Later in the play she avenges Erastus through a combination of disguise and poison. These moments typify Kyd’s emphasis on Senecan revenge, which is achieved through complex intrigue plots. Kyd therefore seems to have established the rights of female characters to be considered equal with men as on-​ stage revengers. Shakespeare extended Kyd’s innovative introduction of female revengers to the public stage through characters such as Tamora in Titus Andronicus, and Margaret in the Henry VI plays and Richard III. Margaret’s revenge against York in 1.4 of Henry VI Part Three, however, is more vicious than can be found in any scene involving Kyd’s female avengers. She harangues York for no fewer than forty-​two lines; informs him of his son’s murder by showing him a handkerchief smeared with Rutland’s blood, which is undoubtedly influenced by the bloody handkerchief that Hieronimo finds on his son’s corpse; and forces him to wear a paper crown (Deutermann, 2016: 43). Margaret’s verbal assault nevertheless recalls Kyd’s violent women, who also employ language as a means of wounding their male counterparts. For instance, Mosby articulates the sonically assaultive effect that Alice Arden’s language has on him: ‘Such deep pathaires, like to a cannon’s burst /​Discharged against a ruinated wall, /​Breaks my relenting heart in thousand pieces’ (AF, 8.51–​3).

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Another abrasive aspect of Kyd’s lexicon that appears to have influenced Shakespeare’s characterisation of Margaret is his predilection for deictic language. Andy Kesson notes that The Spanish Tragedy ‘has almost twice as many instances’ of the word ‘ “thus” compared to almost every other pre-​1592 play’ (Kesson, 2018). Kesson cites a couple of instances of the deictic ‘thus’ that occur in Kyd’s play before a character is stabbed. For example, in the play-​within-​the-​play Hieronimo exacts revenge on Lorenzo for the murder of his son, but just before he stabs him he says ‘Erasto, Solyman saluteth thee, /​And lets thee wit by me his highnes will, /​ Which is, thou shouldest be thus imploid’ (Sp. T., 4.4.50–​2). Bel-​imperia signals retribution with the lines ‘But, were she able, thus she would revenge, /​Thy treacheries on thee, ignoble Prince’ (4.4.65–​6), and she stabs Balthazar immediately afterwards. She also employs the deictic ‘thus’ just before she stabs herself: ‘And on her selfe she would be thus reveng’d’ (4.4.67). Kesson suggests that the word ‘thus’ functions as a ‘cue to perform’, as well as a ‘strategy by which writers’ exerted ‘control of performance and performance decisions’. Additional Kydian examples of ‘thus’ employed for violent or vengeful purposes in his Soliman and Perseda, unmentioned by Kesson, can be supplied. For instance, Soliman takes revenge on the very men he ordered to kill Erastus: ‘Thus die, and thus; for thus you murtherd him’ (S&P, 5.2.113). These words recall Horatio’s murder: ‘I thus, and thus: these are the fruits of love’ (Sp. T., 2.4.55). Returning to 1.4 of Henry VI Part Three, Allison K. Deutermann notes that, like ‘Hieronimo’s bloody handkerchief, Margaret’s napkin, dipped in York’s son’s blood, acts as a vivid memento mori and a goad to revenge. Her use of deictic pointing words (“this napkin”; “I give thee this”) turns York’s and the audience’s attention to the actual, material object of the bloody napkin while coupling it with speech’ (2016: 43–​4). It seems that when Shakespeare composed Margaret’s revenge scene in this play, he not only had Hieronimo’s bloody handkerchief in mind, but also Kyd’s vengeful female characters, whose violent acts are preceded and perhaps, in performance, even stimulated, by deictic language. In Richard III, Margaret performs a ‘choric function’, exhibiting an ‘understanding both of herself and the workings of fate’ (Clemen, 2005: 178). She resembles the figure of Revenge in The Spanish Tragedy in that her foreboding presence looms over the play, while

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her prophecy that Richard and his followers will be punished (just as Revenge reassures Andrea that the villains of the play will eventually die) suggests that divine vengeance intervenes on her behalf. Although Margaret does ‘not’, like Kyd’s personages, ‘offer an explicit iteration of the theatrum mundi’ (Drawdy, 2014: 19), her curses, and the supernatural discourse surrounding her, suggest that a cosmic playwright has already plotted the conclusion to the Wars of the Roses, and that this conclusion will assert providence. Shakespeare, perhaps following Kyd, places greater emphasis on the notion of divine vengeance in Richard III but, as in his predecessor’s plays, retribution ‘must manifest itself by the verbal and physical agency of man’ (22), or, indeed, woman.

Foreboding dreams Prophetic or precognitive dreams and visions can be found in the works of Seneca: Agamemnon opens with the ghost of Thyestes foreseeing Agamemnon’s death, while Andromache has an ominous dream in which she is visited by the ghost of Hector in Troades. Conversely, many Elizabethan writers argued that there was little to no validity in the notion that dreams could impart ‘special knowledge’ (Alwes, 1996: 153). In The Terrors of the Night (1594), Thomas Nashe contended that such dreams were ‘nothing else but a bubbling scum or froth of the fancy’ (Steane, 1972: 218), while Francis Bacon asserted that the tales of divine prophecies throughout history had been ‘by idle and crafty brains merely contrived and feigned, after the event past’ (Vickers, 1996: 414). However, as I have shown in an article titled ‘ “Fearful Dreams” in Thomas Kyd’s Restored Canon’ (Freebury-​Jones, 2019c), prophetic dreams are given some credibility in Kyd’s plays. Here I elaborate on some of my findings in that essay. William Wells noted that ‘Kyd’s characters almost invariably anticipate disaster by dreams or premonitions’, and that it is ‘probable that it was from Garnier that Kyd derived the feature’ (1939: 435–​6). Garnier was in turn influenced by Seneca’s revenge tragedies. As we have seen, Kyd’s drama, like Seneca’s, adheres to a providential design. Prophetic dreams afford Kyd’s characters an insight into the fates prescribed to them by cosmic forces. In

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The Spanish Tragedy, the Viceroy, who has been told (falsely) by Villuppo that his son has been slain in battle, says ‘I, I, my nightly dreames have tolde me this’ (Sp. T., 1.3.76). Similarly, Bel-​imperia anticipates her lover Horatio’s murder in the line, ‘my hart foretels me some mischaunce’ (2.4.15). Horatio attempts to placate Bel-​imperia by dismissing her premonition: ‘Sweet, say not so; faire fortune is our freend’ (2.4.16). Kyd repeated this process –​while drawing from his individual store of verbal formulae, in order to fulfil the same dramatic purpose –​of having a character imparting a dream or vision to a confidant, who subsequently dismisses their interpretation of the premonition, throughout his dramatic career. In Soliman and Perseda, the play’s heroine, Perseda, upon hearing of her lover Erastus’s murder, repeats the Viceroy’s line from The Spanish Tragedy, ‘I, I, my nightly dreames have tolde me this’ (1.3.76), almost verbatim: ‘Ah no; my nightly dreames foretould me this’ (S&P, 5.3.25). High-​quality verbal formulations of this kind, repeated in recurring dramatic situations, give us an insight into Kyd’s idiosyncratic lexicon of collocations. In the third act of Cornelia, the eponymous character relates a dream in which the ghost of Pompey visited her. The dream is prophetic in that Pompey tells Cornelia her father is also dead, which is confirmed by the Messenger in the play’s final act. Cornelia cries ‘My fearfull dreames do my despairs redouble’ (Corn., 3.1.61), to which the Chorus respond ‘Why suffer you vayne dreames your heade to trouble?’ (3.1.62). Like Horatio, the Chorus attempt to appease the dreamer by dismissing the dream’s significance. Nevertheless, the dream has such an impact on Cornelia that she still thinks she can see the ghost of Pompey, even when awake: And, thinking to embrace him, opte mine armes, When drousy sleep, that wak’d mee at unwares, Dyd with hys flight unclose my feareful eyes So suddainly, that yet mee thinks I see him. (3.1.122–​5)

Kyd would also employ this device of having a character suffer from hypnopompic delusions in King Leir and Arden of Faversham, as I aim to show through close study of matching n-​grams and collocations occurring no more than five times in drama of the period 1580–​1600.

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At the beginning of King Leir, the eponymous character announces that ‘me thinks, my mind presageth still /​I know not what; and yet I feare some ill’ (KL, 3.216–​17). Here Kyd employs the same combination of words as he did when composing Bel-​ imperia’s speech: ‘I know not what my selfe: /​And yet my hart foretels me some mischaunce’ (Sp. T., 2.4.14–​15). Later in the play, the King wakes from a prophetic dream, in which his       daughters, Gonorill & Ragan, Stood both before me with such grim aspects. Eche brandishing a Faulchion in their hand Ready to lop a lymme off where it fell, And in their other hands a naked poynyard, Wherewith they stabd me in a hundred places. (KL, 19.1488–​93)

Leir, like Bel-​imperia and Cornelia, imparts his premonition ‘to a friend’, who dismisses ‘any deductions’ he ‘may have drawn’ (Wells, 1939: 436). He tells Perillus that ‘with the feare of this I did awake, /​And yet for feare my feeble joints do quake’ (19.1500–​1), which is comparable to the effect Cornelia’s dream has on her: ‘When drousy sleep, that wak’d mee at unwares, /​Dyd with hys flight unclose my feareful eyes /​So suddainly, that yet mee thinks I see him’ (Corn., 3.1.123–​5). Leir’s dream is fairly accurate, for Ragan has sent the Messenger to slay him. Nevertheless, Perillus reassures him, ‘Feare not, my lord, dreames are but fantasies, /​And slight imaginations of the brayne’ (KL, 19.1481–​2), which is akin to the Chorus’s response to Cornelia: ‘Why suffer you vayne dreames your heade to trouble?’ (Corn., 3.1.62). Leir’s premonitions are symptomatic of the ‘divine theatre in which’ Kyd’s characters ‘enact the roles they have been prescribed by God’ (Erne, 2001: 96). Leir is only saved from his dream’s becoming total reality by the intervention of thunder, which causes the Messenger to flee. Leir and Perillus attribute this storm to a divine power: the Messenger exits and Perillus says ‘Let us give thanks to God’ (KL, 19.1759). As Miles S. Drawdy notes: Kyd’s characters can often be seen ‘testifying to a just and omnipotent God’, which follows a ‘providential logic’ (2014: 38). We can see, therefore, that the dream sequence in King Leir offers structural and dramaturgical parallels with Kyd’s accepted plays. These passages also appear to derive from the same author’s

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linguistic resources. For example, Leir says ‘I marvell, that my daughter stayes so long’ (19.1476), which recalls ‘I wonder that his Lordship staies so long’ (Sp. T., 3.4.30). We should pay close attention to the physiognomy of such verse lines: the matching words occupy the exact same metrical positions, their symmetrical placement revealing Kyd’s verbal patterning, while the disyllabic verbs ‘marvel’ and ‘wonder’ perform the same semantic and syntactic duty. We find the common phrase ‘God graunt’ in Leir’s line ‘God graunt we do not miscarry in the place’ (KL, 19.1478), but it is notable that Kyd also associates this line-​opening with the topic of dreams in Cornelia’s line ‘God graunt these dreames to good effect bee brought’ (Corn., 3.1.65). We might also compare Leir’s description of his daughters ‘Ech brandishing a Faulchion in their hand’ (KL, 19.1490) with the Messenger’s report of the Battle of Thapsus in Cornelia, and the Roman nobles ‘with their fauchins in their fists’ (Corn., 5.1.307). The phrase ‘bleeding wounds’ co-​ occurs with Leir’s account of the dream, in which his daughter Cordella ‘Came with a boxe of Balsome in her hand, /​And powred it into my bleeding wounds’ (KL, 19.1496–​7), and Hieronimo’s account of finding his son’s corpse: ‘Within the river of his bleeding wounds’ (Sp. T., 4.4.124). The singular form, ‘bleeding wound’, occurs in Cornelia in the line ‘And launc’d hys bleeding wound into the sea’ (Corn., 4.1.24), which, following the grammatical pattern in King Leir, is accompanied by the line-​opening conjunction ‘And’, a transitive verb, as well as a possessive pronoun (as in The Spanish Tragedy), and the preposition ‘into’. Here we can discern a variant of the same writer’s verbal formula. Kyd also explores the topic of ominous dreams in Arden of Faversham. Early in the play, the servant Michael, speaking very much in the voice of Cornelia, has a ‘fearful dream that troubled me’ (AF, 4.93), in which he ‘was beset /​With murderer thieves’ (4.94–​5). These lines anticipate Kyd’s heroine thus: ‘The fearefull dreames effect that trouble me’ (Corn., 2.1.209). Michael’s declarative ‘My trembling joints witness my inward fear’ (AF, 4.95) gives us another match with the dream sequence of King Leir: ‘And yet for feare my feeble joints do quake’ (KL, 19.1501). Thomas Arden is dismissive here: ‘So great a cry for nothing I ne’er heard’ (AF, 4.97). However, Arden anticipates his own murder through an ominous dream in Scene 6, in which ‘a toil was pitched’ (6.7) by

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an evil ‘herdman’ (6.17), and he compares his frightening nightmare to ‘one’ (6.21) who ‘sees a lion foraging about’ (6.22). This passage shares a similar hunting image thread to Haleb’s dialogue in Soliman and Perseda: ‘The ones a Lyon almost brought to death, /​Whose skin will countervaile the hunter’s toile’ (S&P, 1.5.41–​2). Indeed, Scene 6 of Arden of Faversham shares a large number of rare verbal links with Kyd’s undoubted plays and King Leir. Like Leir, Arden is being pursued by murderers and anticipates this attempt on his life through a dream. Wells noted that ‘They both dream that they are attacked by two persons, one of whom, in each case, carries a falchion’ (1939: 436). If we examine the verbal details of this moment in Arden of Faversham, we once again find the line-​ opening ‘God grant’, associated with prophetic dreams in Arden’s line ‘God grant this vision bedeem me any good’ (AF, 6.31), which parallels the dream sequence of King Leir, in the line ‘God graunt we do not miscarry in the place’ (KL, 19.1478), and, in particular, Kyd’s Cornelia: ‘God graunt these dreames to good effect bee brought’ (Corn., 3.1.65). We should also note the unique co-​occurrence of the noun ‘visions’ in Kyd’s closet drama (3.1.63). Arden tells his companion, Franklin: ‘So, trust me, Franklin when I did awake, /​I stood in doubt whether I waked or no’ (AF, 6.28–​9). Leir tells Perillus: ‘And with the feare of this I did awake, /​And yet for feare my feeble joints do quake’ (KL, 19.1500–​1). Franklin reassures Arden that ‘This fantasy doth rise from Michael’s fear, /​ Who being awaked with the noise he made, /​His troubled senses yet could take no rest’ (AF, 6.32–​4). Franklin, like Perillus in King Leir and the Chorus in Cornelia, makes an erroneous diagnosis of this predictive dream. Arden responds to his companion ‘It may be so, God frame it to the best: /​But oftentimes my dreams presage too true’ (6.36–​7). These lines recall the Messenger’s speech in the dream sequence of King Leir: ‘Confesse, that dreames do often prove too true’ (KL, 19.1484). Franklin’s speech ‘To such as note their nightly fantasies, /​ Some one in twenty may incur belief’ (AF, 6.38–​9) recalls King Leir’s ‘dreames are but fantasies, /​And slight imaginations of the brayne’ (KL, 19.1481–​2), as well as The Spanish Tragedy’s ‘I, I, my nightly dreames have tolde me this’ (Sp. T., 1.3.76) and Soliman and Perseda’s ‘my nightly dreams foretold me this’ (S&P, 5.3.25), through linking the premodifier ‘nightly’ with the topic of

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ominous dreams. Garnier’s ‘detailed influence on Kyd’ is unmistakable in these passages (Baldwin, 1959: 181). The French tragedian calls dreams ‘Qu’vn vain semblant, qu’vn fantôme, une image /​Qui nous trompe en dormant, et non pas un présage’ in his Hippolyte (1573). We also find a unique formulaic line-​opening shared between Arden’s line ‘With that he blew an evil-​sounding horn’ (AF, 6.16) and Piston’s line in Soliman and Perseda: ‘With that he purst the gould, and gave it us’ (S&P, 5.2.52). Through close analysis of ‘parallelism of thought coupled with some verbal parallelism’ (Byrne, 1932: 24), we can see that Kyd recycled the motif of his characters anticipating disaster by ominous dreams or premonitions. I now explore the ways in which Shakespeare was influenced by this aspect of Kyd’s dramaturgy. Shakespeare seems to have been deeply conscious of Kyd’s use of dreams when he came to write Richard III. Act 1, Scene 4 of that play presents a fascinating example of Shakespeare’s infusion of source material. The scene appears to draw from Thomas Sackville’s The Mirror for Magistrates; Ovid’s Metamorphoses; Seneca’s tragedies; Spenser’s The Fairy Queen; Homer’s The Odyssey; and Virgil’s Aeneid; as well as Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, King Leir, and Arden of Faversham, but not from any of Shakespeare’s historical sources. We can begin an analysis of this rich tapestry of influences by identifying correspondences with The Spanish Tragedy. Clarence describes his dream of escaping from the Tower of London via ship, before tumbling overboard with Richard and descending to Hades, where he is confronted by his victims. His account of journeying to the underworld is undoubtedly influenced by the Ghost of Don Andrea’s speech at the beginning of Kyd’s most famous play. Andrea describes his descent to Hades, having, like Clarence, crossed the Styx, before engaging in dialogue with Minos, Aeacus, and Rhadamanth, who are quoted by the Ghost, just as Clarence speaks Warwick’s words (as well as the words of an angel dappled in blood) aloud in his account. Andrea laments his death in battle, whereas Clarence is wracked with guilt concerning his actions during the Wars of the Roses. Shakespeare’s debts to the verbal texture of Kyd’s tragedy are evidenced in the moment when Clarence is informed by his prospective murderers that they were sent by Richard. Clarence refuses to believe them, for his brother promised ‘That he would labour my delivery’ (R3,

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1.4.241). In Kyd’s play, Lorenzo’s promise to Pedringano that he will save him from the gallows is also false. Hieronimo reads a letter from Pedringano reminding Lorenzo of this oath: ‘That you would labour my deliverie’ (Sp. T., 3.7.33). The similarities in dramatic context, combined with the fact that the collocation ‘That’ with ‘would labour my delivery’ is unique to these plays, leave little doubt about Kyd’s influence on Clarence’s dialogue. The dream-​ world that Clarence describes is certainly reminiscent of Andrea’s prologue, and the verbal texture of this scene reveals some correspondences with Kyd’s play, but I propose that the scene as a whole owes more to Shakespeare’s recollections of King Leir and Arden of Faversham. Clarence describes how he ‘trembling waked, and for a season after /​Could not believe but that I was in hell, /​Such terrible impression made my dream’ (R3, 1.4.61–​3). As we have seen, following his own ominous dream, Leir tells Perillus that ‘with the feare of this I did awake, /​And yet for feare my feeble joints do quake’ (KL, 19.1500–​1), while Arden tells Franklin that ‘when I did awake, /​ I stood in doubt whether I waked or no’ (AF, 6.28–​9). However, while Perillus and Franklin dismiss these respective dreams as mere fantasy, Clarence’s companion Brackenbury says that ‘I am afraid, methinks, to hear you tell it’ (R3, 1.4.65). Clarence relates his dream shortly before the entrance of the two murderers; Leir relates his dream shortly before the entrance of the would-​be-​murderous Messenger; Arden’s dream also anticipates his murder by two ruffians. The Messenger in King Leir is spying on the two old men; later in this chapter I will show that such ‘split’ scenes, containing vicious characters who listen to their intended victims and comment to the audience, can also be found in The Spanish Tragedy and Soliman and Perseda. H. D. Sykes pointed out similarities between Clarence’s dream and Thomas Arden’s (1924: 479), such as the co-​ occurrence of ‘With that’ (R3, 1.4.46; AF, 6.16); ‘with the very noise’ (R3, 1.4.60) and ‘at the noise’ (AF, 6.17); ‘I trembling waked’ (R3, 1.4.61) and ‘I wak’d and trembled’ (AF, 6.20); and ‘Such terrible impression made my dream’ (R3, 1.4.63) and ‘Such great impression took this fond surprise’ (AF, 6.30). Clarence’s iteration of the archaic verb ‘methought’, which occurs no fewer than seven times during his account of his dream, also seems to have been stimulated

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by Kyd’s dream sequences: it occurs once in Leir’s account and twice in Arden’s. Wilfrid Perrett pointed out (1904: 95–​121) that the Messenger in King Leir considers slaying his victims while they are asleep –​‘Now could I stab them bravely, while they sleepe’ (KL, 19.1467) –​while the Second Murderer in Shakespeare’s play ponders: ‘What, shall I stab him as he sleeps?’ (R3, 1.4.98). The formulation ‘stab him as he’ can also be found in Arden of Faversham, when the murderous Black Will, who shares a lust for money with Kyd’s Messenger and Shakespeare’s murderers, promises to eliminate Thomas Arden for financial compensation: ‘I’ll stab him as he stands pissing against a wall’ (AF, 2.96). The Second Murderer’s interrogative uniquely parallels Basilisco’s line in Soliman and Perseda: ‘What, shall I stab the Emperour for thy sake?’ (S&P, 5.3.49). Shakespeare had earlier employed Kyd’s phraseology in a figurative sense in Henry VI Part Two, when Whitmore asks ‘shall I stab the forlorn swain?’, to which the Captain responds: ‘First let my words stab him as he hath me’ (2H6, 4.1.66–​7). Clarence, like Leir and Perillus, attempts to negotiate with the murderers. He warns them that ‘the great King of Kings’ (R3, 1.4.190) ‘holds vengeance in his hand’ (1.4.194), which breeds ‘a kind of remorse in’ (1.4.105) the Second Murderer. Perillus warns the Messenger that ‘the King of heaven’ (KL, 19.1745) will not ‘suffer such outrageous acts’ without ‘just revenge’ (19.1651–​2). Leir and Perillus persuade the Messenger to spare their lives, but Clarence loses his battle of words. His murder fulfils Richard’s command, in the context of Seneca’s tragic universe, where ‘every man’s hand’ is ‘against his brother’ (Witherspoon, 1924: 42). Here we find unmistakable scenic resemblances and congeries of words and ideas, but there are also some important differences between the dramatists’ treatments that are worth summarising. Clarence is murdered shortly after he relates his dream, while Leir is in fact spared, and Arden’s murder takes place at the conclusion of the tragedy, eight scenes after Franklin dismisses his premonition. Dreams in Kyd’s plays are invariably dismissed by the protagonists’ confidants, but Shakespeare is not concerned with delaying the revelation that Clarence’s dream is indeed prophetic. Shakespeare intensifies our perception of Richard’s ruthlessness, for the murderers are not ultimately persuaded by Clarence’s passionate appeals. Conversely, Leir and Perillus’s calls for divine justice frighten the Messenger into

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sparing their lives. Leir is betrayed by his daughters, while Thomas Arden is betrayed by his wife. Brackenbury closely resembles Perillus and Franklin, for he is sympathetic to the plight of his companion. However, he is forced to resign his charge to the murderers. Shakespeare emphasises the corruptness of Richard’s England by having the dreamer’s companion play a (albeit unwilling) part in his demise. Shakespeare therefore adopted elements of Kyd’s dream sequences, but remoulded them to serve his own dramatic purposes.

Dramatic structure and stagecraft Ann Thompson has pointed out that despite ‘the fact that’ The Spanish Tragedy and The Taming of the Shrew ‘are written in completely different genres they have considerable formal similarities’ (1984: 182). She elaborates that correspondences can be discerned in the widespread use they both make of on-​stage audiences, setting up situations whereby the audience in the theatre is encouraged to see part or all of the action through the eyes of another audience consisting of actors placed above or to the side of the stage. Both plays do this through the use of commentators outside the main action –​Christopher Sly and his companions in The Shrew, Revenge and the Ghost of Andrea in The Spanish Tragedy –​and through devices within the main narrative such as Hieronimo’s play-​within-​ the-​play at the end of The Spanish Tragedy or the handling of V.i of The Shrew from the point where Petruchio says ‘Prithee Kate, let’s stand aside and see the end of this controversy’ (61–​62); whereupon the characters of the main plot act as audience to the subplot. Both plays also contain an ‘overhead courtship’ scene of this nature in which one character watches from the side while his or her lover courts or is courted by someone else: in The Spanish Tragedy, II.ii, Balthazar and Lorenzo overhear the courtship of Horatio and Bel-​ imperia and in The Shrew, IV.ii, Hortensio and Tranio overhear that of Lucentio and Bianca. (182)

Thompson notes some interesting verbal matches between the two plays, which are ‘most obvious’ (182) in the Induction to Shakespeare’s comedy. For instance, Christopher Sly’s line ‘Go by, Saint Jeronimy’ (Shr., Induction 1.7), directly alludes to Hieronimo’s much-​parodied line ‘Hieronimo, beware: go by, go by’ (Sp. T.,

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3.12.31). She also observes that Shakespeare drew from Kyd’s use of hunting imagery: ‘Bel-​imperia in The Spanish Tragedy is viewed through the metaphors from falconry which are so common in The Shrew: Lorenzo reassures Balthazar that Bel-​imperia will accept him eventually, saying “In time all haggard hawks will stoop to lure” (II i.4), and the Duke of Castile, Bel-​imperia’s father, is even more emphatic on this point’ (183). Furthermore, both playwrights combine ‘the hawking metaphor with the word “froward” ’ (183). Such imagery is common in Kyd’s plays, but scholars continue to regard metaphors concerning ‘animal predators and victims; riding, hunting and birding; horticulture and unweeded gardens’ (Jackson, 2017b: 130) as distinctive to Shakespeare. Shakespeare was a genius at assimilating all kinds of information about nature, the law, sailing, and so forth. That genius would also extend to picking up phrases and ideas from other writers’ works and reusing them.1 I should like to move away from the verbal parallels identified by Thompson and focus on the correspondences she identifies in terms of overhearing (also in relation to Kyd’s use of Senecan stichomythia) and on-​stage audiences. In staging Balthazar’s ‘unwelcome advances’ towards Bel-​imperia, ‘Kyd combines’, as Bart van Es puts it, ‘classical drama with the traditions of Renaissance love poetry’ (2013: 67–​8), as we can see in the following passage: Balthazar.  What, if conceite have laid my hart to gage? Bel-​imperia.  Pay that you borrowed and recover it. Balthazar.  I die, if it returne from whence it lyes. Bel-​imperia.  A hartles man and live? A miracle. Balthazar.  I, Lady, love can worke such miracles. Lorenzo.  Tush, tush, my Lord, let goe these ambages. (1.4.85–​90) Kyd often disrupts such stichomythic bouts through the interposition of a spectatorial third character, just as supernatural forces often intervene in the outcomes of his plays: in this case, Lorenzo. In fact, that voyeuristic villain’s dialogue appears to have been very much in Shakespeare’s mind throughout the composition of The Taming of the Shrew: in Rizvi’s spreadsheet listing ‘maximal’ n-​grams shared with The Spanish Tragedy, no fewer than five of the nine phrases not found elsewhere in his corpus, such as ‘kind and liberal’ (Sp. T., 2.1.82; Shr., 1.1.98) and the pronoun ‘I/​me’ followed by ‘to sound the’ (Sp. T., 2.1.36; Shr., 5.1.128),

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co-​occur with Lorenzo’s phraseology. Kyd also ‘shows his talent for transforming ancient devices by making the Senecan stichomythia the vehicle’ for Horatio and Bel-​imperia’s ‘amorous fence’ in 2.2 (Boas, 1901: xxxiv): Bel-​imperia.  But whereon doost thou chiefly meditate? Horatio.  On dangers past, and pleasures to ensue. Balthazar.  On pleasures past, and dangers to ensue. Bel-​imperia.  What dangers, and what pleasures doost thou mean? Horatio.  Dangers of warre, and pleasures of our love. Lorenzo.  Dangers of death, but pleasures none at all. (2.2.26–​31) Lorenzo and Balthazar break up the lovers’ discourse with a series of villainous asides, transposing their words through the device antimetabole. Kyd’s ornate verse is complemented by elaborate multi-​layered stage action, for the audience watch Revenge and the Ghost of Andrea, who watch the villains, who in turn watch the lovers. Lorenzo, accompanied by Balthazar, Serberine, and Pedringano, also puts an end to the lovers’ linguistic tangent in 2.4: Horatio. Bel-​imperia. Horatio.

The more thou sitst within these leafy bowers, The more will Flora decke it with her flowers. I, but if Flora spie Horatio heere, Her jealous eye will thinke I sit too neere. Harke, Madame, how the birds record by night, For joy that Bel-​imperia sits in sight. (2.4.24–​9)

The conspirators subsequently enter and ‘Quickly dispatch’ Horatio (2.4.53). I agree with Witherspoon, who suggested that Kyd’s ‘custom of arranging stichomythic dialogue in rhymed couplets’ was probably ‘borrowed from Garnier’ (1924: 161). In King Leir, the Gallian King and Cordella’s exchanges echo the stichomythic bouts between Bel-​imperia and her suitors, Balthazar and Horatio, in The Spanish Tragedy: King. To utter griefe, doth ease a heart o’ercharged. Cordella.  To touch a sore, doth aggravate the payne. (KL, 7.640–​1) Structurally, this scene recalls 3.2 of Soliman and Perseda, in which Perseda and Lucina compete over whose grief is greater. In both scenes, the line-​by-​line dialogue is disrupted by a clown’s bawdy

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jests, while Lorenzo interrupts the amorous discourse between Bel-​imperia and Horatio in The Spanish Tragedy. Cordella, initially unaware that she is being watched –​just as Bel-​imperia and Horatio are not aware that Lorenzo is spying on them –​says ‘I will professe and vow a maydens life’ (7.624), to which Mumford comments ‘Then I protest thou shalt not have my custom’ (7.625). Basilisco also comments facetiously: Why, Lady, is not Basilisco here? Why, Lady, dooth not Basilisco live? Am not I worth both these for whom you mourne? Then take each one halfe of me, and cease to weepe; Or if you gladly would injoy me both, Ile serve the one by day, the other by night, And I will pay you both your sound delight. (S&P, 3.2.18–​24)

We also find Kyd’s characteristic stichomythic exchanges in verbal repartee during the ‘loving controversy’ (KL, 24.2317) between the reunited Leir and Cordella: Leir. Cordella. Leir.

But you gave life to me and to my friend, Whose dayes had else, had an untimely end. You brought me up, when as I was but young, And far unable for to helpe my selfe. I cast thee forth, when as thou wast but young, And far unable for to helpe thy selfe. (24.2309–​14)

I commented earlier that Kyd customarily breaks up line-​by-​line exchanges through the intervention of a third character, who often serves as a spectator. Just as Lorenzo intervenes in the verbal jousting between Bel-​imperia and Balthazar, in the line ‘let go these ambages’ (Sp. T., 1.4.90), the Gallian King decides to ‘breake off’ (KL, 24.2317) the distichomythic dialogue between Leir and Cordella. In Scene 4 of Fair Em, Manvile enters in disguise and speaks of his love for Em. Valingford enters at another door, also in disguise, and delivers his own speech about Em, while Manvile, concealing himself, eavesdrops. Manvile –​like Lorenzo in The Spanish Tragedy; Soliman and Piston in Soliman and Perseda; Mumford and the Gallian King, as well as the Messenger, in King Leir; and the murderers near the conclusion of Arden of Faversham (AF, 14.226–​9) –​speaks in asides as he spies on the unwitting character.

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Mountney, also disguised, subsequently enters, and he too professes his love for the miller’s daughter. The combination of intrigue, disguise,2 the discourse of love, the unheeded asides, and the complex multi-​layered stage action are staples of Kyd’s drama. We might also recall Michael’s euphuistic love letter in Scene 3 of Arden of Faversham, which is overheard by Franklin and Arden. Thus, Thompson’s observation that ‘in The Spanish Tragedy, II.ii, Balthazar and Lorenzo overhear the courtship of Horatio and Bel-​ imperia and in The Shrew, IV.ii, Hortensio and Tranio overhear that of Lucentio and Bianca’ (1984: 182) can be taken a little further. It seems possible that Kyd’s influence on Shakespeare’s stagecraft went beyond The Spanish Tragedy, for such multi-​layered eavesdropping scenes occur throughout Kyd’s dramas. For instance, in terms of staging possibilities, Scene 4 of Fair Em very much stands as a precursor to Biron’s overhearing the King and his friends reading sonnets they have composed for the Princess and her ladies-​in-​waiting in 4.3 of Love’s Labour’s Lost (1596). Shakespeare also extended Kyd’s convention of employing Senecan stichomythia for verbal bouts between amorous characters, as is most clear in the witty dialogue between Petruchio and Katherine in 2.1 of Shakespeare’s comedy, which is interrupted by the entrance of Baptista, Gremio, and Tranio. By acknowledging Kyd’s ‘enlarged’ corpus and revisiting previous scholarship, we are able to put these critical jigsaw pieces, once jagged and seemingly irreconcilable, together, and establish that Kyd’s influence on Shakespeare’s early drama extended far beyond phraseology. Indeed, it could be argued that, at the very beginning of his career, Shakespeare elaborated and refined his dramatic predecessor’s introduction of vengeful women to the public stage, his use of foreboding dreams, his multi-​layered stage action, and his deployment of stichomythia for verbal sparring between lovers.

Notes 1 See Chapter 6 for discussion on Kyd and Shakespeare’s engagement with the earlier work of Thomas Watson. 2 Lorenzo and his cronies are also in disguise when they spy on the lovers in The Spanish Tragedy, just like Mumford and the Gallian King in King Leir when they spy on Cordella.

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4 Revision

On 3 March 1592, Philip Henslowe recorded a performance by the Lord Strange’s Men of ‘Harey the vj’ (Foakes, 2002: 16), which would be later known as Henry VI Part One in the First Folio. Henry VI Part One dramatises events leading up to the Wars of the Roses, as depicted in Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part Two and Part Three. Scholarly opinion has diverged over whether the play was written first in the Henry VI trilogy, or as a prequel akin to The First Part of Hieronimo. There are, however, excellent reasons for believing that Henry VI Part One was written after Henry VI Part Two and Part Three, and close reading of these plays supports this hypothesis; for example, rose symbolism is common in the first and third parts but does not feature in the second part. As Gary Taylor puts it: ‘If the three parts of the play were written in their chronological order, why should the author go to such trouble to initiate the roses symbolism in Part One only to ignore it in Contention (Part Two) –​just as he ignored Talbot and his own inventive dramatisation of Mortimer?’ (1995: 150). Other inconsistencies between Henry VI Part One and Henry VI Part Two include, as Ronald Knowles points out, ‘the surrender of Anjou and Maine as part of the Henry–​Margaret marriage treaty, a condition which is bitterly resented throughout 2 Henry VI’ but ‘not mentioned as part of the treaty in 1 Henry VI: conversely, in 1 Henry VI we are reminded that Henry is already betrothed to the Earl of Armagnac’s daughter, a detail seemingly forgotten’ in the second part. Additionally, ‘there are details such as Suffolk’s being addressed by the King as an earl at the end of 1 Henry VI, yet he has the title of marquess at the beginning of 2 Henry VI’ (Knowles, 2001: 114). Finally, Robert Greene

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paraphrased York’s line ‘O tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide’ (3H6, 1.4.138), from Henry VI Part Three, in his diatribe against Shakespeare in Groatsworth of Wit, which suggests that the second and third parts were well known by 1592. Thomas Nashe alluded to ‘Harey the vj’ in his Pierce Penniless His Supplication to the Devil (1592), which was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 8 August 1592: How would it have joyed brave Talbot, the terror of the French, to think that after he had lain two hundred years in his tomb, he should triumph again on the stage and have his bones new embalmed with the tears of ten thousand spectators at least (at several times), who, in the tragedian that represents his person, imagine they behold him fresh bleeding! (Steane, 1972: 113)

Edmond Malone noted that Nashe’s phrase ‘terror of the French’ is ‘expressly spoken of in the play (as well as in Hall’s Chronicle)’, while ‘Holinshed, who was Shakespeare’s guide, omits the passage in Hall, in which Talbot is thus described; and this is an additional proof that the play is not our author’s’ (1821: 565). The phrase ‘terror of the French’ (1H6, 1.6.20) occurs in the play’s opening act, which scholars attribute to Nashe –​who rarely shied away from promoting works in which he had a hand –​with confidence. I argue that the second and third Henry VI plays were written solely by Shakespeare for Pembroke’s Men as a two-​part play, akin to Marlowe’s Tamburlaine plays, and that ‘Harey the vj’ was designed by Lord Strange’s Men to capitalise on their success. Shakespeare therefore had nothing to do with the original play mentioned by Nashe and Henslowe. The theory that Shakespeare was not the play’s original author was advanced by E. K. Chambers, who suggested that Henry VI Part One ‘was put together in 1592, to exploit an earlier theme which had been successful’ with Shakespeare’s audiences (1930: 292–​3). C. A. Greer similarly argued that another dramatist (who was not Shakespeare) ‘adapted’ the play ‘to 2 and 3 Henry VI’ (1942: 114). Greer noted that this adaptation was not a total success, for ‘1 Henry VI often varies from the other plays to the point of showing downright inconsistency’ (112), a judgement endorsed more recently, as we have already seen. Roslyn Knutson notes a ‘principle of duplication in operation in a set of plays on the War of the Roses’, for ‘The Strange’s men had Henry VI’ (the play known

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as ‘Harey the vj’ in Henslowe’s diary, and Henry VI Part One in the First Folio), while ‘Pembroke’s men had the first part of The Contention between York and Lancaster and its sequel, The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York’ (called Henry VI Part Two and Part Three in the First Folio). She observes that ‘the Chamberlain’s men gathered the serial parts that Pembroke’s men had put into their repertory, adding the original play from the repertory of Strange’s men’ in 1594 (1991: 48). Notably, Henry VI Part Two and Part Three were originally ‘Separated from the seminal play of Henry VI’ and ‘do not advertise themselves as sequels to that original play’ (73). These scholarly observations support the theory I will expound in this chapter: Shakespeare was commissioned by the Chamberlain’s Men, founded in 1594, to adapt the original ‘Harey the vj’ text in order to turn the Henry VI plays, previously unconnected, into a three-​part serial.

Henry VI Part One: Authorship Arguments for Nashe’s hand in this play go back a long way: Brian Vickers notes that ‘As a candidate for the authorship of Act 1, Thomas Nashe was the strongest of those considered by H. C. Hart in 1909’ and in studies conducted by ‘Archibald Stalker in 1935, John Dover Wilson in 1952, Marco Mincoff in 1965 and 1976, Gary Taylor in 1995, and Paul Vincent in 2002’ (2008a: 107). Stalker criticised the staccato form and the disconnection of ideas in the opening act of Henry VI Part One (1935: 133–​66), a feature also of Nashe’s pageant Summer’s Last Will and Testament (1592), which reveals Nashe’s proclivity for internal rhyme, excessive alliteration, and grammatical inversions. Regarding the latter, Paul J. Vincent points out that ‘Of the 109 instances of the targeted kinds of inversions in 1 Henry VI, 73, or two thirds, are found in Act 1. Even more astonishing is the fact that the first scene of Act 1 alone exhibits only six fewer inversions than the combined total for Acts 2–​5’ (2005: 216). These are statistically significant findings, which demonstrate a major difference between the poetry of the first act and the rest of the play. Marco Mincoff highlighted another quantifiable difference, writing that ‘the sentence only seldom’ exceeds ‘two or three lines

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at most’ in Nashe’s portions of Henry VI Part One (1965: 281), an observation echoed by Vickers, who elaborates that there are key differences ‘in preferred sentence lengths’ between the opening act and the remainder of the play. On his count Nashe averages a period every 1.8 lines in 1.1, while ‘Shakespeare’s scenes in 4.2–​4 have 48 periods, at an average length of 3.2 lines’ (Vickers, 2007: 332). My evidence suggests that Kyd wrote 4.3 and 4.4, but Vickers’s figures here nevertheless serve to show that the author of Act 1 had a very different verse style from his collaborators. John Dover Wilson identified ‘parallels with’ Nashe’s ‘pamphlets’ and asserted that Nashe and ‘the man who wrote 1 Henry VI, act I, stole their ideas from the same books’ (1952a: xxiii). He observed that Bedford’s ‘repulsive image’ of ‘mothers’ moistened eyes’ that ‘babes shall suck’ (1H6, 1.1.49) matches ‘Not raging Hecuba, whose hollow eyes /​Gave suck to fifty sorrows at one time’ (SLWT, lines 782–​3).1 To my eyes, if readers will forgive the pun, the image is so distinct as to provide an incontrovertible link between this play and Nashe’s hand. H. C. Hart identified another distinct parallel (1909: xxi) between Charles’s opening line, ‘Mars his true moving’ (1H6, 1.2.1), and Nashe’s Have with You to Saffron Walden (1596) –​both passages echo James Sandford’s 1569 translation of H. Cornelius Agrippa’s De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum –​in which Nashe states ‘you are as ignorant of the true movings of my Muse as the Astronomers are in the true movings of Mars, which to this day they could never attaine to’ (McKerrow, 1958: 20). Hart also recognised (1909: xxii) that Charles’s line ‘Was Mohammed inspired with a dove?’ (1H6, 1.3.119) parallels Nashe’s The Terrors of the Night (1594): ‘and the Dove wherewith the Turks hold Mohamet their Prophet to be inspired’ (Steane, 1972: 214). These lines appear to have been lifted from Henry Howard’s A Defensative against the Poyson of Supposed Prophecies (1583), which Shakespeare does not seem to have read. Another line that provides evidence for Nashe’s authorship is the allusion to ‘The rich-​ jewelled coffer of Darius’ (1H6, 1.8.25). Nashe writes of Darius in the line ‘following Darius in the Persian wars’ (SLWT, 595), while ‘The rich-​jewelled coffer’ (1H6, 1.8.25) refers to a coffer that Alexander the Great carried, containing the works of Homer. Nashe repeats this allusion in The Terrors of the Night: ‘devouring his jewel-​coffer’ (Steane, 1972: 222). I wish to

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offer some fresh evidence of Nashe’s phraseology in this play: in 1.8 we find the tetragram ‘shall hear how we’ in Alencon’s line ‘When they shall hear how we have played the men’ (1H6, 1.8.16), which matches ‘and you shall hear how we will purge’ (SLWT, 627). Such inconspicuous, ‘low-​level’ verbal formulations, unique in Elizabethan drama, negate the possibility of plagiarism, and it is unlikely that Nashe was conscious of the fact that this phrase formed part of his verbal lexicon. It is also worth quoting Vickers’s overview of words and phrases that provide supporting evidence for Nashe’s authorship and distinguish the play’s opening act from Shakespeare’s vocabulary: These include ‘otherwhiles’ (‘now and then’), which Shakespeare never used, but Nashe used nine times; ‘intermissive’ or ‘intermissively’ (1.1.88; Nashe, 2:140, 234); ‘at first dash’ (1.2.71; Nashe, 1:364, 3:16); ‘proditor’ or ‘proditoriously’ (1.3.31; Nashe, 3:210); ‘every Minute while’ (1.4.54) and ‘another-​ while’ (Nashe, 3:28); and ‘hungry-​starved’ (1.5.16; Nashe, 1:374, 2:306, 3:224, 3:225, 3:241). Nashe’s Act 1 also includes words used in un-​Shakespearean senses; compare Dover Wilson’s notes on ‘infused’ (1.2.85), ‘peeled’ (1.3.30), ‘rests’ (1.3.70), and ‘overpeer’ (1.4.11). (2007: 336)

The differences in vocabulary, combined with Nashe’s distinct phraseology and use of recondite sources, provide firm evidence for his authorship of Act 1 of Henry VI Part One. Nashe was certainly not the sole author of the original ‘Harey the vj’ play: attributionists over the years have tended to agree with Chambers that there are ‘several styles in the play’ (1930: 290), and that three authors (including Shakespeare) were involved. Whereas the studies I have surveyed have led to more or less universal acceptance of Nashe’s hand in this play, it is symptomatic of Kyd scholarship that he has not yet been fully recognised as a contributor, indeed the play’s main author, despite an extensive history of independent witnesses vouching for his authorship. In attribution scholarship, it is important to get a sense of the history, or historiography, of arguments for common authorship, in order to build up a portfolio of evidence. In the following pages I wish to show that the range of evidence for Kyd’s hand in this play is just as compelling as that adduced for Nashe, and to test the claims of scholars working in the pre-​electronic age using modern methods.

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Identifying Kyd’s hand in ‘Harey the vj’ Despite the small size of Kyd’s traditionally accepted corpus, and the fact that he has not received the same critical attention as his room-​mate Marlowe, the dramatist’s name has often been linked to the authorship of Henry VI Part One. F. G. Fleay suggested that ‘coincidences with the known work’ of Kyd ‘point to’ his part authorship (1886: 258), and Gregor Sarrazin identified similarities between the play and Kyd’s drama, particularly in Talbot and his son’s relationship (1897: 10), of which more shortly. J. M. Robertson recognised the ‘diction and versification of Kyd’ within the play (1930: 31). He assigned all of 2.5 to Kyd and identified Kyd’s hand in 2.1, 3.1, and 5.4, while Robertson’s colleague Marley Denwood, using ‘his uncommon powers of verbal and phrasal memory in the field of Elizabethan drama’ (Robertson, 1930: ix), identified Kyd’s hand in 5.6 (88–​9). Robertson was a variable attributionist, but many of his observations concerning Kyd’s authorial habits in this play were valid, as we shall soon see. In 1940, William Wells contended that Kyd’s ‘seems to have been the main hand’ in the play (1940: 219). Wells was a perceptive Kyd scholar, so it is disappointing that he did not elaborate on his claims here. Nevertheless, there is overwhelming evidence to support Kyd’s authorship of the latter four acts, which validates Wells’s theory that Kyd was the play’s main contributor. My findings support Brian Vickers’s more recent argument that Kyd was Nashe’s co-​author on the original ‘Harey the vj’ play (Kyd wrote the remaining four acts), and that Shakespeare added 2.4, 4.2, and 4.5 for the Chamberlain’s Men when that company acquired the book (2008b).

Kyd’s rhyming habits In 1905, James E. Routh Jr identified the ‘sporadic appearance’ in Kyd’s accepted plays ‘of three regular rime schemes: aca, where c is an unriming line; abab; and aaa’, which provided compelling evidence for Kyd’s authorship of Soliman and Perseda (1905: 49). Routh concluded that Soliman and Perseda is ‘at one with The Spanish Tragedy and Cornelia in its use of such unusual and whimsically varied rime schemes set at random in the texture of the verse’ (50). I offer a quantitative analysis of Kyd’s rhyming patterns in

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the next chapter, but for now we can turn our attention to evidence of the qualitative kind, the strongest of which can be found in the Bordeaux sequence of Henry VI Part One. To give just one example: Wells identified a distinct parallel (1939: 434) between King Leir’s ‘Deserves an everlasting memory, /​To be inrol’d in Chronicles of fame, /​By never-​dying perpetuity’ (KL, 1.70–​2), and Soliman and Perseda: ‘To be enrolled in the brass leaved book /​ Of never wasting perpetuitie’ (S&P, 1.3.3–​4). As far as I can see, no scholar has linked these parallel passages with Talbot’s rhyming speech in 4.7: ‘Anon from thy insulting tyranny, /​Coupled in bonds of perpetuity, /​Two Talbots winged through the lither sky /​In thy despite shall scape mortality’ (1H6, 4.7.19–​22). These examples suggest a single author’s repertoire of words, ideas, and rhyming habits. There is no significant internal evidence to support Gary Taylor’s argument that this speech is ‘characteristic of Shakespeare’ (1995: 167). Talbot’s grief for the loss of his son in this scene echoes The Spanish Tragedy, while the intensity of that character’s tragedy perhaps owes something to the influence on Kyd of Seneca’s Troades, in which Andromache grieves for the murder of her son Astyanax. Following his success with the father–​son relationship in The Spanish Tragedy, Kyd would have been well equipped to write the scenes dealing with Talbot and his son John, and this scene in particular was lauded by Nashe as part of the original ‘Harey the vj’ play. Internal and external evidence does not support the theory that Shakespeare was responsible for Talbot’s speech.

Kyd’s verse style Philip Timberlake’s study of feminine endings furnishes evidence for Kyd’s authorship. Timberlake recorded an overall range of 0.0–​ 17.5 (0.9–​6.3 in long scenes) in the portions that Vickers attributes to Kyd (1931: 85), which we can compare to Soliman and Perseda’s 0.0–​34.4 and Cornelia’s 8.1–​ 12.7. The range also corresponds to Kyd’s newly attributed plays: King Leir 0.0–​25.4, Arden of Faversham 0.9–​28.5, and Fair Em 0.0–​15.9. Timberlake pointed out that the figures for feminine endings in the play provided ‘good evidence’ that at least ‘two hands were concerned in the existing text’ (84). Kyd’s proposed scenes in Henry VI Part One (in my computations) average 4.7 per cent feminine endings, which would

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be high for Marlowe, whose individual plays reach a peak average of 3.7 per cent feminine endings for Edward II, which has an overall range in scenes of 0.0–​11.1. The pausation practices of the portions not composed by Nashe or Shakespeare also support an attribution to Kyd. Douglas Bruster (2015: 47) has applied Oras’s methodology of recording patterns ‘formed by all the pauses indicated by internal punctuation’ (Oras, 1960: 3) to sections by different authors in Henry VI Part One. Bruster provided only raw figures, so I have calculated the nine pausal position percentages for portions attributed to Kyd, in comparison to his sole-​authored plays (see Table 4.1). We can see that the overall pattern reveals a satisfying homogeneity in comparison to the figures for other Kyd plays. I also calculated the percentages for pauses in the first half of verse lines (i.e. positions 1 to 4), yielding a figure of 54.7 –​which we might compare to Cornelia’s 55.6 –​and, on even-​numbered syllables, 60.6. The latter percentage closely correlates with Cornelia’s 58.6, as well as with the newly attributed plays: 60.3 in the case of King Leir and 62.1 in Fair Em. These data usefully discriminate the portions of Henry VI Part One that have been attributed to Kyd from other dramatists, including Table 4.1  Ants Oras figures for pause patterns in Henry VI Part One and plays attributed to Kyd Play

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

The Spanish Tragedy

7.1 15.0

5.7 39.1 15.2 11.4 4.2

1.9

0.4

Soliman and Perseda

4.1

9.3

5.5 42.1 19.5 14.5 2.9

1.9

0.2

Cornelia

8.2 10.2

5.7 31.6 20.3 13.4 6.4

3.4

0.8

King Leir

13.3 13.7

4.2 36.6 14.0

8.7 5.1

3.9

0.4

Arden of Faversham

2.2

3.9 41.5 16.6 22.8 6.1

1.5

0

Fair Em

5.1 12.2 12.5 37.7 13.8 10.6 5.7

1.6

0.8

Henry VI Part One ‘Kyd’

5.9 12.9

0.0

0.6

5.3

5.5 30.4 19.6 12.5 7.8

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Marlowe, who never attains so low a figure for ‘first half’ pause patterns (Oras, 1960: 65). Taken as a whole, Henry VI Part One is one of just five Shakespeare plays in which there are stronger pauses after the fifth syllable than the sixth but, if we acknowledge that Kyd was responsible for large portions of the play, this is to be expected, given that almost all of the works attributed to him follow this pattern. In addition, Marina Tarlinskaja argues that the verse features of scenes Vickers attributes to Kyd resemble ‘Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy most of all’ (2014: 111). She demonstrates that these scenes share the same stress patterns as Kyd’s accepted plays, ‘with a “dip” on syllable six’, while ‘The ratio of enclitic micro-​phrases in Fair Em and “Kyd’s” scenes in 1 Henry VI is almost the same as in The Spanish Tragedy’ (102). She also cites the ‘use of clusters [bl], [gl], and [nr] as syllables, particularly in the middle of a word’, as an ‘Additional proof that’ the author of these portions of ‘1 Henry VI was Kyd’ (104). Tarlinskaja records an average of 5.3 run-​on lines in Nashe’s act, a figure comparable to Summer’s Last Will and Testament’s 2.8. These figures are much lower than Kyd’s scenes, which average 13.5 run-​ on lines and correspond to Cornelia’s figure of 13.6. Tarlinskaja’s statistical analyses of versification features thus reveal stylistic homogeneity between Kyd’s plays and the scenes attributed to him in Henry VI Part One.

Kyd’s stage directions In Chapter 1 I drew attention to the fact that Arden of Faversham and Fair Em share stage directions beginning ‘Here enters’. The possibility that such directions are due to common authorship is raised by the co-​ occurrence of a similar verbal formulation in a scene attributed to Kyd in Henry VI Part One: ‘Here entered Pucelle and her practisants’ (1H6, 3.3.3). MacDonald P. Jackson states that ‘Any attempt to “tumble” two actors from an upper playing area’ in the direction from Soliman and Perseda, ‘Then they are both tumbled down’ (S&P, 5.2.129 SD), or ‘the “top” that appears to be higher than “the walls” or “upper stage” or “gallery” and serves as a “tower” or “turret” in 1 Henry VI, 3.2.23–​30’, would have been ‘extremely hazardous’ (2014: 108). He also notes that the ‘stage direction in Soliman and Perseda about bearing the victims to the top

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of the tower echoes the dialogue, and the same phenomenon appears in Arden of Faversham’ (108). This phenomenon also appears in another scene attributed to Kyd in Henry VI Part One, when Bedford notes that the French Dauphin and Joan Pucelle did ‘Leap o’er the walls for refuge in the field’ (1H6, 2.2.25), which echoes the direction ‘The French soldiers leap o’er the walls in their shirts’ (2.1.39 SD). Although Jackson failed to draw the consequences of these facts, the distinctive stage directions found in these scenes of Henry VI Part One and Kyd’s attested as well as newly attributed sole-​authored plays provide evidence for common authorship.

Kyd’s linguistic habits In his thesis, Paul J. Vincent ‘demonstrated more clearly than ever before that Greene, Marlowe, and Peele played no part in the composition of harey the vj’, but he conceded that he ‘had little success in identifying the author of the bulk of that play’ (2005: 294). However, he noted that Shakespeare’s ‘Rose Plucking scene (2.4) is in no way distinguished from’ Kyd’s (by my argument) ‘2.2 and 2.5 by the frequency and inventiveness of its compound adjectives’ (190). Had Vincent provided a sustained analysis of Kyd’s dramas, he would have discovered that, unlike the candidates he rightly ruled out, Kyd was similar to Shakespeare in employing compound formations with some frequency and inventiveness. According to my calculations, Kyd’s scenes in Henry VI Part One average one compound adjective every 602 words, which is remarkably close to The Spanish Tragedy’s rate of one every 601 words, providing additional evidence for his hand in the play.

Kyd’s phraseology The evidence for rhyme, versification, idiosyncratic stage directions, and compound adjectives all points towards Kyd’s as the main hand in this play. But the evidential pièce de résistance is the degree to which the verbal fabric of the non-​Nashe or -​Shakespeare portions is woven out of Kyd’s lexical individuality. In Chapter 1 I offered an overview of Martin Mueller’s experiment on 318 early modern texts and the distribution of ‘two-​ play shared n-​grams’, which established that the six plays in Kyd’s proposed sole-​ authored

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canon fitted into the ‘expectations raised by the distribution’ of n-​ grams in same-​author plays. Mueller also demonstrated that Henry VI Part One and The Spanish Tragedy fit into ‘the framework of expectations’ for plays written by the same author: they are placed above the median with a percentage of 96 (Mueller, 2009a). In an alternative approach to n-​gram data, Mueller explains that the ‘interquartile range’ (a measure of variability, based on dividing data into quartiles) for plays by the same author, in his list of all pairs of plays involving Henry VI Part One, weighted according to the lengths of repetitions, is ‘between 17 and 50’, and that ‘anything over 51 is in the 90th percentile or higher’.2 Henry VI Part One and Soliman and Perseda are given a value of 67.22, while Henry VI Part One and The Spanish Tragedy have a value of 60.19. The fact that two of Kyd’s attested plays are within the 90th percentile for plays by the same author provides compelling evidence that Kyd had a substantial hand in the composition of Henry VI Part One.3 We saw in Chapter 3 that objective n-​gram data show Kyd and Marlowe’s phraseology to be strikingly similar, rendering them difficult to tell apart on a purely numerical basis, but Vincent’s wide-​ ranging study of this play nevertheless led him to conclude that Marlowe is ‘the candidate whose presence in 1 Henry VI is easiest to rule out’ (2005: 292), for ‘[n]‌ot the slightest trace of Marlowe’s hand was detected by’ his ‘exhaustive investigation’ (286). He noted that ‘[t]he fact that the first hundred lines of’ Peele’s ‘Edward I are very nearly as Marlovian as they are Peelean –​in terms of their Literature Online linkages –​provides another illustration of the pervasiveness of Marlowe’s dramatic vocabulary in the works of his contemporaries’ (292), thereby demonstrating that merely counting verbal matches with Marlowe texts was highly problematic for attribution purposes. Nonetheless, in 2016 the New Oxford Shakespeare team assigned the non-​ Shakespearian or -​ Nashean parts of this play to Marlowe and an unknown collaborator, even though, as Vincent established, Taylor’s ‘attribution of the remaining scenes of the play to a fourth author is not at all convincing’ (233). In one study favouring Marlowe’s authorship, Gary Taylor and John V. Nance examine samples, consisting of 173 words, and record the first and second word of a passage, then the second and third word, then the string of those first three words together … Each

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of those overlapping and interconnected verbal decisions is then mapped, horizontally, against a larger linguistic system, in this case the sociolect of 80 surviving play texts written between the building of the Theatre in 1576 and the formation of the Chamberlain’s Men in mid-​1594. (2015: 34)

Taylor and Nance do not subject collocations or n-​grams to qualitative analysis, which results in a mere accumulation of parallels, many of which are in fact meaningless combinations of words. They select samples from two of the putatively Kyd scenes in Henry VI Part One and state that ‘the strength of Marlowe’s claim’ to 5.3 ‘is evident: his nine unique parallels almost double the combined total for all five alternative candidates. Moreover, the Marlowe parallels come from six different plays (more plays than the other five candidates combined)’ (42). We might ask ourselves: if Kyd is the author of the samples that Taylor and Nance examine in Henry VI Part One, should we be surprised to discover a large number of word strings unique to Marlowe? Kyd and Marlowe shared a room in 1591, and it is therefore probable that they also shared a reading knowledge of each other’s works. A matrix of interrelations between their plays has been identified by several scholars, such as Charles Crawford (1906: 101–​30) and Alfred Hart, the latter arguing that the extent of Marlowe’s borrowings from Kyd in Edward II amounts to plagiarism, and ‘exceeds anything found in the most corrupt play of that period’ (1942: 388). Vickers notes that ‘earlier scholars were correct in noticing Marlowe’s debts to Kyd’s plays, only they vastly under-​estimated them’ (2016: 52). Taylor and Nance are unable to identify ‘a single unique parallel’ (2015: 43) between Kyd’s acknowledged dramatic corpus and Joan’s speech. However, Marcus Dahl and I have shown that Taylor and Nance miss around half a dozen unique matches with Kyd’s three accepted plays in their chosen 173-​word sample (Freebury-​Jones and Dahl, 2018). Furthermore, we show that when uncontested Kyd samples in The Spanish Tragedy and Soliman and Perseda are tested, Marlowe is the more likely candidate for authorship according to Taylor and Nance’s number-​specific criteria. We conclude that the samples examined by Taylor and Nance are far too small for reliable results. It seems fair to say that such Lilliputian chunks of text cannot give a reliable indication of the authorship of a complete play, or a substantial section of a co-​authored play.

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I submit that no attribution made using this method can be deemed reliable, and we can therefore discount Taylor and Nance’s conclusion that ‘microattribution’ reveals Marlowe’s hand in Henry VI Part One (or indeed the hands of unlikely authors such as Thomas Watson, more on whom later), as opposed to Kyd’s.4 Crucially, while we should expect verbal commonalities between Kyd and Marlowe, close study of repeated phrases reveals that the Kyd matches with 5.3 are of superior quality. Joan’s imperative ‘O, hold me not with silence overlong’ (1H6, 5.3.13) parallels Charles’s line in Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris (1593): ‘O, hold me up, my sight begins to fail’ (MP, 13.13).5 But unlike Joan, Charles in his dying speech is requesting to be physically held up. The words are the same but the context of utterance is dissimilar. The collocation of ‘see’ with ‘forsake me’ in Joan’s line ‘See, they forsake me’ (1H6, 5.3.24) co-​occurs with Barabas’s speech in The Jew of Malta (1589): ‘For I had rather die than see her thus. /​Wilt thou forsake me too in my distress’ (JM, 1.2.354–​5). Barabas is mortified that his daughter has been admitted to the sisterhood, whereas Joan, who uses the verb ‘see’ in the imperative mood, laments that the fiends have deserted her. The contextual similarities here are vague and could be the result of influence, or indeed coincidence, rather than authorship. Joan’s line ‘I’ll lop a member off’ (1H6, 5.3.36) uniquely parallels Kyd’s Soliman and Perseda: ‘They lopt a collop of my tendrest member’ (S&P, 4.2.23). The contextual connection with Joan’s speech here is of particular interest given that the reference to ‘collop’ (a piece of meat) is repeated by Joan’s father in another scene that Vickers assigns to Kyd: ‘God knows, thou art a collop of my flesh’ (1H6, 5.6.18). The iteration of the idiosyncratic phrase ‘a collop of my’ provides a closer textual connection between Henry VI Part One and Soliman and Perseda than any text in the Marlowe canon. We might also compare Joan’s offer of sacrifice ‘Where I was wont to feed you with my blood’ (1H6, 5.3.35) to Cornelia’s imperative: ‘Come, wrathfull Furies, with your Ebon locks, /​And feede your selves with mine enflamed blood’ (Corn., 5.1.342–​ 3). The almost identical wording, combined with the analogous context of a female character appealing to supernatural forces, is highly distinctive. My analysis of the verbal texture of Henry VI Part One provides overwhelming evidence for Kyd’s habits of mind and idiosyncratic

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verbal combinations. This chapter presents a selection of the evidence for Kyd’s lexicon and dramaturgy in the latter four acts of Henry VI Part One, and aims to broaden our understanding of that playwright’s individuality through close study of the ways in which Kyd integrates his distinct phraseology –​occurring no more than five times in plays first performed in the London public theatres during the period 1580–​1600 –​into corresponding plot situations and for the purpose of characterisation. Kyd’s first scene (by my argument) in Henry VI Part One, 2.1, reveals the dramatist’s inclination to recycle elements from his earlier plays. A French Sergeant and his band, along with two Sentinels, guard Orleans. The First Sentinel complains that they are ‘Constrained to watch in darkness, rain, and cold’ (1H6, 2.1.7) while ‘others sleep upon their quiet beds’ (2.1.6). In King Leir, the Captain of the Watch and two fellow watchmen guard the ramparts of a British town. The Captain informs the watchmen that My honest friends, it is your turne to night, To watch in this place, neere about the Beacon, And vigilantly have regard, If any fleet of ships passe hitherward (KL, 27.2434–​7)

while the Sergeant in Henry VI Part One tells the Sentinels to ‘take your places and be vigilant. /​If any noise or soldier you perceive /​ Near to the walls’ (1H6, 2.1.1–​3). The dramatic situation is practically identical in these plays. The French are easily surprised when the English mount their small-​scale attack, just as the Watch, who have been drinking on duty, are easily surprised by Mumford in King Leir. The trigram ‘to watch in’ thus does duty in a remarkably similar context, and both passages contain the lexical choices ‘near’ and ‘vigilant’, which cluster in no other play of the period, suggesting that both scenes belong to the same dramatist’s lexicon of collocations. By examining complex patterns of this kind according to the surrounding linguistic texture in which they co-​occur, we can see that they are of a different character from the verbal borrowings explored earlier in this book and negate possibilities such as plagiarism, imitation, or coincidence. J. M. Robertson considered the authorship of 2.5 to be ‘the hardest nut of all to crack’, but he came to the conclusion that ‘the scene is by Kyd’ (1930: 97). Robertson identified the ‘amorphous

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quality of feeling and diction’ shared by the scene and Kyd’s drama (97), as well as ‘actual homologies of individual phrase and figure in the Mortimer scene and Kyd’s known works’ (102). He argued that it is Kyd’s ‘metre, diction, and manner that stamp the Mortimer death scene’ (106) and acknowledged that ‘Kyd stands out from the rest as the man with the strongest “instinct” for variety and nexus in dramatic construction’ (107), thus anticipating Vincent’s judgement that the then unidentified third author’s ‘real strength’ was ‘his plotting ability’ (2005: 293). In this scene, Edmund Mortimer is brought in a chair by his Keepers, for his feet are ‘Unable to support this clay’ (1H6, 2.5.14). This line parallels Fair Em: ‘With settled patience to support this chance’ (FE, 2.22). Close textual analysis of these passages enables us to identify similarities in language and situation that reveal a common author’s mental associations. Mortimer speaks to the ‘Kind keepers of my weak decaying age’ (1H6, 2.5.1) and notes that he has ‘no other comfort’ (2.5.16) but the prospect of death, while Em offers ‘comfort to’ her father’s ‘aged soul’ (FE, 2.23). In both speeches, the elderly characters discuss comfort and age with their younger relatives. These semantic clusters seem to have been stimulated by the analogous contexts of situation, for Mortimer is imprisoned and denied his birthright by the Lancastrians, while Sir Thomas Goddard has been forced to flee his native home and disguise himself as a miller. Plantagenet enters and tells Mortimer to ‘lean thine aged back against mine arm, /​And in that ease I’ll tell thee my dis-​ease’ (1H6, 2.5.43–​4). This is a favourite verbal trick of Kyd’s, who frequently employs the rhetorical devices polyptoton (the repetition of words derived from the same root) and antanaclasis (the repetition of a word with different meanings in each case), as we can see in such identically structured lines as: ‘Then rest we here a while in our unrest’ (Sp. T., 1.3.5), ‘Dissembling quiet in unquietness’ (3.13.30), and ‘Rest thee, for I will sit to see the rest’ (3.16.37). Robertson pointed out (1930: 102) that Plantagenet’s lines recall ‘Come in, old man’ and ‘Lean on my arm’ (3.13.169–​70). Plantagenet complains about Somerset, who ‘did upbraid me with my father’s death; /​ Which obloquy set bars before my tongue, /​Else with the like I had requited him’ (1H6, 2.5.48–​50). These lines share a distinct verbal pattern with The Spanish Tragedy: ‘To entertaine my father with the like’ (Sp. T., 4.1.64). Mortimer tells Plantagenet of the rival claims

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to the throne. He explains that ‘I was the next by birth and parentage’ (1H6, 2.5.73). Here Kyd is drawing upon the same verbal formulae he had used during Hieronimo’s account of English history. The King asks him: ‘But say, Hieronimo, what was the next?’ (Sp. T., 1.5.35). Mortimer speaks of ‘John of Gaunt’ (1H6, 2.5.77) and says: ‘But as the rest, so fell that noble earl’ (2.5.90). Hieronimo explains: ‘Was, as the rest, a valiant Englishman, /​Brave John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster’ (Sp. T., 1.5.48–​9). Plantagenet’s lines ‘Thy grave admonishments prevail with me. /​ But yet methinks’ (1H6, 2.5.98–​9) match ‘Let dangers goe, thy warre shall be with me /​ But such a warre’ (Sp. T., 2.2.32–​3) in terms of lexical congruence as well as the symmetrical placement of the three-​word unit ‘with me but’. Following Mortimer’s death on stage, Plantagenet determines ‘I myself /​ Will see his burial’ (1H6, 2.5.120–​1), which matches the contextually similar declarative ‘My selfe will see the body borne from hence’ (S&P, 2.1.337) in Soliman and Perseda. Modern attribution methods therefore validate Robertson’s argument for Kyd’s authorship. In the opening scene of Act 3, Kyd dramatises a confrontation between Gloucester and Winchester. This scene duplicates the quarrel between Gloucester and Winchester from Nashe’s 1.3. However, Nashe depicts Winchester as a cardinal, whereas Kyd depicts him as a bishop; he is not promoted until Act 5. Unlike Nashe, Kyd recognised that ‘delaying the elevation of Winchester to the rank of cardinal until 5.1’ was ‘the dramatically more effective alternative’ (Vincent, 2005: 106). Act 3, Scene 1 features highly patterned, rhetorical language indicative of Kyd’s hand, particularly during Gloucester and Winchester’s verbal sparring. For example, we find Kyd’s rapid repartee when Gloucester asks ‘Am I not Protector, saucy priest?’ (1H6, 3.1.46), to which Winchester retorts ‘And am not I a prelate of the Church?’ (3.1.47), while parallelism (the device otherwise known as isocolon, or parison) occurs in Somerset’s line ‘Methinks my lord should be religious’ (3.1.55), and Warwick’s response ‘Methinks his lordship should be humbler’ (3.1.57). Kyd had made something of a speciality out of quarrel scenes by 1592, and H. C. Hart seems to have been justified when he praised the ‘dignity and continuity of purpose’ in this scene (1909: xvii). Dover Wilson identified fundamental differences

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in characterisation between Henry VI Part One and Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part Two. For example, Gloucester ‘is very conscious of his responsibilities and exercising the greatest restraint upon his feelings at moments of extreme provocation’ in Henry VI Part Two, but in Henry VI Part One ‘he shows neither dignity nor self-​control, but conducts himself like a common brawler’ (1952a: 155). Furthermore, the scene, which opens with Kyd’s favourite device of having a character tear up a document (we might recall the snatching and tearing of letters/​documents in The Spanish Tragedy, King Leir, and Fair Em), contains a number of matching collocations with other plays ascribed to Kyd. Henry’s charge ‘To hold your slaught’ring hands and keep the Peace’ (1H6, 3.1.90) matches Lorenzo’s line ‘To smooth and keepe the murder secret’ (Sp. T., 3.10.10). Both lines open with the infinite marker ‘To’, and there is a distinct association of the three-​word phrase ‘and keep the’ with the synonyms ‘murder’ and ‘slaughter’. The Third Servingman’s line ‘Inferior to none but to his Majesty’ (1H6, 3.1.99) parallels Cornelia: ‘For as I am inferior to none’ (Corn., 4.2.96). However, this line also matches ‘yet she is inferior to none’ (Shr., Induction 2.66) from Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. Nevertheless, if we examine the dramatic context of the Third Servingman’s speech we find a similar thought process in the line ‘And have our bodies slaughtered by thy foes’ (1H6, 3.1.104), and a subsequent line in Cornelia: ‘And Crowes are feasted with theyr carcases’ (Corn., 4.2.99). In both passages the three-​word unit ‘inferior to none’ is employed in the context of civil dissension, as ‘Th’impatient people runne along the streets /​And in a route against thy gates they rushe’ (4.2.78–​9). The Kyd match is therefore much closer than the match with Shakespeare, thereby demonstrating the importance of reading shared phrases in context. There is another verbal link between the Servingman’s line ‘Inferior to none but to his Majesty’ (1H6, 3.1.99) and Fair Em: ‘yield the other to none but to my father, as I am bound by duty’ (FE, 16.49–​50). The Servingman’s subsequent lines in Henry VI Part One, ‘And ere that we will suffer such a prince, /​ So kind a father of the commonweal’ (1H6, 3.1.100–​1), suggest a common author’s networks of association, as he activates what Ian Lancashire refers to as ‘schemata in long term-​memory’ (2010: 4) and relates concepts such as duty, inferiority, and fatherhood.

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Gloucester entreats Winchester’s skirmishing Servingmen: And if you love me as you say you do, Let me persuade you to forbear awhile. (3.1.107–​8)

In the Induction to Soliman and Perseda, Death orders Love and Fortune: I commaund you to forbeare this place. (S&P, 1.1.4)

Perillus shares a long collocation with Gloucester’s line in King Leir: O, if you love me, as you do professe. (KL, 24.2124)

In Arden of Faversham, Arden tells Michael: Get you to bed; and, if you love my favour, Let me have no more such pranks as these. (AF, 4.103–​4)

The fact that these two lines delivered by Gloucester share rare matches with half of the plays in Kyd’s ‘enlarged’ sole-​authored canon is notable. Moreover, Gloucester’s aside ‘Ay, but I fear me with a hollow heart’ (1H6, 3.1.139) parallels Fair Em: ‘it would go very near /​her heart, I fear me’ (FE, 16.7–​8). There can be little doubt that this scene in Henry VI Part One is woven out of the verbal fabric of Kyd’s accepted plays, and that its language also pertains to the plays newly ascribed to him. The numerous verbal collocations and the convergence of thoughts in this scene therefore reveal a single author’s stylistic fingerprints. My findings suggest that Kyd was responsible for most of the Bordeaux sequence of Henry VI Part One: 4.3 to 4.7, with the exception of 4.5, which, as we shall see, was intended by Shakespeare as a replacement for 4.6. Dover Wilson argued that there is a ‘blend of two distinct styles’ in 4.3 (1952a: 178), while Mincoff suggested that ‘IV.iii.1–​16 in particular’ could have been preserved by Shakespeare when he rewrote the sequence for a revival (1965: 283). Indeed, the opening sixteen lines display outmoded authorial habits, such as the -​ed inflection –​which is often given syllabic value in Kyd’s plays –​in ‘discoverèd’ (1H6, 4.3.6), ‘promisèd’ (4.3.10), and ‘renownèd’ (4.3.12). My evidence suggests that the entire scene should be attributed to Kyd. Vincent argues that Sir William Lucy’s ‘name marks him as a peculiarly Shakespearian character’ (2005: 247), while Elihu Pearlman suggests that Shakespeare altered speech headings in the Bordeaux sequence and transformed

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a depersonalised Messenger and/​or Herald into Lucy (1996: 21). However, Lucy can be found in both Edward Hall’s The Union of the Families of Lancastre and York (1548) and Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles, where he reportedly made great haste to join the Battle of Northampton, which took place in July 1460, but arrived too late and was killed with an axe by his wife’s Yorkist lover. Kyd could have simply drawn the name from his sources; there is no evidence to suggest that he is a Shakespearian character designed, as Vincent puts it, ‘to honour a Stratford worthy’ (2005: 249). Lukas Erne notes that Kyd ‘does not construct his plots to represent events with naturalistic fidelity, but [does so] to highlight a process of cause and effect’ (2001: 172), while Alan C. Dessen has pointed out that the dramatist responsible for Lucy’s speeches in 4.3 and 4.4 ‘plays fast and loose with neo-​classic sense of place or scene division by having’ Lucy ‘provide two parallel pleas’ to York and Somerset ‘and a soliloquy in between without leaving the stage’ (1984: 94). I suggest that these scenes reveal Kyd’s ‘emphasis on haste’ and that –​as Erne observes in The Spanish Tragedy and Soliman and Perseda –​the action ‘forms a causal sequence. The causality of the action rather than a precise duration is expressed through the apparent temporal juxtaposition of the different scenes’ (2001: 191–​2). Lucy disrupts scenic illusion and, like Kyd’s Revenge and the Ghost of Andrea, casts an ominous shadow over the play’s characters, as ‘sundered friends greet in the hour of death’ (1H6, 4.3.42). That exact phraseology recurs in Soliman and Perseda and nowhere else in drama of the period: ‘Even in the hour of death’ (S&P, 5.4.96). The presence of this Senecan character throughout the Bordeaux sequence suggests that he was always part of Kyd’s dramatic intentions, for he is given choric authority. Like Exeter in 3.1 and 4.1, who despairs of this ‘hapless time’ (1H6, 3.1.205), just as Cornelia uniquely laments the ‘haples time of hopes expired’ (Corn., 5.1.404), Lucy is structurally prominent and is left alone on stage to voice his concerns about England to the audience. Vincent claims that the character in 4.7 has ‘a different expectation of the battle’s outcome from that of the Lucy of 4.3 and 4.4’ (2005: 250), but this is not the case: in 4.4 Lucy laments that ‘Too late comes rescue’, for Talbot ‘is ta’en or slain’ (1H6, 4.4.42), while in 4.7 he comes ‘to know what prisoners thou hast ta’en’ (4.7.56). I therefore disagree with Vincent’s argument that ‘inconsistencies generated by

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his appearance in 4.7’ show that ‘Lucy was clearly not part of the original conception of the sequence and it is just as clear that the copy for F [the First Folio] presented an incomplete authorial revision of apparently two very minor roles into that of Sir William Lucy’ (135). Even if we consider Lucy an inconsistent character, as Vincent does, he still follows ‘an identifiable’ Senecan (and Kydian) ‘pattern, which consists of a movement’ on the part of the Chorus ‘from an almost complete detachment from the tragic events to a total identification with them’ (Coral, 2007: 17). He grieves for Talbot and wishes ‘that I could but call these dead to life’ (4.7.80). Furthermore, as Dover Wilson pointed out: ‘In the first scene of Part II Gloucester gives a list of those who had shed their blood in France to preserve what Henry V had won, and overlooks the name of Talbot altogether.’ Gloucester does, however, list Somerset and York, ‘who are represented in Part I as factious traitors responsible for Talbot’s death’ (1952a: xiii). These fundamental differences between the traitorous Somerset and York of Henry VI Part One and the celebrated figures in Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part Two suggest that Shakespeare was not responsible for these scenes in the first part. In 5.5 Suffolk captures Margaret, and the play takes a peculiar detour into the genre of romantic comedy. Vincent points out that the episode ‘echoes the dramaturgy, diction and prosody’ of 2.3, in which the Countess captures Talbot, and that ‘[i]‌n addition to the dramaturgical correspondences, and the use of split verse lines which is rare in the play, there is a telling duplication of phrasing and vocabulary in the immediate surrounds of the two exchanges’ (2005: 98). I agree with Vincent that this episode must have been ‘conceived and executed by the same playwright’ (99). Thomas H. McNeal observed in 1958 that ‘the number of devices common to the meeting of Cordella and the Gallian King in Leir and the meeting of Margaret and Suffolk in I Henry VI is impressive’, and that alongside ‘parallels in character and action’ there are ‘a few rather definite likenesses of phrase and thought which are not so easy to explain as coincidence or as mere Elizabethan repetition’ (1958a: 4). I propose that the explanation for these ‘definite likenesses’ is that the dramatist responsible for King Leir was also responsible for the wooing scene in Henry VI Part One. We might contrast Kyd’s characterisation of Margaret in Henry VI Part One with her character in Shakespeare’s plays:

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Margaret in the plays which follow Part I completely lacks any damsel-​in-​distress appeal. No longer is her range limited and confused by a romantic interlude designed originally for the lovely Cordella. She is as Shakespeare first found her: ‘England’s bloody scourge’ of Part II; ‘She-​wolf of France’, with a ‘tiger’s heart wrapt in a woman’s hide’ of Part III; and that ‘hateful wither’d hag’ of Richard III. We are certainly surprised at her excessive duplicity when she appears as Henry’s stormy queen. (McNeal, 1958a: 8)

Inconsistencies in Margaret’s character can be explained by the hypothesis that Kyd, and not Shakespeare, was responsible for this episode in the first part of the trilogy. Vincent is surely right in concluding that ‘The playwright who conceived the Suffolk and Margaret of 1 Henry VI could hardly have had 2 Henry VI before him’ (2005: 100). This scene shares Kyd’s ‘concern’, to adopt Bart van Es’s phraseology, ‘with elaborate symmetries and dissonances of language’ and ‘patterns of chiasmus, paronomasia, and echo’ (2013: 68). Kyd uses stichomythia as a vehicle for Margaret’s unheeded asides and Suffolk’s soliloquy. The verbal interplay between these characters closely resembles the line-​by-​line exchanges between Lubeck and Mariana in Scene 5 of Fair Em. Lubeck finds himself in a similar situation to Suffolk when he is forced to woo by proxy his own lover, Mariana, for William the Conqueror. Furthermore, the quality and quantity of matching collocations and thought-​parallels with Kyd point unequivocally to his hand. Suffolk tells Margaret that he will ‘touch thee but with reverent hands /​ And lay them gently on thy tender side’ (1H6, 5.5.3–​4). Kyd also collocates the formulaic line-​opening ‘And lay them’ with the preposition ‘with’ in Cornelia: ‘And lay them levell with the charged earth’ (Corn., 5.1.281). The symmetrical patterning in these corresponding verse lines furnishes additional evidence for single authorship. Kyd’s precise imagery can be seen in Suffolk’s lines ‘Be not offended, nature’s miracle, /​Thou art allotted to be ta’en by me. /​So doth the swan his downy cygnets save’ (1H6, 5.6.10–​12), and Soliman’s speech: I should have deemd them Junoes goodly Swannes, Or Venus milke white Doves, so milde they are. And so adornd with beauties miracle. (S&P, 4.1.70–​2)

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Soliman, like Suffolk, is bewitched by his captive. He decides that Perseda’s ‘captivitie may turne to blisse’ (4.1.75). Suffolk is tempted to ‘woo her, yet I dare not speak’ (1H6, 5.3.21). Kyd also employs this word combination in Soliman and Perseda: ‘The rest I dare not speake, it is so bad’ (S&P, 5.2.53). Furthermore, Suffolk’s aside ‘Before thou make a trial of her love’ (1H6, 5.5.32) shares a unique collocation of words with the lines ‘But make a challenge of her love with me’ (KL, 3.262), and ‘Nor make no question of her love to thee’ (AF, 1.49). Suffolk eventually decides to win Margaret for King Henry. Here he resembles Lorenzo and Mosby, Kyd’s earlier villainous matchmakers. Margaret responds ‘I am unworthy to be Henry’s wife’ (1H6, 5.5.78). Leir tells the Messenger: ‘I am unworthy for to live’ (KL, 19.1587). Suffolk seeks Margaret’s father’s consent: ‘We’ll crave a parley to confer with him’ (1H6, 5.5.86). This line closely parallels Fair Em: ‘We are come to confer with you’ (FE, 10.3). Suffolk tells Margaret’s father that ‘Thy daughter shall be wedded to my king’ (1H6, 5.5.93). The trigram ‘thy daughter shall’ does duty in an identical dramatic situation in Fair Em. Valingford promises that ‘Father Miller, thy daughter shall have honor by granting me her love’ (FE, 16.37–​8). Moreover, the tetragram,‘be wedded to my’ is unique to Cornelia: ‘But if yee once be wedded to my love’ (Corn., 2.1.71). We find a neat pattern in the match ‘And those two counties I will undertake’ (1H6, 5.5.114) with ‘And those two Scipios’ (Corn., 2.1.262), while Suffolk’s lines ‘in traffic of a King. /​ And yet’ (1H6, 5.5.120–​1) also parallel Cornelia: ‘And liveth subject to a king. /​ And yet’ (Corn., 2.1.381–​2). Suffolk determines to return to England and ‘make this marriage to be solemnised’ (1H6, 5.5.124). In The Spanish Tragedy, the King of Spain tells Don Ciprian to ‘Advise thy King to make this marriage up, /​For strengthening of our late confirmed league’ (Sp. T., 2.3.10–​11). Suffolk will ensure that the marriage goes ahead by soliciting ‘Henry with’ Margaret’s ‘wondrous praise’ (1H6, 5.5.146). The bigram ‘wondrous praise’ is employed as a line-​ending in King Leir as well: the Gallian King also heads to England ‘to see if flying fame /​Be not too prodigal in the wondrous praise’ (KL, 4.345–​6). H. C. Hart noted that the word ‘princely’ is repeated ‘[f]‌ive times in’ this ‘one scene’, and that ‘In Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy’ the Ambassador ‘repeats “kingly” three or four times in a few lines’ (1909: 144); the

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word is repeated three times by my count (in 3.12.32–​47). This is hardly clinching evidence for Kyd’s authorship, but when we take it together with the other evidence presented here we can be confident in the ascription. Incidentally, the one appearance of the adjective ‘kingly’ in Henry VI Part One occurs during this scene (1H6, 5.5.119). At the conclusion of the play, Suffolk is left alone on stage ‘With hope to find the like event in love’ (1H6, 5.7.105). The contiguous word sequence ‘With hope to’ co-​occurs with Cornelia, in which Kyd also employs it as a formulaic line-​opening: ‘With hope to have him be reviv’d by them’ (Corn., 2.1.248). Kyd repeats this word sequence (we might also note the parallel of thought in ‘reviv’d’ and ‘rise’) in the line ‘Descends to hell, with hope to rise againe’ (3.1.146). Suffolk tells the audience that ‘Margaret shall now be queen and rule the king’ (1H6, 5.7.107). This line shares the rare three-​word unit ‘rule the king’ with Ragan’s speech in King Leir: ‘I rule the King of Cambria as I please’ (KL, 11.930). It seems that Kyd drew upon his mental repertoire of collocations in order to represent both Suffolk and Ragan as Machiavellian power-​seekers. The interrelations explored here prove beyond reasonable doubt that the dramatic language of these portions derives from the author of The Spanish Tragedy, Soliman and Perseda, and Cornelia, and that that language is indistinguishable from King Leir, Arden of Faversham, and Fair Em. I now wish to show that studies of Shakespeare’s contributions to Henry VI Part One, which served to transform Nashe and Kyd’s play from a paean to Lord Talbot into a part of the Wars of the Roses sequence, are also mutually reinforcing.

Shakespeare’s hand in Henry VI Part One The dispute between Plantagenet and Somerset within the Temple Garden has been attributed to Shakespeare by generations of scholars, beginning with William Spalding, who suggested that ‘Shakespeare may have written a single scene’ in ‘The pretended First Part of King Henry VI’, and that that scene must have been ‘Act II. Scene 4. The plucking of the roses’ (1833: 8). Act 2, Scene 4 exemplifies Shakespeare’s early stylistic and metrical characteristics.

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Philip Timberlake recorded an average of 18.5 per cent feminine endings in this scene. Kyd’s 2.5 (containing a total of 121 verse lines according to Timberlake) is around the same length as the Temple Garden scene (124 lines), and yet it has a considerably lower percentage of 3.3 (1931: 85). Timberlake recorded twenty-​four feminine endings in 2.4 and just four in the subsequent scene. Similarly, 3.2 has a total of 130 lines, and yet it averages 3.8 per cent feminine endings. Timberlake’s data strongly suggest that these scenes were written by different dramatists. Shakespeare consistently used a higher proportion of feminine endings than any of his Elizabethan contemporaries, including Kyd, who appears to have been the innovator. According to my calculations, the three Shakespeare scenes average 15.5 per cent feminine endings, which is high for Kyd but strikingly close to the 15.3 per cent that Timberlake found in The Comedy of Errors and the 16.8 per cent for Richard III. The phraseological correspondences between this scene and Shakespeare’s plays are legion: for instance, when Plantagenet enters and asks ‘what means this silence’ (1H6, 2.4.1), his interrogative matches Buckingham’s in Richard III: ‘what meant this wilful silence?’ (R3, 3.7.28). Plantagenet continues thus: ‘Then say at once if I maintained the truth’ (1H6, 2.4.5). This speech shares a unique line-​opening in pre-​1601 drama with Romeo and Juliet’s ‘Then say at once what thou dost know in this’ (Rom., 5.3.227), and Richard III’s ‘Then say at once, what is it thou requests?’ (R3, 2.1.99). Plantagenet requests that those who believe he has pleaded truth ‘From off this briar pluck a white rose with me’ (1H6, 2.4.30). Somerset asks those who side with him to ‘Pluck a red rose from off this thorn with me’ (2.4.33). The rare three-​word sequence ‘from off this’ can also be found in Shakespeare’s King John: ‘Would I might never stir from off this place’ (Jn, 1.1.145). Kyd associates the bigram ‘from off’ with the subjects’ arms in the lines ‘This scarfe I pluckt from off his liveles arme’ (Sp. T., 1.4.42), and ‘How got he this from of Lucinas arme’ (S&P, 2.2.10). Here we can perceive different habits of mind. The match with King John is closer, for Shakespeare associates this word string with ‘a rose’, as we can see in the Bastard’s line ‘That in mine ear I dare not stick a rose’ (Jn, 1.1.142). An examination of verbal repetitions in 2.4 therefore gives us an insight into Shakespeare’s associative memory.

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It seems likely that Shakespeare added 2.4 to the playbook for the Chamberlain’s Men around 1594. Vincent provides an overview of some of the inconsistencies caused by the insertion of this scene into the old ‘Harey the vj’ text: If 2.4 was not part of the original conception of the play, or more precisely, if scenes 2.3 and 2.5 were written before 2.4, Richard Plantagenet would presumably have appeared for the first time in the play in 2.5. There are strong indicators in the text that originally this was indeed so. It seems that as far as the author of 2.5 was concerned, not only Mortimer but also Plantagenet was new to the audience. At line 2 Mortimer introduces himself as ‘dying Mortimer’ and repeats his name in full, ‘Edmund Mortimer’ in line 7. He asks for his ‘nephew’ (17) and the keeper answers, ‘Richard Plantagenet, my lord, will come.’ (2005: 113)

Vincent elaborates that in 2.5 ‘Mortimer is deliberately named twice, Richard Plantagenet is named in full twice and twice more as Richard only’, and that ‘The dramatist is obviously introducing both of them to the audience as new characters. If the Tower scene had always preceded the Rose Plucking scene, in which Richard is the central character, there would be no need for such deliberate repetition’ (114). Vincent provides an enlightening hypothesis on Shakespeare’s methods of revision: [O]‌ne can easily identify the seeds which Shakespeare took from the older 2.5 and germinated into the Temple Garden of 2.4. Lines 45–​ 50 of the Tower scene refer to a quarrel between York and Somerset arising from an ‘argument upon a case’ (45) and are not so much an echo of 2.4 as an explanation for Richard’s desire to hear the full story of his father’s death. This passage, it would seem, together with the keeper’s earlier speech telling Mortimer that they had ‘sent unto the Temple, unto his chamber’ (19) presented Shakespeare with the basic situation and action for the Rose Plucking scene. (115)

Vincent also highlights ‘the discontinuity between the Vernon who appears in 2.4 and the one who takes the stage in 3.4 and 4.1. In each of the latter two scenes a private disagreement between Vernon and Basset disrupts the proceedings of Henry’s court. On both occasions their quarrelling is childish and utterly devoid of wit’, while Shakespeare ‘was not concerned to link the discord of England’s nobles with that of their servants’, and ‘all of the parts

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in 2.4 are for learned and witty nobles and gentlemen’ (116). Dover Wilson suggested that ‘the brawls between Vernon and Basset’ were ‘clearly introduced to prepare us for the Wars of the Roses’ (1952a: x). However, the contrast between the intelligent dialogue delivered by the ‘Good Master Vernon’ (1H6, 2.4.43) of Shakespeare’s addition and the childish quarrelling in Kyd’s scenes indicates different authors’ hands. Kyd seems to have made some effort to link his portions with Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays, for roses are mentioned in 4.1. Basset tells the court that Vernon mocked him by saying that ‘the sanguine colour of the leaves /​Did represent my master’s blushing cheeks’ (4.1.92–​3). Nonetheless, Kyd’s use of colour symbolism to foreshadow England’s internal conflict strikes me as comparatively clumsy, whereas the Temple Garden scene, in its depiction of the original plucking of red and white roses which led to the York–​Lancaster conflict, fully transforms ‘Harey the vj’ into a play about the Wars of the Roses. In 4.2 Talbot orders the General of Bordeaux to yield the town. However, the General informs Talbot that he is surrounded. Shakespeare confronts Talbot with an ominously strong opponent, thereby marking his imminent defeat. Chambers asserted that the ‘unrhymed Talbot scene’ was ‘written’ by Shakespeare ‘in or later than 1594’ (1930: 1.291), while Marco Mincoff suggested that this scene was a later insertion, for it ‘is in a style distinctly different from’ Nashe and his co-​author’s portions (1976: 82). The verbal fabric of this scene is also distinctly Shakespeare’s, as we can verify by using modern corpus linguistic methods. The General refers to Talbot as ‘Our nation’s terror and their bloody scourge, /​ The period of thy tyranny approacheth’ (1H6, 4.2.16–​17). These lines share a similar construction with ‘Outcast of Naples, England’s bloody scourge! /​ The sons of York’ (2H6, 5.1.116–​17). The General tells the English that ‘Ten thousand French have ta’en the sacrament’ (1H6, 4.2.28). This tetragram recurs in Richard II (1595), in the exact same place within the verse line: ‘A dozen of them here have ta’en the sacrament’ (R2, 5.2.97). The scene also contains one of Shakespeare’s favourite quibbles in Talbot’s lines ‘Sell every man his life as dear as mine /​ And they shall find dear deer of us, my friends’ (1H6, 4.2.53–​4). To offer one example, Shakespeare also employs the rhetorical device antanaclasis in Titus’s association of ‘dear Lavinia, dearer than my soul’ (Tit., 3.1.102) with a ‘deer, and he that wounded

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her /​Hath hurt me more than had he killed me dead’ (3.1.91–​2). Significantly, whereas Shakespeare rarely resists the pun on ‘deer’ and ‘dear’, it is absent from Kyd’s use of similar hunting imagery in Scene 6 of Arden of Faversham, in which Arden describes himself as a deer ensnared by a forester’s net. On purely stylistic grounds, the ascription of 4.2 to Shakespeare is uncontroversial. Dover Wilson pointed out that 4.5 and 4.6 ‘pursue the same course; 4.6 being virtually a repetition of 4.5. Not only is the action almost identical (the father urging the son to save himself by flight; the son refusing to desert his father: both going forward into battle resolved to die together), but the two speakers repeat the same arguments, even at times in nearly the same words’ (1952a: xlvii). In 4.5 Talbot says ‘Come, side by side together live and die /​And soul with soul from France to heaven fly’ (1H6, 4.5.54–​5). Scene 6 concludes thus: ‘If thou wilt fight, fight by thy father’s side, /​And commendable proved, let’s die in pride’ (4.6.56–​7). Additionally, the lines ‘Fly to revenge my death if I be slain’ (4.5.18) and ‘Fly to revenge my death when I am dead’ (4.6.30) replicate each other, as do ‘O, if you love my mother, /​Dishonour not her honourable name’ (4.5.13–​14) and ‘In thee thy mother dies, our household’s name’ (4.6.38). Dover Wilson suggested that these scenes revealed Shakespeare ‘in the very act of beautifying the plumage’ of another dramatist’s work (xlvii). Pearlman agrees that 4.5 was intended as a replacement for 4.6, which should have been deleted: In the course of the sequence that so affected Elizabethan audiences, a single event is dramatised two consecutive times –​the repetitions a curious departure from Shakespeare’s usual economy. In both act 4, scene 5 and scene 6, Talbot the father and John Talbot the son choose loyalty to each other –​even at the cost of certain death in combat –​to the safety of flight. The apparent blemish usually passes without comment, perhaps because editors and critics tacitly dismiss it as a mark of what they seem to regard as Shakespeare’s still immature craftsmanship. But it is worth considering that the obvious redundancy may not be an error of artistry but a flaw of transmission. (1996: 2)

It seems clear to me that 4.6 was written by Kyd and that Shakespeare intended 4.5 as a replacement. Dover Wilson pointed out that the rhyming couplets in Shakespeare’s 4.5 are

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end-​stopped as couplets normally should be, run easily from first to last, and though displaying no obvious signs of genius are unexceptionable in metre and diction. Those of 4.6, on the other hand, are looser, often overrun, not without forced rhymes and unnecessary line-​filling words. (1952a: xlv–​xlvi)

Vickers notes that ‘Shakespeare treats each couplet as a self-​ contained unit, the first line raising an issue, the second settling it’ (2007: 342). Conversely, in Kyd’s 4.6 and Talbot’s dying speech in 4.7, ‘the run-​on lines, functionally used in blank verse to convey immediacy and movement, have a counterproductive effect in rhymed couplets, destroying their rationale’ (343). We are now in a position to determine whether Vickers’s observations, made before he had identified Kyd as the author of 4.6, accord with his attribution. We can compare Kyd’s use of enjambed couplets in Cornelia. Kyd added the following material to Garnier’s closet drama: And whose first fortunes (fild with all distresse) Afford no hope of future happinesse. But what disastrous or hard accident Hath bath’d your blubbred eyes in bitter teares, That thus consort me in my myserie? Why doe you beate your brests? why mourne you so? Say, gentle sisters, tell me, and believe It grieves me that I know not why you grieve. (Corn., 3.1.17–​24)

The effect is practically identical; it seems that the use of sporadic, enjambed rhyming couplets came from the same pen. I suggest that these passages demonstrate Kyd’s growing tendency towards run-​on lines. Vickers also pointed out that ‘the author of 4.6 was oblivious to the effect that too many th sounds can have in quick succession’ and that there are ‘seven th’s in three lines’, which are ‘compounded by the triple alliteration on f in line 56, and the double-​consonant alliteration on pr in the last line’ (341). I would like to take Vickers’s observation a little further by highlighting the opening of The Spanish Tragedy as a comparable example of Kyd’s use of multiple alliteration. The Ghost of Andrea tells the audience that I past the perils of the formost porch. Not farre from hence amidst ten thousand soules. (Sp. T., 1.1.31–​2)

Here we have three p sounds in one line and three f sounds in quick succession (we might also note the predominance of r sounds in

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‘perils’, ‘formost’, ‘porch’, ‘farre’, and ‘from’). The diction of 4.6 is indicative of Kyd’s hand, when judged critically. We can supplement the studies explored above with quantitative analysis of n-​grams. Rizvi’s data for these three scenes strongly support an attribution to Shakespeare, whose early plays, such as Henry VI Part Two and Part Three, King John, and Love’s Labour’s Lost, dominate the summary spreadsheet. The repetition of phraseology in 4.5 and 4.6 indicates that Shakespeare made some effort to homogenise his contributions with Kyd’s portions. Shakespeare’s additions enable us to recognise him as a man of the theatre, who was not above contributing to his predecessors’ works. Such an undertaking would have been perfectly normal in the context of Elizabethan theatre, in which companies frequently commissioned playwrights to revise older plays in their possession. I want to close this chapter by investigating claims that Shakespeare also had a revising hand in the 1602 additions to Kyd’s most famous tragedy.

The 1602 additions to The Spanish Tragedy I mentioned that revision was commonplace during the early modern period: to offer just a couple of examples, John Webster was commissioned by the King’s Men to add an Induction to and revise scenes of John Marston’s The Malcontent (1603), while Ben Jonson was not only called upon to revise other men’s plays but also thoroughly revised his own. To adopt a Star Wars analogy once more, we might recall that George Lucas added scenes and special effects to the original trilogy in 1997. Viewers attended cinema screenings of these adaptations and continue to purchase them in media such as DVD and Blu-​ray. Early modern audiences, like modern movie fans, would attend revivals of older plays, taking comfort in the fact that they were going to hear and see something familiar, but also being enticed by the proposition of a new spin on an old classic. Just as Lucas sought to adapt his franchise in light of improvements in special effects, playing companies might seek to adapt older plays according to shifting theatrical milieus, advances in stagecraft, venues, changes in company personnel, and changing audience expectations. In 1602, Thomas Pavier published a Quarto edition of Kyd’s Elizabethan blockbuster The Spanish Tragedy, which was advertised

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as being ‘Newly corrected, amended, and enlarged with new additions of the Painters part, and others’. These additions amounted to 320 lines in total. Henslowe’s diary records payments to Ben Jonson in 1601 and 1602 for ‘new adicyons for Jeronymo’ (Foakes, 2002: 182, 203). However, there are excellent reasons for believing that the surviving additions are not those referred to by Henslowe. John Marston satirised the 1602 Fourth Quarto additions (particularly the so-​called ‘Painter Scene’) in his Antonio and Mellida (1599) and Antonio’s Revenge (1600), which suggests that they were well known long before Henslowe’s payments to Jonson. Jonson himself ‘hinted at a revision of the play in Cynthia’s Revels (1600, publ. 1601) before he came to write his own additions’ (Erne, 2001: 121). External evidence appears to rule Jonson out as the author of the extant additions. Brian Vickers expanded previously noted matches to produce a list of over 100 verbal links between Shakespeare and the Fourth Quarto additions. He pointed out that ‘[s]‌everal pieces of evidence survive suggesting that Shakespeare’s company, the Chamberlain’s Men (after 1603, the King’s Men) may also have performed’ The Spanish Tragedy (2012: 16). He added that it is not unlikely ‘Shakespeare’s company performed the revised version of The Spanish Tragedy at the Globe; if so, their premier dramatist may have been the author of the Additions’ (17). Shakespeare, having previously adapted Kyd’s (and Nashe’s) ‘Harey the vj’, and (as I argue in the following chapter) having collaborated directly with the older dramatist on Edward III, would have been equipped to enlarge Kyd’s most famous play. If he did so, the 1602 additions to The Spanish Tragedy give us a fascinating insight into the nature of Shakespearian revision. The additions themselves are not unlike the scenes Shakespeare added to ‘Harey the vj’ (particularly 4.5), for some of them ‘were in all probability designed as replacements rather than additions’ (Erne, 2001: 123). For example, Levin Ludwig Schücking argued (1938: 7–​21) that the addition in which a painter named Bazardo seeks justice for the murder of his son was intended as a replacement for the ‘Senex’ scene (similarly, in Kyd’s scene, an old man named Don Bazulto, who is also styled ‘Senex’, seeks justice for his murdered son). Erne suggests that ‘[t]he third addition’, a monologue in which Hieronimo meditates on

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paternal love, ‘probably substituted another passage of the original’ (2001: 123), while ‘[t]he fifth addition has the merit of replacing Hieronimo’s nonsensical “vow of silence” ’ (125). Erne also notes that Kyd’s ‘dramatisation of Hieronimo’s grief and madness must have been decidedly out of date’ (124), and that ‘Kyd’s long, highly rhetorical and declamatory sentences’ are ‘replaced by a more immediate and economic language’ closer to ‘regular speech’ (125). However, I propose that Shakespeare was mindful of his predecessor’s dramatic language when he composed these additions. My evidence suggests that Shakespeare’s working memory retained some verbal details from the original text, while he also seems to have repeated details from King Leir and Arden of Faversham, according to dramatic context. In the first addition, Hieronimo asks his wife ‘Can thy soft bosome intertaine a thought /​That such a blacke deede of mischiefe should be done /​On one so pure and spotles as our sonne?’ (Sp. T., Addition One.78–​80), which echoes a line from Kyd’s original text: ‘That such a monstrous and detested deed’ (3.7.46). In the same addition, Hieronimo refuses to believe that his son has been murdered. He states that Horatio ‘had no custom to stay out so late: /​He may be in his chamber’ (Sp. T., Addition One.50–​1). In Arden of Faversham, Alice attempts to cover up her husband’s murder by feigning anxiety: ‘I do not like this being out so late’ (AF, 14.280). In the second addition to The Spanish Tragedy, we find the unique pentagram ‘it is a thing of’ in Hieronimo’s ironic declarative ‘it is a thing of nothing: /​The murder of a son’ (Sp. T., Addition Two.72–​3). In King Leir, Ragan orders her father’s murder in the line ‘It is a thing of right strange consequence’ (KL, 17.1309). Such sequences indicate that Shakespeare engaged not only with Kyd’s plot and characterisation when he added passages to The Spanish Tragedy, but with the verbal fabric of other plays in his corpus as a whole. On a slightly different note, Roslyn Knutson writes about these additions in relation to Shakespeare’s ‘duplication’ of Kyd’s old Hamlet play: the decision to offer a new play had to do with the way in which the revenge tragedy as genre had developed since the old Hamlet had been written. The texts of The Spanish Tragedy, before and after revision, show some of these developments. The character of Hieronimo

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in the text printed in 1602 has four additional mad scenes. He has acquired a sardonic humour. He has become a more bloodthirsty and thus a more villainous revenger, in the Marlovian sense of triumphing in the violence of his revenge. Recognizing these new directions in the genre, the Chamberlain’s men had two courses of action: either to update the old Hamlet with revisions or to acquire a duplicate play. (1991: 94)

There can be little doubt that Shakespeare had The Spanish Tragedy in mind while writing Hamlet, and that he followed it as a model. It may well be that Shakespeare’s memory of The Spanish Tragedy was refreshed as a result of his revisions to the play, and that one of the reasons why Hamlet echoes The Spanish Tragedy is because Shakespeare was deeply familiar with Kyd’s drama, including the old Hamlet. The New Oxford Shakespeare team accepts that Shakespeare had a hand in the additions, but they propose that Thomas Heywood was also involved (Taylor, 2017). However, this part-​ ascription is based on the so-​ called ‘microattribution’ method. Martin Mueller has pointed out that ‘Shakespeare shares far more n-​grams with Marlowe or Thomas Heywood than with any other writer’ (Mueller, 2011). Thus, if Shakespeare were responsible for all of the additions, we should not be surprised to discover a large number of matches with Heywood. Heywood’s Edward IV Part One (1599) is ranked just below Kyd’s original play and Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part Three at the top of Rizvi’s summary spreadsheet for these additions. However, if we examine the distribution of ‘maximal’ n-​grams that are unique to Edward IV Part One and the additions, we find that they occur solely in the ‘Painter Scene’, which is most confidently attributed to Shakespeare. Unless further evidence for Heywood’s involvement comes to light (i.e. not based on tiny 173-​word samples), the part-​ascription must be deemed insecure. Having explored the theories that Shakespeare was commissioned by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men to add scenes to Kyd’s portions of ‘Harey the vj’ and to revise The Spanish Tragedy, I propose in the following chapter that Edward III shows a different relationship between these dramatists, for they appear to have collaborated directly on that play.

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Notes 1 All references to Nashe’s play are to Posluszny (1989) and are given by line number. 2 Email correspondence (28 September 2015). See Mueller (2011) for an account of his weighting of n-​grams. 3 The data referred to here can be found in the spreadsheet titled ‘emdrepsamples’ on my website (Freebury-​Jones, 2017a). 4 For additional critiques of the ‘microattribution’ method see Auerbach (2020a); Rizvi (2019); Vickers (2020). 5 All references to Marlowe’s plays are to Burnett (1999).

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5 Collaboration

The Reign of King Edward III was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 1 December 1595 by Cuthbert Burby. It was printed by Thomas Scarlet the following year with no allusion to the play’s authors or by which acting company it had been ‘sundry times played about the City of London’. Martin Wiggins suggests that Shakespeare ‘contributed to the play at the end of 1593, not long after finishing Richard III, during a short-​lived period working for Derby’s Men’ (Wiggins and Richardson, 2013: 228), after Pembroke’s Men collapsed. It is worth remembering that Titus Andronicus was played by Derby’s Men according to the 1594 Quarto text. On the basis of internal evidence, Shakespeare’s hand in Edward III is now universally accepted in attribution studies. There are a number of possibilities as to why Edward III was omitted from the First Folio and Francis Meres’s list of Shakespeare’s works in his compilation Palladis tamia: Wit’s Treasury (1598). John Heminges and Henry Condell seem to have favoured (though not always) works that Shakespeare wrote without the aid of fellow dramatists, omitting Pericles, Prince of Tyre (1608), written by Shakespeare and George Wilkins, and The Two Noble Kinsmen (1613), written by Shakespeare and John Fletcher. Meres does not account for every play in his list of Shakespeare’s early works: he omits the entire Henry VI trilogy and The Taming of the Shrew. Most significant, perhaps, is the fact that Edward III contains insults aimed towards the Scottish, such as descriptions of the ‘confident and boist’rous boasting’ (E3, 2.75) Scots as ‘Vile, uncivil’ (2.12). A letter written by George Nicolson in 1598 complains of such negative depictions of the Scottish on stage, which could ‘stir the King and country to anger thereat’ (Chambers, 1923: 323).

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Richard Proudfoot notes that ‘once James VI of Scotland’ became ‘James I of Great Britain, only a hardy stationer would have risked his ears by venturing’ the play ‘into print’ (1985: 183). The play was attributed to Shakespeare in an unreliable catalogue appended to an edition of The Careless Shepherdess, published in 1656 by Richard Rogers and William Ley; it was registered as Shakespeare’s by Humphrey Moseley. In 1760, Edward Capell assigned the whole play to Shakespeare and noted that ‘Something of proof arises from resemblance between the style of his earlier performances and the work in question’ (1760: ix). However, F. G. Fleay argued convincingly that Shakespeare was not the play’s sole author: I recommend anyone who has been deluded by Capell, or his German copiers, or his English reproducers at third hand, into the belief that this work is all Shakespeare’s, to read from the entrance of the King in Act i. Sc. 2, to the end of Act ii. by itself, and judge if that part be Shakespeare’s, as I say it is; then to stop awhile, and read all the rest of the play by itself, noting the monotonous thud of the antique stop-​ line and the un-​Shakespearian words I have given above, and judge if any part of that be Shakespeare’s. (1876: 306)

As an attributionist, Fleay was, in some respects, ahead of his time, supplying quantitative evidence alongside close reading of early modern plays. He noted that differences between the play’s authors could be tabulated through counts of ‘the proportion of rhyme-​lines to verse-​lines’, which ‘is one to seven’ in Shakespeare’s portions, but ‘one to twenty’ in ‘the other parts of the play’, and that episodes attributable to Shakespeare contain many more ‘double-​endings to verse-​lines’, such differences being ‘far too great to allow the play to have been written by one author’ (305). Fleay’s argument that Shakespeare and his co-​ author’s portions were ‘distinctly different in general style and poetic power’ (303) was validated by Philip Timberlake, who recorded an average (according to my calculations) of 10.1 per cent feminine endings for the Countess episode, in which King Edward falls in love with, but is ultimately rejected by, the Countess of Salisbury (1931: 78–​9). The verse in Shakespeare’s portions does indeed contrast with the ‘thud of the antique stop-​line’ (Fleay, 1876: 306) found elsewhere in the play. Timberlake highlighted the Countess’s opening speech in the play’s

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second scene as being distinctly Shakespearian, with its ‘feminine endings, mid-​line sentence ending’, and ‘variation of caesura’, and concluded that ‘the whole structure of the verse is of a different order’ (1931: 79). Timberlake’s study therefore provided solid evidence that ‘two hands are to be found in the play’ (79). In 2005, Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor proposed that ‘Shakespeare was responsible only for Scene 2 (from the entrance of Edward III)’, for ‘Scene 3, and for Scene 12’ of the play (Jowett et al., 2005: 257). Here they are following E. K. Chambers, who argued that Shakespeare’s contribution begins ‘not I think before l[ine] 94’ (1930: 516). I ascribe the entire second scene to Shakespeare, including the Countess’s opening speech. I agree with Jonathan Bate that the ‘texture of the language changes remarkably’ (Bate and Rasmussen, 2013: 133) from the beginning of what is designated Scene 2 in the 2005 Oxford edition, from which I cite. I suspect that Chambers’s attempt to deny Shakespeare the opening eighty-​nine lines of this scene is linked to the fact that these passages contain provocative insults aimed at the Scots. We might ask ourselves: if these lines are too distasteful for Shakespeare, why would he rewrite the entire ‘ur-​Countess episode’ (of which more later), yet retain these barbs? Will Sharpe suggests that the Countess scenes are ‘tangential to the thrust of the French narrative established in the first scene and resumed in Act 3’ (2013: 664). The play is marred by inconsistencies in character continuity and dramaturgy. For example, Lodowick, King Edward’s secretary, appears in the Countess episode but nowhere else in the play. The ‘non-​Shakespearian’ portions of the play closely resemble the ‘misfit’ Kyd scenes (by my argument) in Henry VI Part One, for they are unlike Shakespeare’s ‘autumnal and pessimistic’ sole-​ authored history plays in their ‘comparative optimism and jingoism’ (Sharpe, 2013: 666). However, there appears to have been an attempt by Shakespeare and his co-​author to guarantee some kind of continuity, for Shakespeare also wrote 4.4 (designated Scene 12 in the Oxford edition), which deals with the Battle of Poitiers and therefore, I argue, demonstrates that Shakespeare was involved in the early phases of the play’s treatment. In this scene, Prince Edward is taunted by the French heralds, which anticipates the taunting of the English King by the French Dauphin in Henry V. Chambers linked the authorship of this scene with the

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Countess episode. He proposed that ‘as this scene is also of better quality than the rest and again has a fairly large number of feminine endings, it may possibly be due to the hand of Act ii’ (1930: 516). Timberlake provided a more objective analysis when he pointed out that ‘the high percentage’ of 9.1 per cent feminine endings in this scene revealed a ‘fundamental difference’ to the verse style of the subsequent scene, in which the ‘earlier style’ of Shakespeare’s co-​author returns (1931: 79). Similarly, Kenneth Muir observed that the distribution of iterative imagery ‘would support the theory that’ Shakespeare ‘was mainly responsible for the Countess scenes and IV.iv’ (1960: 30). Pervez Rizvi’s database provides firm quantitative evidence for Shakespeare’s authorship of these portions. In his summary spreadsheet for the Countess scenes and Scene 12, or 4.4, Richard III and Richard II appear in the top three plays sharing large numbers of unique ‘maximal’ n-​grams. Conversely, the remainder of the play shares more verbal commonalities with non-​Shakespearian dramatists (Rizvi, 2017). Sharpe ‘feels it impossible to state dogmatically whether Edward III was written originally in collaboration or whether Shakespeare was revising or adding to an earlier substrate text’ (2013: 670), while Bate notes that ‘the name of Warwick is missing from the roll-​ call of courtiers in the opening entry direction’ of the first scene, ‘yet in the middle of the first scene the king turns to Warwick and asks him about his daughter, the Countess of Salisbury. We learn that she is besieged by the Scots in her castle at Roxburgh’. Bate hypothesises that ‘his character’ could have been ‘introduced at a late stage in the writing, so as to pave the way for the Countess of Salisbury sequence’ (Bate and Rasmussen, 2013: 133). However, the fact that either the dramatist or a compositor neglected Warwick in the opening stage direction hardly provides strong evidence that the character’s lines were not part of the original scene. I propose that if Warwick were indeed inserted into this scene it occurred when the authors’ portions were merged together, for the 1596 Quarto appears to have been based on ‘a final rough copy of the whole play compiled by one of the collaborators’ (Melchiori, 1998: 174). Shakespeare’s co-​author could have simply inserted the speeches of Edward and Warwick during this process in order to link the opening scene with Shakespeare’s contributions. Furthermore, there are allusions to Shakespeare’s Countess episode in the main plot

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of the play. For example, in Scene 6 (as designated in the Oxford edition), which is patently not by Shakespeare, the King of France states that Edward ‘th’other day was almost dead for love’ (E3, 6.156), while Edward feels the need to justify that he is ‘No love-​ sick cockney’ (8.101) in Scene 8. I suggest that these allusions to the Countess episode show that Shakespeare and his co-​author worked together from a single plot scenario. Proudfoot notes that the Earl of Salisbury’s ‘search for a passport to travel to Calais, in the third phase of the action’, written by Shakespeare’s co-​author, ‘stands in thematic relation to the countess episode in the first’, which argues for ‘care in plotting and unity of conception’ (1985: 168). Once again, the evidence suggests that Shakespeare’s Countess scenes were part of the original play, as opposed to later additions. Giorgio Melchiori suggests that, during the plotting phase of Edward III, Shakespeare and his co-​author ‘drew the outlines of the play at first from Holinshed’s chronicles of the reign of Edward III, soon integrated with those’ of Jean Froissart’s Chronicles, and that Shakespeare ‘took into account a novel of Painter’s’ when he wrote the Countess episode (1998: 15). In my view, Melchiori’s argument that Shakespeare’s Countess scenes were part of a process of ‘replacing, extending, and re-​elaborating one or two scenes in an earlier version now lost’ is weak (37). I can find no significant internal evidence to support the theory that Shakespeare decided to ‘replace Froissart’s narrative’ of a hypothesised ‘ur-​Countess episode’ with ‘the version in Painter’s’ (38) The Palace of Pleasure (1566). Shakespeare simply consulted both sources when he wrote his scenes. As R. M. Smith put it in 1911: ‘the dramatist merely followed the order of events that Froissart had established, and selected only certain details from Painter for the Countess scenes’ (1911: 101). Proudfoot nevertheless endorses Melchiori’s theory that Shakespeare revised a play by another writer or writers: ‘The simplest conclusion is that the use of Painter’s novel to add complexity to Froissart’s anecdote of the King and the Countess was the final stage of revision of the play’ (Proudfoot and Bennett, 2017: 64). On this occasion I cannot agree with him. The hypothesis of revision seems weaker than in other plays Shakespeare is believed to have revised, for Shakespeare’s portions of Edward III are far more extensive than in texts such as The Spanish Tragedy

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and Sir Thomas More. I submit that Shakespeare’s portions were part of the original play and were planned alongside his co-​author.

Identifying Kyd as Shakespeare’s co-​author in Edward III In the late nineteenth century Gregor Sarrazin drew attention to the striking similarities between the Mariner’s account of the naval battle of Sluys (in Scene 4 of the Oxford edition) and the General’s account of the battle with the Portuguese in The Spanish Tragedy, which he argued could only be the result of close imitation or common authorship (1892: 124). During the twentieth century, J. M. Robertson was the first scholar to follow up Sarrazin’s observation. Robertson argued that ‘it is hardly conceivable that anyone else could have produced such an actual copy’ of Kyd’s ‘style and matter as is constituted’ by the Mariner’s speech, and ‘[i]‌t may be that other speeches’ are ‘also by Kyd’ (1924: 384–​5). William Wells judged the ‘work to be entirely Kyd’s’ (1940: 218), and Guy Lambrechts also gave the whole play to Kyd (1963). In the same year that Lambrechts’s study appeared, MacDonald P. Jackson considered the play to be ‘wholly Shakespeare’s’ (1963: 287), a position that neither he nor any attributionist maintains. We can see that older and modern scholars alike have had difficulties distinguishing Kyd and early Shakespeare’s styles. Although the argument for Kyd’s sole authorship was misguided, Lambrechts pointed out some striking instances of Kyd’s verbal repetition. He noted that (1963: 160–​1) the grotesque descriptions ‘Here flew a head dissevered from the trunk’ and ‘mangled arms and legs’ (E3, 4.165–​6) in the Mariner’s speech would seem to stem from the same author’s imagination as the General’s account of the battle with the Portuguese in The Spanish Tragedy: ‘Heere falles a body scindred from his head, /​There legs and armes lye bleeding on the grasse’ (Sp. T., 1.2.59–​60). We might add the Messenger’s account of the Battle of Thapsus in Cornelia for comparison: ‘every where /​Lay Armed men, ore-​troden with theyr horses, /​Dismembred bodies drowning in theyr blood’ (Corn., 5.1.248–​50), and ‘Here lay an arme, and there a leg lay shiver’d’ (5.1.258). Lambrechts also drew attention to instances in which Kyd recycled aspects of dramatic

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structure: the moment in Scene 6 of Edward III, when the Prince of Wales is dubbed knight, contains formulaic repetition, the King and his noblemen beginning and ending their speeches with almost identical verses (162), ‘Fight and be valiant; conquer where thou com’st’ (E3, 6.183–​ 202), which closely corresponds to Soliman and Perseda’s jousting scene, in which the Prince of Cyprus invites contenders to declare their pedigree with the refrain ‘What is thy motto?’ (S&P, 1.3.16–​28).1 Although the essay by Lambrechts has been largely ignored or dismissed by subsequent scholars, the combination of verbal repetition and structural symmetry he observed points strongly towards Kyd’s dramaturgy. Brian Vickers has shown that Shakespeare’s co-​ author was deeply indebted to the works of Seneca and Garnier’s Cornélie. He notes Kyd’s use of a Senecan convention: ‘the narration of an off-​stage event, usually a catastrophe, conveyed by a Nuntius’ (2014: 105). Vickers points out several instances of this convention in Edward III, which occurs throughout Kyd’s accepted plays, such as in 1.2 of The Spanish Tragedy, when the King gives the General a formal invitation to report on the battle, and in Act 5 of Cornelia, when the Messenger arrives and offers news of the battle in which Cornelia’s husband was slain. I have noticed a similar example in Kyd’s portions of Henry VI Part One, unnoted by Vickers: in 5.2, Kyd adopts what Vickers calls ‘the full’ Senecan ‘convention of the addressee inviting the narrator to deliver his news’ (106). Charles asks the Scout: ‘What tidings send our scouts? I prithee speak’ (1H6, 5.2.10). The Scout delivers bad news, for the English army ‘is now conjoined in one, /​And means to bid you battle presently’ (5.2.12–​ 13). The scene actually begins with French optimism, characteristic of Kyd’s exploration of the changing fortunes in battle. Alongside such dramaturgical similarities, Vickers identified ‘an extraordinary number of collocations, sequences of three or more words that’ Edward III ‘shares with The Spanish Tragedy and Cornelia’ (109), arguing that ‘we may conclude, with a high degree of probability, that Shakespeare wrote the four scenes in Edward III traditionally attributed to him, but that the remainder of the play should be ascribed to Thomas Kyd’ (116). Scholars since the eighteenth century have also noted authorial links between Edward III and Henry VI Part One. For example, Richard Farmer observed that ‘Henry the sixth hath ever been

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doubted’ and that ‘I have no doubt but Henry the sixth had the same Author with Edward the third’ (1767: 88). Karl Wentersdorf commented on the ‘many points of resemblance in diction, imagery and the treatment of subject matter in the play about Talbot’ (1960: 231), while Eliot Slater argued that the ‘communalities and resemblances between the vocabularies of 1 Henry VI and Edward III’ provided ‘objective factual evidence connecting two plays’ (1988: 7). Slater examined a range of linguistic evidence, including prefix words, compound forms, and once-​only nouns in Edward III and Henry VI Part One, concluding that ‘There is no important point in which their vocabulary can be distinguished. In this respect there is nothing to show that they could not be by the same author’ (79). In particular, Slater noted that ‘The strength of the linking’ with scenes not traditionally ascribed to Shakespeare in Edward III, which he termed ‘part B’, was ‘phenomenal’ (111). We are now in a position to interpret Slater’s findings in a different light: the high degree of community between these texts is due to Kyd’s being their main author. Another link can be discerned in Proudfoot’s observation that ‘the absence of a final rhyming couplet’ at the end of Edward III is ‘bathetic’ and ‘perplexing’, given ‘the scene’s tidy finality in other respects’ (Proudfoot and Bennett, 2017: 32). But Proudfoot does not mention that Suffolk’s concluding speech at the end of Henry VI Part One, which I attribute to Kyd, also eschews a final rhyming couplet.

Kyd’s rhyming habits Whereas Shakespeare uses ‘rhyming couplets, a traditional medium for the poetry of courtship’ in the Countess episode (Bate and Rasmussen, 2013: 133–​4), we often find Kyd’s ‘seemingly random alternation of rhyme and blank verse’ (Routh, 1905: 50) in the main plot of the play. In an essay establishing Kyd’s authorship of King Leir on the basis of dramaturgy, phraseology, and prosody, Vickers has recorded ‘every rhyme pattern Kyd is known to have used’ (2018b: 471). I have extended Vickers’s analysis by also examining these patterns in Arden of Faversham, Fair Em, Henry VI Part One, and Edward III: the figures for Kyd’s accepted plays and King Leir in Table 5.1 were recorded by Vickers. The total for Kyd’s habitual

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Table 5.1  Rhyme patterns in plays attributed to Kyd Rhyme Aca

The Spanish Tragedy

Soliman and Perseda

Cornelia

11

6

3

8

20

2

4

3

3

1

Abab

7

Aaa

3

1

Abba Acaa

1

Aaaa

1

Totals

23

2

King Leir

1

Arden of Faversham

Fair Em

18

7

30

17

9

1 1

17 2

2 1

1

2 9

‘Kyd’ Henry ‘Kyd’ VI Part One Edward III

2 20

10

12

19

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rhyme forms in the ‘non-​Shakespearian’ scenes of Edward III is higher than that found for Soliman and Perseda. Kyd’s distinctive use of interrupted rhyme can be seen in the very first lines of the play, when Edward tells Artois that banished though thou be From France thy native country, yet with us Thou shalt retain as great a seigniory: For we create thee Earl of Richmond here. And now go forward with our pedigree. (E3, 1.1–​5)

All of the newly attributed plays share Kyd’s sporadic interspersions of a range of rhyming patterns in iambic verse, quite unlike the use of rhyme in the plays of Marlowe, Greene, Peele, or Lodge. We should note that the patterns in Arden of Faversham are strikingly similar to Soliman and Perseda, while King Leir employs every rhyming pattern found in Kyd’s attested plays. It seems fair to say that the scenes attributable to Kyd in Edward III are also ‘at one with’ the other plays attributed to Kyd in their ‘use of such unusual and whimsically varied rime schemes set at random in the texture of the verse’ (Routh, 1905: 50).

Kyd’s verse style In his quantitative study of feminine endings, Timberlake demonstra­ ted that Shakespeare’s co-​ author averaged (in my computations) 2.7 per cent eleven-​syllable lines, with an overall range in scenes of 0.0–​11.7, the lowest and highest figures fitting within the ranges for attested Kyd plays, such as Soliman and Perseda (0.0–​34.4) and Cornelia (8.1–​12.7). The upper scale in the range of 0.8–​6.9 per cent for long scenes also correlates with the higher percentages found in Kyd’s plays. The range is wider than evinced in plays by other dramatists. For instance, in Marlowe’s entire dramatic canon there is only one scene of more than 100 verse lines that exceeds a percentage of 5.9. Timberlake’s data therefore support the attribution to Kyd and do indeed confirm that it is ‘at least certain that two men were concerned in the play’ (1931: 78). Although the overall percentage is in the lower scale for Kyd’s use of feminine endings, we might note that the range for long scenes in these portions of Edward III is strikingly close to that obtained for Kyd’s scenes in Henry VI Part One,

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0.9–​6.3 per cent, the higher figure once again uncharacteristic of dramatists such as Marlowe but congruent with Kyd’s attested plays. Douglas Bruster (2015: 47) has examined pause patterns in Edward III. However, he follows Ward Elliott and Robert Valenza’s proposed divisions of authorship (2010) in order to determine the ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘non-​Shakespeare’ scenes. My evidence suggests that some of the portions Elliott and Valenza give to Shakespeare were actually composed by Kyd; thus, the pause patterns for ‘non-​ Shakespeare’ scenes might not be wholly representative of his contributions to the chronicle history play. Nonetheless, having calculated the percentages for the ‘non-​ Shakespeare’ scenes, I discovered some similarities between these patterns and other Kyd plays and portions, especially those closest to Edward III in terms of chronology: Henry VI Part One and Cornelia. In Table 5.2 we might note the percentage of pauses in the first half of the line, 55.9, which is almost identical to Cornelia’s figure of 55.6, and on even-​ numbered syllables 60.2, which closely approximates Cornelia’s 58.6. We might also note that the percentage for pauses after syllable 4, 42.2, is practically identical to Soliman and Perseda’s 42.1. On the whole, the pause profile for these portions of Edward III fits into Kyd’s patterns but is unlike that obtained for Elizabethan contemporaries such as Marlowe, whose figures for ‘first half’ pause patterns are consistently higher, and whose figures for pauses after the fourth syllable are lower in all of his plays (Oras, 1960: 65).

Kyd’s linguistic habits I noted earlier in this book that Kyd places ‘but’ in the initial iambic position more frequently than Shakespeare. Entirely independent of this discovery, Richard Proudfoot has brought it to my attention that the frequency of ‘but’ at the start of verse lines ‘varies vastly’ in Edward III.2 By my count, there are sixty-​two instances in Kyd’s portions (104 instances of ‘but’ in total), which we can compare to the thirty-​three instances at the beginning of verse lines in Shakespeare’s scenes (seventy-​four in total). The Kyd scenes thus average one ‘but’ placed in the initial iambic foot every twenty-​four lines, which is very close to the average in Soliman and Perseda and King Leir: one every twenty-​three lines. Shakespeare averages one ‘but’ in the initial position every thirty lines in his scenes, which

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351

Play

First half

Even

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

The Spanish Tragedy

78.9

67.5

7.1

15.0

5.7

39.1

15.2

11.4

4.2

1.9

0.4

Soliman and Perseda

60.9

67.8

4.1

9.3

5.5

42.1

19.5

14.5

2.9

1.9

0.2

Cornelia

55.6

58.6

8.2

10.2

5.7

31.6

20.3

13.4

6.4

3.4

0.8

King Leir

78.9

63.0

13.3

13.7

4.2

36.6

14.0

8.7

5.1

3.9

0.4

Arden of Faversham

63.5

71.2

2.2

5.3

3.9

41.5

16.6

22.8

6.1

1.5

0

Fair Em

67.5

62.1

5.1

12.2 12.5

37.7

13.8

10.6

5.7

1.6

0.8

Henry VI Part One ‘Kyd’

54.7

60.6

5.9

12.9

5.5

30.4

19.6

12.5

7.8

0.0

0.6

Edward III ‘Kyd’

55.9

60.2

0.9

6.1

6.7

42.2

24.0

10.9

8.2

0.9

0

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Table 5.2  Ants Oras figures for pause patterns in Edward III and plays attributed to Kyd

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accords with the rate of use in Henry VI Part Two: one every twenty-​nine lines. Inna Koskenniemi has observed that there is an ‘unusually large number of compound epithets in Edward III’, which are ‘significant stylistically’, and that ‘seventeen of the compounds in Edward III were found to be new’ (1964: 467). Many of what Koskenniemi calls ‘free and imaginative’ compound epithets (468) occur in passages I ascribe to Kyd. In my computations, these portions of Edward III average one compound adjective every 395 words, which we can compare to the rate of use in Soliman and Perseda: one every 330 words.3

Kyd’s vocabulary Albert Yang’s word rank order and frequency algorithm for measuring the distance between texts reveals that the portions of Henry VI Part One attributed to Kyd lie closest to King Leir and the putative Kyd scenes in Edward III, whereas the plays closest to Shakespeare’s portions of Edward III are all by Shakespeare. Yang’s clustering tree clearly distinguishes the six plays assigned solely to Kyd from Shakespeare’s plays, but Henry VI Part One and Edward III cluster in the middle with their contributions closest to the respective authors, suggesting shared authorship (Yang, 2020: 194).

Kyd’s phraseology Alongside the data for rhyme, verse habits, and vocabulary, statistical analysis of word n-​grams furnishes compelling evidence for Kyd’s hand in Edward III. As I demonstrated earlier, play pairs exceeding a value of 51, weighted according to the lengths of repetitions in Martin Mueller’s corpus of over 500 early modern texts, are within the 90th percentile for works written by the same author. According to Mueller’s list of all pairwise combinations involving Edward III, that play and The Spanish Tragedy have a value of 70.51. We might also note the weighted value of 81.59 for Henry VI Part One and Edward III. Collocations and N-​Grams enables users to download a spreadsheet for the non-​Shakespearian portions of Edward III: Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy is ranked twelfth, with a higher weighted figure

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for unique ‘maximal’ matches than found for the undisputed Kyd play pair Soliman and Perseda and Cornelia. The weighted number of unique n-​grams between the portions of Edward III attributed to Shakespeare’s co-​ author and the portions of Henry VI Part One I attribute to Kyd is higher than the figures that both The Spanish Tragedy and Soliman and Perseda share with Cornelia. Furthermore, Rizvi notes on his website that the unique ‘formal’ tetragram test, which I detailed in Chapter 1, assigns the non-​ Shakespearian portions of Edward III to Kyd ‘by a strong margin’ (Rizvi, 2017). On the basis of these independent studies, the argument for Kyd’s part authorship of Edward III according to n-​gram repetitions seems strong. Close study of matching n-​grams and collocations of thought as well as language, occurring five times or fewer in plays first performed publicly in London during the decades 1580–​1600, also indicates that a single mind was responsible for the plays and portions assigned to Kyd. Edward III begins, like Shakespeare’s Henry V, with the King discussing his claim to the French throne. Robert of Artois tells the King that Philippe of Beau’s sons ‘left no issue of their loins’ (E3, 1.9). In Romeo and Juliet, the heroine threatens to stab herself if Friar Laurence does not help her: ‘Which the commission of thy years and art /​Could to no issue of true honour bring’ (Rom., 4.1.64–​ 5). Juliet’s lines are contextually dissimilar to Artois’s speech. Conversely, in King Leir, the King reprimands Cordella thus: ‘Peace, bastard Impe, no issue of King Leir’ (KL, 3.312). The King Leir example therefore provides the closest parallel with Artois’s line. If we investigate further, we discover that the bigram ‘no issue’ appears in Kyd’s (by my argument) unhistorical dramatisation of Mortimer’s death in Henry VI Part One: Mortimer tells Richard Plantagenet that ‘I no issue have’ (1H6, 2.5.94). Another authorial association can be seen in Artois’s description of King Edward as ‘the flower of Europe’s hope’ (E3, 1.15), which parallels King Leir: ‘And weeds of rancour chokt the flower of grace. /​Then what remainder is of any hope’ (KL, 23.2062–​3). Artois calls upon heaven to witness his fidelity to Edward: ‘But heaven I call to record of my vows’ (E3, 1.32). In King Leir, the Gallian King reassures Cordella that his intentions are honourable: ‘Let heaven and earth beare record of my words’ (KL, 7.674). Artois is loyal to Edward because ‘You are the lineal watchman of our peace’ (E3, 1.36).

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In Henry VI Part One, the King refers to Gloucester and Winchester as ‘The special watchmen of our English weal’ (1H6, 3.1.66). The abstract nouns ‘peace’ and ‘weal’ are practically interchangeable in these lines, while the disyllabic adjectives ‘lineal’ and ‘special’ serve the same metrical functions, suggesting a common author’s idiolect. We find the locution ‘what then should’ in Artois’s interrogative ‘What then should subjects but embrace their king?’ (E3, 1.38), and Soliman’s speech ‘They love each other best: what then should follow’ (S&P, 4.1.172); we might note the collocation of thought in the corresponding transitive verbs ‘embrace’ and ‘love’. The King asserts that ‘’Tis not a petty dukedom that I claim’ (E3, 1.82). The trigram ‘not a petty’ co-​occurs with Kyd’s Cornelia: ‘Perceive we not a petty vaine’ (Corn., 2.1.370). There is a unique line-​opening shared between the subsequent line, ‘But all the whole dominions of the realm’ (E3, 1.83), and ‘But all the whole inheritance I give’ (1H6, 3.1.168). King Henry gives Richard Plantagenet ‘the whole inheritance’, which ‘doth belong unto the house of York, /​From whence you spring by lineal descent’ (3.1.168–​ 70), while King Edward seeks the French Crown, for he is ‘the lineal watchman of’ France’s ‘peace’ (E3, 1.36). This match suggests a common author’s cognitive processes. Edward’s line ‘To set a gloss upon his arrogance’ (1.78) shares a six-​word unit with Henry VI Part One: ‘To set a gloss upon his bold intent’ (1H6, 4.1.103). The fact that this line is also matched in King Leir gives us an insight into a common author’s phrasal repertoire: ‘To set a glosse on your invasion’ (KL, 30.2572). Edward is scandalised by the French King, who demands fealty. The English King vows: ‘I’ll take away those borrowed plumes of his’ (E3, 1.85). Joan, following defeat at the hands of Talbot and his forces, tells her French companions that ‘We’ll pull his plumes and take away his train’ (1H6, 3.3.7). We might also note the line-​ opening contractions ‘I’ll’ and ‘We’ll’ in that unmistakable verbal match. The adjective-​and-​plural-​noun combination ‘silly ladies’ in the line ‘But seely ladies with thy threat’ning arms’ (E3, 1.137) co-​ occurs only with Mariana’s speech in Fair Em: ‘Put silly ladies often to their shifts’ (FE, 8.34). The repetition of this phrase reveals a single author’s verse cadences, for the two-​word sequence follows the phonetically similar line-​openings ‘But’ and ‘Put’. Kyd never seems to tire of the adjective ‘silly’: by my count it features twice in The Spanish Tragedy, twice in Soliman and Perseda, and once in Cornelia. As

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for the newly attributed plays, it occurs twice in King Leir, twice in Arden of Faversham, once in Fair Em, twice in Kyd’s scenes in Henry VI Part One, and thrice in the portions of Edward III attributed to him. The Black Prince declares ‘As cheerful sounding to my youthful spleen /​This tumult is of war’s increasing broils’ (E3, 1.159–​160). Talbot describes the moment he rescued John: ‘Quicken’d with youthful spleen and warlike rage’ (1H6, 4.6.13). The quantity and, crucially, the quality of matching collocations provide solid evidence for Kyd’s authorship of this opening scene. Scene 5 provides additional evidence of Kyd’s lexicon. The scene depicts the meeting of French citizens near Crécy who discuss ‘How the French navy is destroyed at sea, /​And that the English army is arrived’ (E3, 5.8–​9), and a friar’s prophecy ‘Whenas a lion roused in the West /​Shall carry hence the fleur-​de-​lis of France’ (5.42–​3), which, along with ‘such like surmises, /​Strike many Frenchmen cold unto the heart’ (5.44–​5). Melchiori points out that ‘[n]‌o trace of this prophecy is found in the known sources of the play. It is probably an invention of the dramatist’ (1998: 115). I suggest that Kyd’s debt to Seneca is patent in this scene, for the dramatist follows his classical ancestor by emphasising ‘prophetic visions and supernatural signs that heighten or intensify the role of fate’ (Norland, 2009: 160). We might compare the First Frenchman’s lines, Ay, so the grasshopper doth spend the time In mirthful jollity, till winter come, And then, too late, he would redeem his time, When frozen cold hath nipped his careless head (5.16–​19)

with the Ghost of Andrea’s speech: ‘But in the harvest of my sommer joyes /​ Deaths winter nipt the blossomes of my blisse’ (Sp. T., 1.1.12–​13). We might also note the parallel of thought in the contrast between winter and joy. These passages match King Leir, Ye florishing branches of a Kingly stocke, Sprung from a tree that once did flourish greene, Whose blossomes now are nipt with Winters frost, And pale grym death doth wayt upon my steps, And summons me unto his next Assizes (KL, 3.225–​9)

and Arden of Faversham: ‘And nips me as the bitter northeast wind /​Doth check the tender blossoms in the spring’ (AF, 8.5–​6). Here we perceive clusters of Kyd’s mental associations. The Fleeing

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Frenchman’s lines ‘All which, though distant, yet conspire in one /​ To leave a desolation when they come’ (E3, 5.67–​8) share the tetragram ‘conspire in one to’ with Fair Em. We might note the placing of this identical word sequence in the respective verse lines: ‘Could heaven or hell, did both conspire in one /​ To afflict my soul, invent a greater scourge’ (FE, 13.2–​3). The phrase ‘ransack-​constraining war’ (E3, 5.49) closely parallels The Spanish Tragedy: ‘Woe to the cause of these constrained warres’ (Sp. T., 3.7.61). Compare also the Fleeing Frenchman’s admission ‘Ah, wretched France, I greatly fear thy fall; /​Thy glory shaketh like a tottering wall’ (E3, 5.76–​7) with Joan’s acknowledgement in Henry VI Part One that ‘Now, France, thy glory droopeth to the ground’ (1H6, 5.3.29). The co-​ occurrence of these words and ideas –​embracing two verbs ending in an -​eth inflection –​is the result of a common author’s deployment of individual phrases within his mental repertoire, while Robertson pointed out that ‘The verse movement’ in the Fleeing Frenchman’s speech most closely resembles Kyd’s ‘careful rhetoric’ (1924: 383). In the subsequent scene, the French prisoner Gobin is rewarded for helping the English cross the River Somme, which is followed by an unhistorical verbal altercation between the English and their French foes. We find Kyd’s phraseology in King Edward’s interrogative ‘Hast thou not seen the usurping King of France?’ (E3, 6.34), which closely parallels The Spanish Tragedy: ‘Back, seest thou not the King is busie?’ (Sp. T., 3.12.28). We also find evidence of a common author’s lexicon in the Prince of Wales’s declarative ‘He means to bid us battle presently’ (E3, 6.44), and the Scout’s message in Henry VI Part One: ‘And means to give you battle presently’ (1H6, 5.2.13). The King of France enters and complains that Edward slays ‘His faithful subjects, and subverts his towns’ (E3, 6.48). Eric Sams (albeit arguing that both plays were written solely by Shakespeare) observed that the ‘same sense and context’ can be found in Henry VI Part One (1996: 119) during Talbot’s meeting with the Countess of Auvergne, which I ascribe to Kyd: ‘Razeth your cities and subverts your towns’ (1H6, 2.3.65). King Edward attempts to bargain with the French King: ‘Before the sickle’s thrust into the corn’ (E3, 6.111). This line recalls Revenge’s assertion in The Spanish Tragedy that ‘The Sickle comes not, till the corne be ripe’ (Sp. T., 2.6.9). Vickers claims that ‘The words “sickle” and “corn” are collocated in these plays and nowhere else in’ his

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‘pre-​1596 drama corpus’ (2014: 113), but my searches reveal that the grouping of those two nouns with the transitive verb ‘thrust’ can be found in three other plays performed prior to 1596, two of which belong to the ‘enlarged’ Kyd canon.4 Kyd had already used this combination of words in Soliman and Perseda in the line ‘That thrust his sickle in my harvest corne’ (S&P, 4.1.223), which is echoed in Arden of Faversham: ‘Why should he thrust his sickle in our corn’ (AF, 10.83). Those lines share a unique discontinuous sequence of five words, while the trigram ‘thrust into the’ can also be found in Fair Em: ‘it was my chance to be thrust into the arm’ (FE, 6.12–​13). The Prince of Wales’s speech ‘Ay, that approves thee, tyrant, what thou art. /​ No father, king, or shepherd of thy realm’ (E3, 6.117–​18) shares a veritable constellation of words with Soliman’s resolution to combat the disguised Perseda. Soliman tells her that ‘I will combate thee, what ere thou art’ (S&P, 5.4.28), but before they enter combat Perseda provides a further verbal link by denouncing him as a ‘wicked tirant’ (5.4.36). These lines also match Joan’s dismissal of the Shepherd in Henry VI Part One: ‘Thou art no father nor no friend of mine’ (1H6, 5.6.9). Common authorship is the most likely explanation for the manifold similarities between these passages; the corresponding fragments of speech are akin to patches cut from the same cloth. Audley’s interrogative ‘You peers of France, why do you follow him /​ That is so prodigal to spend your lives?’ (E3, 6.121–​2) shares a unique tetragram (we might note the negative connotations in these lines) with Franklin’s speech in Arden of Faversham: ‘Will you follow him that hath dishonoured you?’ (AF, 13.136). No comparable collocation of language and thought can be found in plays first performed during the period 1580–​1600. The King of France’s imperative ‘And, Edward, when thou dar’st, begin the fight’ (E3, 6.166) shares the rare trigram ‘begin the fight’ with The Spanish Tragedy: ‘From out our rearward to begin the fight’ (Sp. T., 1.2.36). Here we can detect Kyd’s idiosyncratic storehouse of phrases pertaining to warfare. The imperative ‘Let us resolve’ in King Edward’s line ‘And, English lords, let us resolve the day’ (E3, 6.168) occurs in Talbot’s speech: ‘Let us resolve to scale their flinty bulwarks’ (1H6, 2.1.27). Both passages employ the phrase as a call to arms. The Prince’s speech ‘Or use them not to glory of my God /​ To patronage the

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fatherless and poor’ (E3, 6.212–​13) recalls Cordella’s speech in King Leir: ‘In going to the Temple of my God, /​ To render thanks for all his benefits’ (KL, 13.1063–​4). The rare verb ‘patronage’ is never used by Shakespeare, but it co-​occurs with two speeches attributed to Kyd in Henry VI Part One: Gloucester’s line ‘And useth it to patronage his theft’ (1H6, 3.1.48), as well as Basset’s speech ‘Yes, sir, as you dare patronage /​The envious barking of your saucy tongue’ (3.8.32–​3). The Prince of Wales’s speech at the conclusion of the scene, Be numb my joints, wax feeble both mine arms, Wither my heart that, like a sapless tree (E3, 6.215–​16)

recalls Mortimer’s self-​description in Henry VI Part One: These eyes, like lamps whose wasting oil is spent, Wax dim, as drawing to their exigent; Weak shoulders, overborne with burdening grief, And pithless arms, like to a withered vine That droops his sapless branches to the ground. (1H6, 2.5.8–​12)

These extended semantic clusters must be products of the same hand, the entwined botanical and anatomical imagery reminiscent of Horatio and Bel-​ imperia’s exchanges in The Spanish Tragedy: ‘my armes are large and strong withal: /​Thus Elmes by vines are compast’ (Sp. T., 2.4.44–​5). In Scene 13 ‘A flight of ugly ravens /​Do croak and hover o’er’ the French ‘soldiers’ heads’ (E3, 13.28–​9). Stanley Wells has suggested that Shakespeare is ‘possibly’ responsible for ‘Scene 13’ (Jowett et al., 2005: 257), but my tests, combined with close textual analysis, provide evidence for Kyd’s authorship through highlighting a number of idiosyncratic verbal combinations. We find an instance of Kyd’s self-​ reminiscence in the King of France’s exclamation ‘Hark, what a deadly outcry do I hear!’ (E3, 13.19), which recalls Hieronimo’s famous line in The Spanish Tragedy ‘What out-​cries pluck me from my naked bed’ (Sp. T., 2.5.1), as well as his speech at the conclusion of the play: ‘me thinks, I heare /​His dismall out-​cry eccho in the aire’ (4.4.108–​9). The latter speech uniquely parallels an earlier scene attributed to Kyd in Edward III: ‘methinks I hear /​ The dismal charge of trumpets’ sound retreat’ (E3, 8.57–​8). As I have noted, we find another example of Kyd’s self-​repetition in Arden of Faversham: ‘What dismal outcry calls me from my rest?’

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(AF, 4.87). The collocation ‘hath hid the’ with ‘of’, ‘And’, and ‘night’ in Prince Philippe’s description of a fog, ‘Which now hath hid the airy floor of heaven, /​And made at noon a night unnatural’ (E3, 13.31–​2), uniquely parallels Arden of Faversham. Black Will describes ‘Black night’, which ‘hath hid the pleasures of the day, /​ And sheeting darkness overhangs the earth’ (AF, 5.1–​2). These lines are matched in Cornelia: ‘Hath hid them both embowel’d in the earth’ (Corn., 2.1.266). A single author’s verbal lexicon accounts for these patterns of word usage. Another matching phrase occurs in the King of France’s line ‘For when we see a horse laid down to die’ (E3, 13.50), and Cornelia: ‘why feare we, when we see /​ The thing we feare lesse then the feare to be?’ (Corn., 2.1.322–​3). Kyd employs this word combination to serve similar dramatic purposes: the King of France tells Philippe that he is not afraid of the ominous ravens, while Cornelia provokes ‘the heavens’ (2.1.326) when she tells Cicero that she is not afraid to die. However, in an aside, the French King acknowledges that divine forces may affect the battle’s outcome: ‘now I call to mind the prophecy’ (E3, 13.39). Leir, realising his folly at the conclusion of the play, tells Cordella ‘now I call to mind, /​ The modest answer, which I tooke unkind’ (KL, 32.2649–​50). The King of France asks ‘Which of these twain is greater infamy’ (E3, 13.82). In The Spanish Tragedy, the Spanish King asks Balthazar ‘To which of these twain art thou prisoner?’ (Sp. T., 1.2.152). Largescale automated searches reveal that that idiosyncratic sequence of words can be found in no other play of the period. Miles S. Drawdy observes that in Kyd’s drama ‘military and political success’ is able to ‘impart knowledge of the divine will’ (2014: 10). Scene 15 emphasises the inevitability of the French defeat, for ‘heaven’ is ‘opposed’ and they must ‘lose the day’ (E3, 15.34–​5). The French defeat is ‘orchestrated by God’ and is ‘indicative of His’ displeasure (Drawdy, 2014: 10). The French King laments that ‘Swift-​ starting fear /​Hath buzzed a cold dismay through all our army’ (E3, 15.2–​3). The three-​word unit ‘through all our’ performs a remarkably similar duty in King Leir: ‘And scoure about through all our Regiment’ (KL, 22.1885). Philippe’s line ‘No hope but death, to bury up our shame’ (E3, 15.30) matches Cicero’s speech in Cornelia ‘And we have time to burie our annoy’ (Corn., 2.1.119), in which the word string also precedes an abstract noun with negative connotations. We should note the immediate context

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of the King of France’s line ‘The feeble handful on the adverse part’ (E3, 15.33) and a passage in King Leir, in which Cornwall similarly laments the loss of battle: ‘And joyne against us with the adverse part’ (KL, 31.2617). In the final scene of the play, there is a distinct combination of thought and language in the King’s lines ‘Shall find displeasure written in our looks. /​ And now, unto this proud, resisting town’ (E3, 18.3–​4) and Henry’s speech in Henry VI Part One: ‘If they perceive dissension in our looks, /​ And that within ourselves we disagree’ (1H6, 4.1.139–​40). Both monarchs express the idea that the enemy will be able to perceive their displeasure or dissent. King Edward’s subsequent imperative ‘soldiers, assault’ (E3, 18.4) co-​ occurs with Soliman and Perseda and no other play of the period, and also embraces the noun ‘town’: ‘Souldiers, assault the towne on every side’ (S&P, 5.4.121). Salisbury reports that King Edward intends ‘To quittance those displeasures he hath done’ (E3, 18.24). The non-​Shakespearian verb form ‘quittance’ can be found in Henry VI Part One, in the line ‘quittance their deceit’ (1H6, 2.1.14), and in Arden of Faversham: ‘Now must I quittance with betraying thee’ (AF, 3.198). The King’s castigation of Sir John Copland, ‘What moved thee, then, to be so obstinate /​To contradict our royal Queen’s desire’ (E3, 18.70–​1), uniquely parallels Cornelia in terms of both thought and lexical choices: ‘Who dares to contradict our Emporia’ (Corn., 4.1.121). Salisbury mistakenly reports that he has witnessed ‘Edward’s fall’ (E3, 18.157). His long speech concerning the fate of the Black Prince is characteristic of Seneca’s revenge tragedies, in which the action is often related retrospectively. Vickers notes that ‘Salisbury metamorphoses into the Senecan messenger, deeply conscious of the effect his news will have’ (2014: 109), in the line ‘I must sing of doleful accidents’ (18.107). King Edward is deeply upset by this news. He exclaims ‘He bids me to provide his funeral! /​ And so I will, but all the peers in France /​Shall mourners be’ (E3, 18.167–​9). These lines share a concatenation of lexical items with Mortimer’s dying words in Henry VI Part One: ‘Mourn not, except thou sorrow for my good. /​Only give order for my funeral. /​ And so farewell, and fair be all thy hopes’ (1H6, 2.5.111–​13). The adjective ‘sere’, bookended by the conjunction ‘and’ and the determiner ‘the’, in the lines ‘Until their empty veins be dry and sere. /​

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The pillars of his hearse shall be their bones’ (E3, 18.170–​1), co-​ occurs only with King Leir’s ‘Withered and sere the branch must needes remaine’ (KL, 16.1243). These lines also recall the image of Cornelia’s ‘branch-​ like vaines’ (Corn., 2.1.5). We are given an insight into Kyd’s store of phrases concerning intense sorrow in King Edward’s line ‘Away with mourning, Philip! Wipe thine eyes’ (E3, 18.186), and Hieronimo’s imperative ‘Heere, take my handkercher, and wipe thine eies’ (Sp. T., 3.13.83). Both examples concern a father’s grief for the loss of his son. The King of France accepts defeat: ‘Of this I was foretold, /​But did misconstrue what the prophet told’ (E3, 18.215–​16). Leir wakes from his prophetic dream: ‘And with the feare of this I did awake’ (KL, 19.1500). Perillus reminds the eponymous character of the ‘comfort’ his dream ‘foretels to us’ (19.1785). We encounter multiple verbal links signifying a single author’s complex associative networks in the line ‘traffic of my tender youth’ (E3, 18.231), which shares a unique four-​word sequence with ‘fortunes of my tender youth’ (Sp. T., 1.1.7), and also parallels ‘My tender youth was never yet attaint’ (1H6, 5.7.120) and ‘in traffic of a King’ (5.5.120). Surely the totality of verbal matches with plays in the ‘enlarged’ Kyd canon, considered in context, will be enough to attribute large portions of this play to a common author with a high degree of probability. The evidence suggests that Shakespeare’s contributions to Edward III do not extend beyond the Countess episode and Scene 12, for the verbal fabric of the remaining scenes is infused with Kyd’s phrasing throughout. Edward III can now be acknowledged as one of Shakespeare’s earliest collaborative plays, which indicates that Shakespeare was appreciative of Kyd’s dramatic capabilities.

Influence through collaboration The relationship between Edward III and Henry V is one of influence growing out of what I see as earlier collaboration. The similarities between these plays are so patent that, according to Kent T. van den Berg, the 1599 Quarto of Edward III ‘may have been deliberately issued to coincide’ with ‘performances of Henry V’ (Van den Berg, 1985: 104). Shakespeare evidently recalled Kyd’s opening scene of Edward III when he composed Henry V. The correspondences

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between this scene and 1.2 of Henry V are striking. King Edward ponders his right to the French throne in the lines ‘And now go forward with our pedigree: /​Who next succeeded King Philippe of Beau’ (E3, 1.5–​6), while King Henry states that ‘We would be resolved, /​Before we hear him, of some things of weight /​That task our thoughts, concerning us and France’ (H5, 1.2.4–​6). The Count of Artois explains that Edward is entitled to the French throne, for Edward’s mother is the sister of King Philippe of Beau’s deceased sons, who ‘Did sit upon their father’s regal throne, /​Yet died and left no issue of their loins’ (E3, 1.8–​9), while Canterbury tells King Henry that ‘There is no bar /​To make against your highness’ claim to France’ (H5, 1.2.35–​6) with the exception of the Lex salica, a law of agnatic succession preventing females from inheriting the throne. Canterbury refers to the events of Edward III in the lines ‘Go, my dread lord, to your great-​grandsire’s tomb, /​From whom you claim; invoke his warlike spirit, /​And your great uncle’s, Edward the Black Prince, /​Who on the French ground played a tragedy’ (1.2.103–​6). Van den Berg points out that ‘Throughout Henry V, Englishmen and Frenchmen alike refer to Henry’s expedition as a re-​enactment of Edward’s’ (1985: 107). Additionally, the English in both scenes are conscious that if they invade France, they must also ‘defend /​Against the Scot, who will make raid upon us’ (1.2.137–​8). Edward acknowledges that ‘We shall have wars /​On every side’ (E3, 1.156–​7); Harry reminds the audience that ‘my great-​grandfather /​Never unmasked his power unto France /​But that the Scot on his untarnished kingdom /​Came pouring’ (H5, 1.2.146–​9). Inevitably, the English in both plays ‘repulse the traitorous Scot’ (E3, 1.155) and defeat the French, for Shakespeare, like Kyd, suggests that ‘heaven’ is ‘opposed’ to England’s enemies and that they will thus ‘lose the day’ (15.34–​5). However, Elizabethan audiences watching Henry V for the first time would no doubt be aware that Henry’s son would lose, as Kyd (by my argument) puts it, ‘The conquest of our scarce-​cold conqueror’ (1H6, 4.4.50). The Chorus in Henry V, like the choric figures of Exeter and Lucy in Henry VI Part One, foreshadows England’s downfall and reminds the audience that ‘oft our stage hath shown’ (H5, Epilogue.13) the disasters of Henry VI’s reign. Henry V thus recalls and anticipates the events of Edward III and Henry VI Part One. Edward Burns notes that ‘in Henry V Shakespeare returns

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to the material of the two earlier plays, 1 Henry VI and Edward III’, and that ‘he constructs the new play in revisionary reference to them’ (2000: 85). He elaborates that ‘Burgundy’s peace-​making speech’ in Henry V parallels ‘those with which Joan Puzel wins him over in 1 Henry VI’, while ‘Henry’s wooing of Katherine is similarly placed structurally to Suffolk’s of Margaret’ (85). Both marriages form part of a peace treaty between England and France, and both females are characterised as chaste maidens. Katherine alerts Henry to the fact that ‘It is not a fashion for the maids in France /​to kiss before they are married’ (5.2.264–​5). After Suffolk kisses Margaret, she tells him that ‘I will not so presume /​To send such peevish tokens to a king’ (1H6, 5.5.141–​2). Melchiori points out that Edward III and Henry V contain ‘acts of magnanimity and reunion at the conclusion of both’ plays, and that ‘Edward, finally reunited with Queen Philippa, pardons at her request the burghers of Calais’, while ‘Henry atones for the ruin caused to France by marrying Princess Katherine’ (1998: 40). The dramaturgical links between these texts become stronger, of course, if we accept the argument that Kyd played a major role in the compositions of Henry VI Part One and Edward III. The non-​Shakespeare portions of these plays have been largely underappreciated by critics, but we can see that Kyd’s approach to depicting European conflict and mingling Roman tragedy with English history had a significant impact on Shakespeare’s exploration of the genre.

Notes 1 I am grateful to Brian Vickers for drawing my attention to this aspect of Lambrechts’s study in email correspondence (22 September 2020). 2 I wish to thank Richard Proudfoot for sharing his thoughts with me in email correspondence (8 December 2015). 3 I have taken my figures for compound adjectives in these scenes from Proudfoot’s unpublished document entitled ‘Edward III Compound Epithets’. 4 The third instance occurs in Selimus (1591), which I attribute to Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge. For further discussion on the authorship of this play and its direct borrowings from Kyd see Freebury-​Jones (2020a: 379–​90).

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6 Kyd’s influence on Shakespeare’s later plays

In Chapters 2 and 3 I cited data for phrases shared between Kyd and Shakespeare texts. I placed emphasis on verbal links between Kyd’s dramas and Shakespeare’s early plays, but readers may have noticed that much later Shakespeare plays also shared dense verbal relations with Kyd’s works, which suggests that Kyd’s phraseology persisted in Shakespeare’s mind much later in his career. Here I cast new light on scholarship concerning the ways in which Shakespeare recalled plays in the ‘enlarged’ Kyd canon when he composed Much Ado about Nothing, Othello (1604), King Lear, and Macbeth (1606). As we move deeper into Shakespeare’s career and further away from Kyd’s spell as a playwright, we must acknowledge that Kyd’s influence was not strictly linear and would have been mediated by the works of other writers, some of whom may also have been influenced by Kyd. Bearing this in mind, I nevertheless wish to show that many elements of Shakespeare’s later dramas seem traceable to Kyd, and that these connections have been noted by generations of scholars whose observations can be extended and refined.

Much Ado about Nothing In The Spanish Tragedy, Kyd pays Thomas Watson a generous tribute by having Lorenzo and Balthazar quote from ‘Sonnet 47’ of The Hekatompathia; or, Passionate Century of Love (1582): Lorenzo.

My Lord, though Bel-​imperia seeme thus coy, Let reason holde you in your wonted joy: In time the savage Bull sustaines the yoake,

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In time all haggard Hawkes will stoope to lure, In time small wedges cleave the hardest Oake, In time the flint is pearst with softest shower, And she in time will fall from her disdaine, And rue the sufferance of your freendly paine. Balthazar. No, she is wilder and more hard withall, Then beast, or bird, or tree, or stony wall. But wherefore blot I Bel-​imperias name? It is my fault, not she that merites blame. (Sp. T., 2.1.1–​12) The parallel text in Hekatompathia is as follows: In time the Bull is brought to ware the yoake; In time all haggred Haukes will stoope the Lures; In time small wedge will cleave the sturdiest Oake; In time the Marble wears with weakest shewres. More fierce is my sweete love, more hard withall, Than Beast, or Bird, than Tree or Stony wall. (Hek., 1–​6)1

As I mentioned in the introduction, Watson and Kyd were closely linked as friends and colleagues in Dekker’s pamphlet A Knight’s Conjuring, so this connection in print is perhaps unsurprising: In another companie sat learned Watson, industrious Kyd, ingenious Atchlow, and (tho hee had bene a Player, molded out of their pennes) yet because he had bene their Lover, and a Register to the Muses, Inimitable Bentley: these were likewise carowsing to one another at the holy well, some of them singing Pæans to Apollo, som of them Hymnes to the rest of the Goddes. (Dekker, 1607: sigs K8v–​L1r)

T. W. Baldwin inferred from this passage that Kyd was a friend of the poets Watson and Thomas Achelley, and that he had written roles for John Bentley, who was a member of the Queen’s Men between 1583 and 1585 (Baldwin, 1959: 178). Scott McMillin and Sally-​ Beth MacLean point out that ‘Only Kyd is known to have written for the common stage among this group’ (1998: 29). Furthermore, Francis Meres, in his Palladis tamia, linked Kyd and Watson as notable English authors and tragic writers (Allen, 1933: 77–​8), and they were also coupled by Thomas Heywood in 1635 (Sutton, 2011). Gary Taylor has even gone so far as to suggest that works attributed in part or wholly to Kyd contain Watson’s hand (2019),

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having analysed a fragment of 274 words in Scene 10 of Arden of Faversham using the method known as ‘microattribution’. Taylor’s biographical and stylistic claims do not withstand rigorous testing and critique (Freebury-​Jones, 2020c, 2021; Vickers, 2021, 2022),2 and actually serve to buttress the attribution of that play to Kyd. My intention here is not to rehearse the criticisms of this method and Taylor’s ascription, but rather to suggest that Taylor’s analysis offers opportunities for researchers to investigate further instances of parodia and imitatio between these two writers and close associates. Although the meaningless fragments of words such as ‘hours the’ that Taylor claims as evidence give no reliable indication of imitation, let alone authorship, further research might unearth genuine correspondences that will serve to broaden knowledge of contemporary writers who influenced Kyd, and in turn how such writers engaged with Kyd’s works. Beyond such personal connections between writers, however, it should be stressed that it was a period in which poems circulated through manuscript and oral channels, with some writers anticipating ‘the performance of’ their ‘texts’ (Richards, 2019: 240). We can see that Kyd’s influence on Shakespeare’s later plays is not unproblematically linear when, in Much Ado about Nothing, Don Pedro tells Benedick ‘Well, as time shall try. “In time the savage bull doth bear the yoke” ’ (Ado, 1.1.243–​ 4), to which Benedick responds mockingly. Perhaps Shakespeare was in turn parodying the sententious style of Lorenzo’s lines in The Spanish Tragedy. Although this borrowed line has antecedents,3 the identical phraseology in Kyd and Shakespeare’s plays offers a unique variant of the line in Watson’s poem. Don Pedro’s echo therefore suggests that Shakespeare was engaging with Watson’s lines via Kyd, who cleverly adapted them to the dramatic situation of Lorenzo’s reassuring Balthazar that his love for Bel-​imperia is not a lost cause. Shakespeare recalled this passage earlier in his career when he wrote The Taming of the Shrew: Petruchio soliloquises ‘My falcon now is sharp and passing empty’ (Shr., 4.1.176) and ‘Another way I have to man my haggard, /​To make her come and know her keeper’s call’ (4.1.179–​80). There are indications that the same passage was in Shakespeare’s mind when he employed the rhetorical device anaphora in Henry VI Part One: ‘Between two hawks, which flies the higher pitch, /​Between two dogs, which

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hath the deeper mouth, /​Between two blades, which bears the better temper’ (1H6, 2.4.11–​13). John Dover Wilson argued that ‘to see how far’ Shakespeare ‘outsoared his teacher, we have only to set Warwick’s gay and felicitous sally beside the heavy-​footed proverbial philosophy of its more famous model in The Spanish Tragedy’ (1952b: ix). Other scholars have noted correspondences between Shakespeare’s comedy and King Leir. For instance, Thomas H. McNeal pointed out that ‘Beatrice, the strong-​willed heroine’ (1958b: 47) resembles Ragan when she commands Benedick to kill Claudio, repeating Ragan’s wish ‘O God, that I had bin but made a man’ (KL, 25.2371), as well as its preceding ecphonetic ‘O’, in the line: ‘O God, that I were a man’ (Ado, 4.1.307). McNeal grouped Beatrice with Margaret of Anjou, Lady Macbeth, and Goneril and Regan as Shakespearian female characters who were influenced by King Leir. An examination of Rizvi’s data also reveals links between Beatrice and Kyd’s Cordella, albeit through Gonorill’s report: when Benedick says that ‘she will rather die than give any sign of affection’ (Ado, 3.1.215–​16) he is uniquely echoing Gonorill’s line ‘she will rather dye, than give consent’ (KL, 2.189). Jacqueline Pearson suggests that additional ‘echoes of King Leir in the Beatrice–​Benedick area of the plot might be suggested’ (1981: 128). She identifies a couple of close verbal matches between Beatrice’s speeches and lines delivered by the Messenger and Ragan. However, Pearson considers ‘the clinching evidence for the use of King Leir in Much Ado’ to be found in scenes featuring Dogberry and Verges, suggesting that ‘Shakespeare’s idea of the comic Watch may well have been influenced by the comic and scandalous Watch’ near the conclusion of King Leir: In both plays, the Watch begin by discussing the methods they ought to employ in their work. In Leir, overcome with ‘drinke and sleep’ (2484–​5), they allow the French to take the town: in Much Ado the Watch had rather sleep than talk (III.iii.37). In Leir the Second Watchman comically confuses the words ‘vice’ and ‘advice’: ‘and you’ll follow my vice …’ (2444). Dogberry is famous for his malapropisms: ‘comprehend’ for ‘apprehend’ (III.iii.24), ‘confidence’ for ‘conference’ (III.v.2), ‘suspect’ for ‘respect’ (IV.ii.72–​3), and many more. What is a single joke in King Leir becomes in Shakespeare’s hands a character note. (128)

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Pearson observes that the ‘Watch episode occupies only a small corner of King Leir. Shakespeare throws greater emphasis upon his Watch, and builds recognizable characters out of a few hints in the earlier play, but the similarities between the two are unmistakable’ (129). Here we see the ways in which Shakespeare cleverly adapted and surpassed Kyd’s work. Previous scholars have tended to consider Kyd’s influence on Shakespeare in purely tragic terms, despite the fact that Shakespeare followed Kyd in blending comic and tragic materials. Recognising Kyd as the author of King Leir, rather than deeming that play ‘anonymous’, as Pearson does, means that we can trace Kyd’s influence in comic terms, and the ways in which both writers peppered prose speeches with misunderstandings, malapropisms, and vulgar humour. Such humour is of course not exclusive to these dramatists, and it is fair to say that the correspondences between Much Ado about Nothing and plays attributed to Kyd are not as palpable as is the case with other Shakespeare plays. Nevertheless, the allusion to Watson’s poetry, the verbal echoes, the vengeful woman who commands a male character to murder her enemy, and the similarities in comic characters and their dramatic purposes suggest that Kyd’s dramas were still in Shakespeare’s mind when he wrote this play. Acknowledgement of Kyd’s ‘enlarged’ canon thus enables us to achieve a better understanding of his enduring influence on Shakespeare, and to recognise a slightly different relationship between their dramas.

Othello It is conceivable that in touching upon domestic tragedy with Othello, Shakespeare recalled Arden of Faversham, and therefore exploited the conventions and tropes of that older play’s genre. But the two tragedies are very different in terms of setting and the non-​ aristocratic personages they present. Shakespeare’s tragedy is set in the exotic locations of Venice and Cyprus, and none of his tragedies is based solely in near-​contemporary England. Hardly any of Shakespeare’s plays are set in England from first to last (The Merry Wives of Windsor being an obvious exception). In Othello, Shakespeare was harking back to the genre of so-​called ‘Turk plays’, or plays with ‘Turk motifs’, which included: Marlowe’s Tamburlaine

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plays; Greene’s Alphonsus, King of Aragon (1587); and Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar (1588); as well as the two lost Tamar Cham plays found in the repertoires of Strange’s and the Admiral’s Men, dated 1591–​ 2. There are particularly strong correspondences between Othello and Kyd’s Turkish tragedy of love, Soliman and Perseda, in terms of plot structure and dramatic devices. For instance, R. M. Christofides points out that in Kyd’s play ‘the death of the Cypriot Prince symbolises the fall of Cyprus in much the same way as Othello’s suicide’. Moreover, ‘the action of Kyd’s play also turns on a lost token of love, in this case a necklace’ (2016: 108). Regarding Christofides’s last observation, it was Edmond Malone who first noted that ‘this incident of the handkerchief’ was probably influenced in part by Soliman and Perseda, ‘a drama which he has frequently quoted, where the same importance is ascribed to a carkanet’ (Boswell, 1821b: 400). My searches of Rizvi’s database (2017) reveal some striking verbal affinities between Othello and Soliman and Perseda that support the idea that Kyd’s Turkish play was in Shakespeare’s mind when he composed his tragedy. For instance, when Montano requests of the intoxicated Cassio ‘I pray you, sir, hold your hand’ (Oth., 2.3.146), he is uniquely paralleling Piston’s exchange with Erastus: ‘I pray you, sir, hold your hands, and, as I am an honest man’ (S&P, 1.4.112–​13). It is possible that Shakespeare’s recollection of Piston’s speech contributed to the repetition of the word ‘honest’ in relation to Iago throughout Othello. This conjecture is supported by the fact that Piston’s phraseology is echoed by Iago shortly afterwards: ‘As I am an honest man’ (Oth., 2.3.260). To the best of my knowledge, no scholar has identified the links between Kyd’s comic clown and Iago, which has fascinating implications for future research on Shakespeare’s characterisation of this malevolent anatagonist with comic traits. Daniel Vitkus points out that though ‘the central exotic figure’ of Soliman in Kyd’s play ‘does not kill himself’, he does, like Othello, acknowledge that his death is deserved. Vitkus compares Soliman’s murder of Perseda to Othello’s murder of Desdemona, and notes that, like Othello, ‘Soliman then kisses the woman he has loved and killed, but in this case, she has prepared her lips with poison’, and before ‘he expires, Soliman (again, sounding much like Othello) employs imagery of deflowering in order to describe Perseda’s death at his hands … and like the Moor he regrets his

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actions’ (2003: 127). Othello’s use of the deictic ‘thus’ in his final line before stabbing himself, ‘And smote him thus’ (Oth., 5.2.365), recalls Soliman’s expression of remorse: ‘Thus die, and thus’ (S&P, 5.2.113). That Shakespeare had the character of Soliman in mind when writing this play is supported by a significant verbal link: speaking of Desdemona, Iago tells the audience that ‘by how much she strives to do him good, /​She shall undo her credit’ (2.3.349–​ 50). Soliman soliloquises: ‘Foolish Soliman, why did I strive /​To do him kindness, and undoe my selfe?’ (S&P, 4.1.219–​ 20). Vitkus also compares Iago to Kyd’s Brusor, for both characters conspire against their ‘trusty, virtuous comrade’. In this respect, ‘Othello’s victims, Cassio and Desdemona, fit the mould of Erastus and Perseda’ (2003: 127). More so than the traitorous Brusor, however, Kyd’s Machiavellian villain, Lorenzo, was the archetype for Iago. As Thomas McAlindon notes, Othello, 4.1 –​the eavesdropping scene in which Iago misleads the eponymous character into believing that Cassio has confirmed his wife’s infidelity, not only through words but also gesture –​‘has distinguished prototypes’, including ‘the twin bower scenes in The Spanish Tragedy’, when the lovers are ‘watched by the eavesdropping Machiavel Lorenzo and the foppish, disappointed suitor Balthazar (exact counterparts of both Iago and Roderigo)’ (1991: 147). However, Shakespeare transposes the eavesdropping schemes involving Lorenzo to new territory in Othello by having the Machiavellian villain organise it so that his intended victims, Cassio and Othello, respectively, are the observed and the observer. Othello consequently lapses into madness, which provides a dramatically effective voice for grief, exemplified so successfully by Hieronimo in The Spanish Tragedy that his madness became synonymous with the play. As the subtitle of the 1615 edition describes Kyd’s play: ‘Hieronimo is mad again.’ The vogue for presenting stage madness can be seen in other plays by Shakespeare’s Elizabethan predecessors, such as Robert Greene’s Orlando furioso (1591) and the lost Admiral’s Men play Tasso’s Melancholy (1594), which probably dramatised Torquato Tasso’s mental illness. Again, the influence of Seneca, whom Kyd, in particular, claimed ‘emphatically as his ancestor’ (Erne, 2001: 81), can be traced through such figures as Hercules in Hercules furens, although there are other antecedents, such as Ludovico Ariosto’s epic poem Orlando furioso (1516).

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Shakespeare followed in the footsteps of authors such as Kyd and Greene by presenting madness in his revenge drama Titus Andronicus, and approached the subject more creatively in his later tragic works, including his exploration of jealousy as a causal factor in Othello. Jealousy is a treacherous emotion in Kyd’s Soliman and Perseda, threatening to tear apart Erastus and Perseda when the heroine accuses him of being unfaithful and, ultimately, leading to the deaths of the two lovers when Soliman fails to overcome his own jealousy. The connections between Othello and Soliman and Perseda suggest that while Shakespeare did not necessarily consult Kyd’s play directly, his predecessor’s handling of dramatic narrative, ­theatrical devices, and characters influenced Shakespeare’s writing process, well over a decade after Soliman and Perseda debuted. At this point in Shakespeare’s career, the older playwright’s dramaturgy seems to have become an intrinsic part of Shakespeare’s generic makeup, informing his creative choices from afar.

King Lear Kyd’s influence on King Lear is far more tangible than is the case with Much Ado about Nothing and Othello, and takes the form of not only plot points and dramatic devices, but also, as we saw in Chapter 2, a large number of distinct verbal echoes. This is established by the fact that, in Rizvi’s summary spreadsheet for Shakespeare’s tragedy, King Leir is ranked second in comparison to all drama of the period (Rizvi, 2017). Audiences familiar with King Leir would have probably been shocked by Shakespeare’s tragic ending. Here we see Shakespeare making considerable use of a play that anticipates his own, not only as source material but also as a means to subvert audience expectations. He elaborates themes and verbal cues in Kyd’s text: for instance, Shakespeare retains the kneeling competition between the King and his daughter, but whereas this moment is comically absurd in the older play, Shakespeare recognised its potential to heighten pathos. Sidney Lee suggested that ‘Something of the stage business which is associated in Shakespeare’s tragedy with the exchange of letters, e.g. between Regan and Goneril (IV. ii. 82), Kent and Cordelia (IV. iii. 11, seq.), and Goneril and Edmund (IV. v, passim), seems traceable

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to the interception by Gonoril in the old play of letters addressed to Leir’ (1909: xli). As we saw in the introduction, Kyd’s plays often feature the dramatic device of having characters tear up letters or documents. James Shapiro notes that ‘Shakespeare thought well enough of this action’ in King Leir ‘to put it to better use in a later scene’ of his tragedy, when Albany holds a ‘missive at arm’s length while Goneril lunges to take it away and tear it to pieces’, which represents ‘a better piece of stagecraft’ (2015: 62–​3) than is found in the source play. Another borrowed feature is the thunderstorm, which Leir attributes to ‘The King of heaven’ (KL, 19.1745), while Shakespeare’s Lear attributes the ‘dreadful pother o’er our heads’ to ‘the great gods’ (Lr, 3.2.49–​50). It could be argued that both Leir and Lear are at the mercy of interventionist deities, but while divine justice is accomplished in Kyd’s play, Shakespeare shows us that, in his own tragic universe, ‘As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods. /​They kill us for their sport’ (4.1.38–​9). The heavens listen to Leir’s prayers, but ultimately reject those by Shakespeare’s Lear. Furthermore, King Lear extends Kyd’s emphasis on disguise. The banished Kent and Edgar, like the Gallian King and Mumford (assisted later by the banished Cordella), disguise themselves as people of a lower social rank. Edgar’s ‘presented nakedness’ (2.2.174) as Poor Tom can possibly be traced in part to Leir and Perillus’s offering their gowns to the Mariners in the old play, as well as Mumford’s encounter ‘with naked women’ (KL, 30.2538). Both Leir and Lear attempt to disrobe, or ‘shake the superflux’ (Lr, 3.4.35). Just as Perillus offers his doublet to the Mariner in exchange for Leir’s robe, in the line ‘would my friend might keepe his garment still’ (KL, 23.2021), the Fool in Shakespeare’s version attempts to prevent the King from unbuttoning his clothes and urges him to ‘be contented’ (Lr, 3.4.104). Shakespeare also evokes Kyd by mixing tragic matter with bawdy humour, and we can easily imagine the Fool’s address to the audience being spoken by Mumford: ‘She that’s a maid now, and laughs at my departure, /​Shall not be a maid long, unless things be cut shorter’ (Lr, 1.4.49–​50). Both characters frequently undermine their kingly companions with witty jests. Shakespeare’s proclivity for inserting comedy into his tragedies perhaps owes something to Kyd’s dramatically self-​conscious break from generic traditions in his tragic works, while King Leir toys with audience expectations

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throughout. Kyd’s violation of what Arthur Huntington Nason refers to as the ‘pseudo-​classical canon that forbids comedy in tragedy’ (1906: 37), a feature we also find in plays by the likes of Marlowe and Greene, seems to anticipate and inform Shakespeare’s development of the tragic genre. Perillus no doubt provided the prototype for the loyal Kent, while Kent’s ill treatment at the hands of Cornwall and Regan perhaps owes something to the abuse that the Ambassador suffers in King Leir. Shakespeare’s Lear is duped by Kent’s disguise, while Kyd’s Leir, as Jeffrey Kahan notes, ‘does not seem to know who Perillus is and remains surprised by his unsolicited kindness’ (2008: 10). Shakespeare appears to have been particularly impressed by the Messenger in King Leir, who provides the model for both Oswald and Edmund. The Messenger takes advantage of Gonorill and Ragan, and in regarding Ragan as ‘a wench that longs to have a stabbe’ (KL, 15.1227) he could have given Shakespeare the cue for the intrigue between Edmund and the evil sisters. Similarly, Oswald’s final scene is strikingly similar to the Messenger’s attempt on the lives of Leir and Perillus. Oswald attacks Gloucester and Edgar, before giving Edgar a letter that reveals Goneril has devised ‘A plot upon her virtuous husband’s life’ (Lr, 4.5.272). The Messenger shows Leir a letter revealing that Ragan wants him dead. In my view, there can be little doubt that Kyd’s ‘strong-​minded, sexually passionate, prepared to kill’ female antagonists (Tarlinskaja, 2014: 11) influenced Shakespeare’s characterisation of Regan and Goneril. We can thus see that the influence of the old King Leir play on Shakespeare does not amount to slavish imitation, but that Shakespeare selected elements of Kyd’s dramaturgy and language, while transforming and excelling his predecessor’s work. Although there are several versions and analogues of the Lear myth, including the chronicle accounts of Geoffrey of Monmouth and Holinshed, as well as Gesta Romanorum and Brut,4 the importance of Shakespeare’s source play cannot be overstated.

Macbeth Several scholars have noted stylistic links between the bleeding Captain’s speech in 1.2 of Macbeth and the type of heroic narrative

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employed in The Spanish Tragedy. James C. Bulman observes that ‘Much as the Messenger in 1 Henry VI details Talbot’s achievements in an elevated heroic style, so the bleeding Captain’ describes ‘Macbeth’s bravery in the round cadences and epic similes’ that are reminiscent of Kyd’s verse, ‘whose ghost of Andrea narrates the epic events that will determine the action’ of the play (1985: 170). J. M. Nosworthy suggested that Shakespeare parodied Kyd’s style in this scene, having ‘matured beyond it’, as was evident in Shakespeare’s ‘metrical flexibility, the controlled use of alliteration, and, above all, in the shortness of the speeches’ (1946: 127). Shakespeare therefore updated his predecessor’s language, just as ‘the additions to The Spanish Tragedy’, which I discussed earlier, ‘replace an outmoded presentation of madness’ (126). Senecan rhetoric befits the Captain and his narration in Macbeth, whereas Kyd often incorporates Senecan topoi at the expense of character. For example, M. L. Wine has pointed out that Shakebag in Arden of Faversham ‘is given to Senecan rhetoric’ (1973: lxvii). In one of ‘the play’s most “poetic” passages’ (xxx), the murderer tells the audience that Black night hath hid the pleasures of the day, And sheeting darkness overhangs the earth And with the black fold of her cloudy robe Obscures us from the eyesight of the world, In which sweet silence such as we triumph. The lazy minutes linger on their time, Loath to give due audit to the hour. (AF, 5.1–​7)

It is curious to encounter a hired ruffian speaking in the grand, declamatory style of a Senecan protagonist. Shakebag’s speech closely resembles the following passage in The Spanish Tragedy, in terms of thought, manner, and poetic quality: Now that the night begins with sable wings To over-​cloud the brightnes of the Sunne, And that in darkenes pleasures may be done, Come, Bel-​imperia, let us to the bower, And there in safetie passe a pleasant hower. (Sp. T., 2.4.1–​5)

In both passages, Kyd establishes the mood of night scenes through a tight cluster of recurring words, although it could be argued that emphasis is placed on theatrical considerations at the expense of

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characterisation in Shakebag’s speech. Shakespeare employs more economical blank verse when the murderers prepare to slay Banquo and his son, Fleance, in Macbeth: The west yet glimmers with some streaks of day. Now spurs the lated traveller apace To gain the timely inn. (Mac., 3.3.5–​7)

Such passages give us an insight into the development of Shakespeare’s poetic style in relation to that of his dramatic predecessor. Moreover, as MacDonald P. Jackson points out, ‘Shakebag’s “sheeting darkness” is well on the way to Lady Macbeth’s “blanket of the dark” (1.5.52)’ (2014: 91). However, a more similar speech occurs in a scene that I assign to Kyd in Henry VI Part One, and which no modern attribution scholar gives to Shakespeare. In 2.2 of that play, Bedford, Burgundy, and Talbot mourn the death of Salisbury, before Talbot is invited to the Countess of Auvergne’s castle by a Senecan messenger figure. Just as Shakebag opens Scene 5 of Arden of Faversham, Bedford opens the scene thus: ‘The day begins to break and night is fled, /​Whose pitchy mantle overveiled the earth’ (1H6, 2.2.1–​2). Unlike the Macbeth example, the evidence of matching words here is supported by similarities in dramatic context and verse movement, pointing towards Kyd’s idiosyncratic style. The same poetic imagination is also apparent in Hieronimo’s recounting of his son’s murder: ‘But night, the coverer of accursed crimes, /​With pitchie silence husht these traitors harmes’ (Sp. T., 4.4.101–​2). In Macbeth, Shakespeare incorporates Senecan elements into English chronicle history material, just as Kyd did in his portions of Henry VI Part One and in Arden of Faversham. But Shakespeare’s similar engagement with Holinshed and Seneca, combined with the corresponding domestic relationships between the Macbeths and Alice and Thomas Arden/​Mosby, reveals the extent to which he had taken aspects of Kyd’s dramaturgy to new heights. Shakespeare develops Kydian tropes in such a way that speeches such as that delivered by the Captain appear parodic in a Jacobean context. Reading such speeches as parody does not render them denigrative of Kyd’s style, which is inherently Elizabethan; we can, of course, interpret parody as a sincere form of compliment from a dramatist whose career extended long after his predecessor’s death.

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Kyd’s influence on Shakespeare’s Scottish play went beyond the use of epic Senecan narration and rhetoric. Shakespeare was conscious of Kyd’s female roles in his characterisation of Lady Macbeth. In Soliman and Perseda, Basilisco hesitates to kill Lucina, so Perseda volunteers to do the deed herself: ‘What darest thou not, give me the dagger then’ (S&P, 5.3.49). Alice stabs her husband after delivering the imperative: ‘give me the weapon’ (AF, 14.237). Lady Macbeth commands ‘Give me the daggers’ (Mac., 2.2.51), but Shakespeare deviates from Kydian prototypes, in that Lady Macbeth does not partake in violent action herself. She returns the daggers to the chamber in which Duncan has been murdered. Her subsequent mental deterioration recalls Isabella in The Spanish Tragedy. Kyd gives us an insight into Isabella’s state of grief during a conversation with her maid: So that you say, this hearbe will purge the eye, And this the head? Ah, but none of them wil purge the hart. No, thers no medicine left for my disease, Nor any phisick to recure the dead. (Sp. T., 3.8.1–​5)

Like Isabella, Lady Macbeth’s doctor acknowledges that the ‘thick-​ coming fancies /​That keep her from her rest’ (Mac., 5.3.40–​1) are beyond his practice, to which Macbeth responds ‘Throw physic to the dogs’ (5.3.49). Thomas H. McNeal identified ‘Lady Macbeth’s origin in the wicked sisters of Leir’, and considered her to be ‘the superlative expression of a murderous queen who must look for help from a cowardly male’, and the eventual result of Shakespeare’s career-​ long engagement with King Leir, through ‘copied words, from phrasal echo to paraphrase to self-​plagiarism’ (1958b: 48). He also suggested that ‘from Leir Shakespeare learned a special design for murder: There is the heartless instigator of crime, the cowardly assistant, and the helpless (often sleeping) victim. The weapon is the dagger’ (49). However, Shakespeare recognised ‘the limitations of’ the ‘depraved sisters’ Gonorill and Ragan, and was ‘aware that a greatly evil character in order to reach high reality must somehow create sympathy. So it comes about that Lady Macbeth must suffer for her sins’ (50). I propose that in order to create Lady Macbeth Shakespeare fused Kyd’s characterisation of violent

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female characters with the archetype of the grieving woman who succumbs to madness. The correspondences between Macbeth and plays attributed to Kyd thus evince a complex web of interrelations. Close reading of Shakespeare’s tragedy demonstrates that Kyd continued to exert an influence on Shakespeare’s dramatic language and characterisation, almost two decades after his plays were first performed. It seems fair to say that the influence of Kyd’s phraseology on Shakespeare appears to have faded somewhat following the older dramatist’s death. At that point Shakespeare was well under way with developing his own distinctive idiom. However, the evidence explored in this chapter suggests that Shakespeare absorbed Kyd’s dramaturgical influence, and that this influence greatly contributed to Shakespeare’s writing career. While previous chapters have largely explored verbal links between Kyd and Shakespeare plays, which could be the result of Shakespeare’s listening for his cues while acting in Kyd’s plays, this chapter has established that Shakespeare continued to pick up the older dramatist’s cues when he was an established playwright, in terms of rhetoric, stagecraft, characterisation, and plot devices.

Notes 1 Line references to Watson’s poem are taken from Sutton (2011). 2 See also a forthcoming article by Pervez Rizvi: ‘The Unsoundness of the Stylometric Case for Thomas Watson’s Authorship of Arden of Faversham’, American Notes and Queries. 3 For further discussion see McEachern (2006: 166). 4 For further discussion see Knowles (2020: II.1240–​1401).

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7 Kyd and Shakespeare: A reappraisal

Having endorsed arguments for an ‘enlarged’ or ‘extended’ Kyd canon on an ‘entirely different evidentiary basis’ from previous proponents, Martin Mueller summed up the implications of his findings thus: ‘Shakespeare and Marlowe suddenly acquire a slightly older and gifted contemporary whose oeuvre has some size and considerable thematic and generic range’ (Mueller, 2009b). Kyd is often labelled a Senecan playwright, as if that would preclude him from writing in a variety of genres. As I have attempted to show in this book, Kyd’s darkest tragedies contain much comic material, and Ben Jonson’s epithet ‘sporting Kyd’ (Bevington et al., 2012: 639) suggests that the dramatist was recognised by contemporaries for his comic talents. Bill Bryson notes that, if we only had Shakespeare’s comedies, ‘we would think him a frothy soul. If we had just the sonnets, he would be a man of darkest passions. From a selection of his other works, we might think him variously courtly, cerebral, metaphysical, melancholic, Machiavellian, neurotic, light-​hearted, loving, and much more’ (2008: 18–​19). Though Seneca’s influence pervades Kyd’s language, themes, and dramatic structure, even in comedies such as King Leir and Fair Em, and the domestic tragedy Arden of Faversham, it is erroneous, in my view, to project what Lukas Erne calls a ‘generic image’ (2001: 222) onto the playwright, or indeed any early modern dramatist working to supply material for the public theatres. The later plays attributed to the dramatist suggest that Kyd refined the Senecan tropes he had used in earlier works, perhaps in response to criticisms from the likes of Thomas Nashe and Robert Greene, but that all of the plays in his canon exemplify a ‘combination of lyrically elaborate verse-​structure with colloquial directness of speech’ (Boas,

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1901: lxxxix–​xc). Although Kyd is sometimes regarded as more of a rhetorician than a poet, the idiosyncratic fusion of lyrical verse and colloquial, naturalistic dialogue in his plays, as well as the fluidity of linguistic register with which a wide range of dramatic voices are conveyed, is laudable. Kyd was an innovator who experimented with his blank verse, introducing feminine endings with a frequency surpassing any pre-​Shakespearian dramatist and compounding adjectives with inventiveness and noteworthy rates of use. In these respects, Shakespeare’s style is closer to Kyd’s than it is to Marlowe’s. Although earlier scholars recognised that Kyd exerted a considerable influence on Shakespeare’s career, few modern scholars have given him the credit he deserves. The notable exception is Erne, who attempts to give a ‘fuller picture of the artistic achievement and historical importance of Shakespeare’s most important tragic predecessor, besides Marlowe’ (2001: xii). In exploring Shakespeare and Kyd’s relationship, I do not mean to undermine the pervasive influence that Marlowe had on Shakespeare’s dramaturgy. The impact that Kyd’s room-​mate had on Shakespeare has been universally acknowledged by early modern scholars. For instance, Peter Ackroyd notes that Shakespeare ‘was mightily impressed and influenced by Marlowe … it is also clear that in his earliest plays Shakespeare stole or copied some of his lines, parodied him, and generally competed with him’ (2010: 140), while Robert Logan explores ‘the firmness with which Marlowe’s influence rooted itself in Shakespeare and developed, for it continued to thrive for 18 years after Marlowe’s death, roughly from 1593–​1611, the remainder of Shakespeare’s career’ (2007: 8). However, I cannot agree with Algernon Charles Swinburne’s argument that Marlowe ‘first, and he alone, guided Shakespeare into the right way of work’, and that ‘[b]‌efore him there was neither genuine blank verse, nor genuine tragedy in our language. After his arrival, the way was prepared; the paths were made straight, for Shakespeare’ (1908: 40). As T. S. Eliot rightly put it: ‘Kyd has as good a title to the first honour as Marlowe’, and ‘Shakespeare was not taught or guided by one of his predecessors or contemporaries alone’ (1920: 78). Gary Taylor and his co-​ authors concede that the hypothesis of an ‘extended’ Kyd canon, if endorsed, will ‘have solved a whole series of important attribution problems and thereby

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reshaped our understanding of the rise of commercial drama in the late 1580s and early 1590s’ (Taylor et al., 2017: 146), but they go on to dismiss Brian Vickers’s arguments on the basis of their ‘microattribution’ method. Having scrutinised the claims and methodologies employed by members of the New Oxford Shakespeare team and their associates, I have found no compelling evidence to suggest that Marlowe and Shakespeare co-​authored any surviving play texts. In light of the New Oxford Shakespeare team’s scholarly feud with Vickers, we do well to recall R. H. Barker’s words: He was right after all, and the scholars who for a generation now have ignored or sneered at his evidence, sometimes –​when they have condescended to mention it –​printing the word evidence itself between inverted commas, have not turned out to be our most reliable guides. (1958: 166)

Here Barker was speaking of E. H. C. Oliphant, who attributed The Revenger’s Tragedy (1606) to Thomas Middleton and was eventually vindicated (1926). While I anticipate that some of the arguments in this book will provoke opposition from scholars who are deeply entrenched in certain attribution theories, I am confident that, in time, similar sentiments to Barker’s will be expressed with regards to the ‘enlarged’ Kyd canon. I hope that my work on these plays will help to consolidate the restoration of Kyd’s oeuvre and will be regarded as constructive and collegial. This book summarises, interrogates, and corrects all of the scholarship on Kyd’s authorship of anonymous plays, much of it sadly neglected in recent years, and thus presents a somewhat different picture from the one that Erne provides, though it is a picture that largely agrees with his in terms of Kyd’s historical importance. The main aim of this study has been to add to the critical and scholarly discussion that seeks to establish Kyd’s dramatic corpus, and to indicate where and how Kyd contributed to the development of Shakespeare’s drama, both through influence and collaboration. A further, complementary aim has been to demonstrate various ways in which it is possible to combine statistical analysis with reading the plays as literary and performative works, as well as historical documents. I have tried to argue that an ‘enlarged’ Kyd canon can be of great use for early modern literary studies. In the case of Arden of Faversham, Catherine Richardson notes that the attribution to Shakespeare

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‘above all others will undoubtedly continue to matter most to the play’s fortunes’, given his ‘extraordinary cultural status’ (2022: 38). In light of the mutually reinforcing evidence for Kyd’s sole authorship I have presented, it is to be hoped that readers will resist what Peter Kirwan calls the ‘ongoing bias of commercial investment and scholarly attention in favour of canonical Shakespeare at the expense of all else’ (2021: 159). Fundamentally, I have presented a narrative in which Kyd wrote a number of surviving plays in a variety of genres, which influenced Shakespeare’s language, his versification style, his dramatic devices, his characterisation, and his plots. I have also given excellent reasons for believing that Shakespeare acted in some of Kyd’s plays, that he later revised Kyd’s work, and that the dramatists even collaborated directly. Though we do not possess external evidence demonstrating that Shakespeare met collaborators such as John Fletcher and Thomas Middleton, we can safely assume that he knew his co-​ authors in person, as well as the dramatists responsible for plays in which he had performed. In the narrow and frequently competitive world of the London theatres, it is indeed likely that Shakespeare and Kyd knew each other, but I am not suggesting that Shakespeare was Kyd’s apprentice in quite the same way that apprenticeships were an important feature of acting companies. Rather, I am suggesting that Shakespeare learned from Kyd, at first through performance and engaging with the older dramatist’s works in rehearsal, on stage, and in the tiring areas. Dramatists were recycling lines from the works of other authors before they were available in print, which suggests reliance on aural memory and acute awareness of how plays sounded, or perhaps that plays were circulated and read in manuscript more often than is generally supposed. Shakespeare drew from his extensive knowledge of The Spanish Tragedy, Soliman and Perseda, King Leir, and Arden of Faversham when he wrote his earliest works, such as Henry VI Part Two and Part Three, The Taming of the Shrew, and The Two Gentlemen of Verona. At times these plays read like patchworks of Kyd’s phraseology, which seems to have formed an innate part of Shakespeare’s theatrical vocabulary. But Shakespeare often elaborates and refines Kyd’s metaphors, especially those relating to hunting or nature imagery; he alters the contexts in which Kyd’s locutions were originally employed; and he extends Kyd’s more flexible verse style

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and rhetorically charged language. In Kyd’s plays, Shakespeare found prototypes for powerful female characters such as Margaret and Tamora, as well as for Machiavellian villains such as York and Aaron. And it is chiefly from Kyd that Shakespeare realised the potential for incorporating gallows humour (quite literally in Pedringano’s case in The Spanish Tragedy) in his tragic works. In 1592, Kyd and Nashe collaborated on ‘Harey the vj’, and it is reasonable to suppose that Shakespeare would have been interested in that rival play before he came to revise it a couple of years later for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Shakespeare may have been struck by Kyd’s use of choric figures, such as Exeter and Lucy, whose apparent knowledge of future events perhaps influenced Shakespeare’s characterisation of Margaret as a ‘prophetess’ (R3, 1.3.299) in Richard III. Harold F. Brooks suggests that Margaret ‘steps into a role that continues Joan’s’ (1980: 722), and there are some features of Margaret’s character in Richard III that show traces of the characterisation of Joan of Arc in scenes attributed to Kyd in Henry VI Part One. For example, Margaret calls upon ‘a hell of ugly devils’ (R3, 1.3.224) to haunt Richard, while Joan invokes spirits ‘Out of the powerful regions under earth’ (1H6, 5.3.11). York calls Joan an ‘ugly witch’ (5.5.5). Similarly, Richard calls Margaret a ‘foul, wrinkled witch’ (R3, 1.3.164). Following her capture, Joan requests that York ‘give’ her ‘leave to curse awhile’ (1H6, 5.4.14). Margaret requests Richard to ‘let’ her ‘make the period to my curse’ (R3, 1.3.236). We are now in a position to recognise Joan as a typical example of Kyd’s vengeful female characters. She uses intrigue, disguise, and deception for retributive purposes and, like Alice in Arden of Faversham, her oratorical dexterity has a profound impact on male characters. Burgundy’s acknowledgement that Joan’s ‘haughty words’ have ‘battered me like roaring cannon-​ shot’ (1H6, 3.7.78–​9) evinces a thought-​parallel with Mosby’s claim that Alice’s words, ‘like to a cannon’s burst /​Discharged against a ruinated wall, /​Breaks my relenting heart in thousand pieces’ (AF, 8.51–​3). We have seen that Shakespeare’s collaboration with Kyd on Edward III also had important implications for Shakespeare’s presentation of history on the commercial stage, especially in later plays such as Henry V, in which Shakespeare not only revisits Kyd’s contributions to the genre but even reminds audiences of events occurring in his collaborations with Kyd.

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During the mid-​1590s, Shakespeare developed his own distinctive dramatic voice in the wake of Kyd’s tragic death. But at some point in the late 1590s, Shakespeare appears to have engaged particularly closely with Kyd’s works. Shakespeare probably contributed additions to The Spanish Tragedy, which helped to inspire his most famous tragic works, particularly Hamlet, which shares the device of a play-​within-​a-​play as well as a protagonist who delays his revenge. The attribution of a lost Hamlet play to Kyd supports the argument that he exerted a significant influence on Shakespeare’s tragic works. We can now state with confidence that, were it not for Kyd, we would probably not have King Lear either. Kyd’s King Leir evidently had a profound effect on Shakespeare from the very beginning of his career: he would frequently return to its language, characters, and motifs, and probably always intended to adapt the play. Kyd’s influence can be traced in several other Shakespeare plays that are not often linked to him, such as Much Ado about Nothing, in which Shakespeare recalled Kyd’s vengeful female characters while creating the role of Beatrice. Shakespeare also had an eye on earlier plays featuring ‘Turk motifs’ when he wrote Othello, and he seems to have recalled Kyd’s characterisation of several figures in Soliman and Perseda for the roles in his play. The domestic elements of Kyd’s tragic plays, such as the non-​aristocratic personages that take centre stage in The Spanish Tragedy (Hieronimo) and Arden of Faversham (Thomas Arden), helped pave the way for Shakespeare’s exploration of the public world/​state affairs in tandem with the private world/​affairs of marriage in his own tragedies, particularly Othello and Macbeth. The ‘enlarged’ Kyd canon therefore has groundbreaking implications for our understanding of not only Kyd’s artistic achievement but also the trajectory of Shakespeare’s dramatic career. This study also lays foundations for further research on the relationship between Kyd’s dramas and those of contemporaries such as George Peele, Robert Greene, Thomas Lodge, and Marlowe. In the Prologue to Volpone (1606), Ben Jonson distinguishes different collaborators: ‘a co-​ adjutor, /​Novice, journeyman or tutor’ (Volp., Prologue.17–​18).1 As Stanley Wells puts it: ‘A coadjutor would be an equal collaborator, a novice a kind of apprentice, a journeyman a hack brought in perhaps to supply a comic subplot,

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and a tutor a master craftsman guiding a novice’ (2006: 26). In the case of Edward III, for instance, Kyd was the more experienced dramatist, the master craftsman. Shakespeare would continue to engage with and learn from Kyd through processes of revision, adaptation, and collaboration, and we may therefore regard Kyd as an even more important dramatic predecessor than has hitherto been acknowledged. We may regard him as a tutor to Shakespeare.

Note 1 The reference to Volpone is taken from Campbell (1995).

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Appendix Rare tetragrams plus, shared between Kyd’s sole-​authored plays

The Spanish Tragedy and Soliman and Perseda And, by warres fortune, lost both love and life (Sp. T., 1.1.40) Therefore to thee I owe both love and life (S&P, 2.1.111) I wot not how, in twinkling of an eye (Sp. T., 1.1.85) But he was gone in twinckling of an eye (S&P, 3.2.36) All wel, my soveraigne Liege, except some few That are deceast (Sp. T., 1.2.2–​3) Except some few that turne (S&P, 4.1.42) Brave man at armes (Sp. T., 1.2.72) Accord to his request, brave man at armes (S&P, 1.4.8) Bring hether the young Prince of Portingale (Sp. T., 1.2.127) Hath the young prince of Cipris married (S&P, 3.1.10) Yes, Fortune may bereave me of my Crowne (Sp. T., 1.3.18) Thou didst bereave me of my dearest love (S&P, 2.1.255) And with their blood, my icy and best beloved, My best beloved, my sweete and onely Sonne (Sp. T., 1.3.37–​8) My sweete and best beloved. My sweete and best beloved (S&P, 4.1.156–​7) Speak on. Ile guerdon thee what ere it be (Sp. T., 1.3.55) Graunt (me) one boone that I shall crave of thee. What ere it be, Perseda, I graunt it thee (S&P, 4.1.140–​1) Who, living, was my garlands sweetest flower (Sp. T., 1.4.4) Who, living, was my joy, whose death my woe (S&P, 5.4.132) Now come and sit with us, and taste our cheere (Sp. T., 1.5.12) And in our Counsell shalt thou sit with us, And be great Solimans adopted friend (S&P, 3.1.99–​100)

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Meanewhile let us devise to spend the time (Sp. T., 1.5.108) And not to spend the time in trifling words (2.1.44) But, while I stand and weepe, and spend the time In fruitlesse plaints, the murtherer will escape (S&P, 2.1.307–​8) And shall be sent with all convenient speed (Sp. T., 2.3.38) Lets saile to Rhodes with all convenient speede (S&P, 5.2.147) O, save his life, and let me dye for him (Sp. T., 2.4.56) O save his life, if it be possible (S&P, 5.2.100) Heere, Isabella, helpe me to lament (Sp. T., 2.5.36) Come, janisaries, and helpe me to lament (S&P, 1.5.112) Sweet lovely Rose, ill pluckt before thy time (Sp. T., 2.5.47) Faire springing Rose, ill pluckt before thy time (S&P, 5.4.81) Because she lov’d me more then all the world. Thou talkest (Sp. T., 2.6.6–​7) Great Soliman, Lord of all the world. Thou art not Lord of all (S&P, 5.4.19–​20) Not that I feare the extremitie of death (Sp. T., 3.1.40) Not that I feare, but that I scorne to fight (S&P, 2.2.92) Thy peace is made, and we are satisfied (Sp. T., 3.1.71) Why then the mends is made, and we still friends (S&P, 2.1.46) The ugly feends do sally forth of hell (Sp. T., 3.2.16) For whome hell gapes, and all the ugly feendes Do waite for to receive thee in their jawes (S&P, 5.4.38–​9) I know his humour, and therewith repent That ere I usde (Sp. T., 3.2.76–​7) I, and so mooves me, that I now repent That ere I gave (S&P, 4.1.208–​9) What ere he be, ile answere him and you (Sp. T., 3.3.48) What ere he be, even for his vertues sake (S&P, 3.1.31) To know the cause that may my cares allay (Sp. T., 3.6.5) Erastus, ile not yet urge to know the cause That brought thee hether (S&P, 3.1.73–​4) That I may come (by justice of the heavens) (Sp. T., 3.6.6) By favour and by justice of the heavens (S&P, 2.1.59) And by our law he is condemnd to die (Sp. T., 3.6.40) By whom Erastus was condemnd to die (S&P, 5.2.132)

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Appendix I, mary, sir, this is a good motion (Sp. T., 3.6.86) Marie, sir, this is a faire warning for me (S&P, 5.2.99) he that was so full of merrie conceits (Sp. T., 3.7.20) To plague thy hart that is so full of poyson (S&P, 5.4.118) And thou, and I, and she will sing a song (Sp. T., 3.13.171) Yes, thou, and I, and all of us betray him (S&P, 5.2.23) I, heaven will be revenged of every ill (Sp. T., 3.14.2) And therefore angrie heavens will be revengd (S&P, 4.1.215) And let me live a solitarie life (Sp. T., 3.14.32) Then let me live a Christian Virgin still (S&P, 4.1.142) Sith heaven hath ordainde thee to be mine (Sp. T., 3.14.97) I, that was before he knew thee to be mine (S&P, 5.1.9) Great Soliman, the Turkish Emperour (Sp. T., 4.1.135) Of Soliman, the Turkish Emperour (4.4.2) Of Solyman, the Turkish Emperour (S&P, 3.6.3) Of Soliman, the Turkish Emperour (4.3.3) Erastus, the Knight of Rhodes. And I? (Sp. T., 4.1.137–​8) Erastus made gouernour of Rhodes, and I (S&P, 4.2.65–​6) Erasto, dearer than my life to me (Sp. T., 4.4.31) Farewell, my country, dearer then my life (S&P, 2.1.281) Let not Erasto live to grieve great Soliman (Sp. T., 4.4.45) Why lives he then to greeve great Soliman (S&P, 4.1.235) And was to represent the Knight of Rhodes, That I might kill (Sp. T., 4.4.133–​4) Here me, my Lord: let me go over to Rhodes, That I may plead (S&P, 5.1.229–​30) Author and actor in this Tragedie (Sp. T., 4.4.147) Prooues me cheefe actor in this tragedie (S&P, 4.3.18)   Composite word count: 41,027 Total number of matches: 36 Percentage of matches: 0.09

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The Spanish Tragedy and Cornelia Mermedons do scoure the plaine (Sp. T., 1.1.49) Dyd scoure the plaines (Corn., 5.1.79) All wel, my soveraigne Liege, except some few That are deceast (Sp. T., 1.2.2–​3) Except some fewe that stayd (Corn., 5.1.93) And with their blood (Sp. T., 1.3.37) And with their blood (Corn., 1.1.40) Then heare that truth which these mine eyes have seene (Sp. T., 1.3.59) Mine eyes have seene what I in hart desir’d (Corn., 3.3.76) There laid him downe, and dewd him with my teares (Sp. T., 1.4.36) But (kissing) sighes, and dewes hym with her teares (Corn., 3.1.12) There laid him downe, and dewd him with my teares, And sighed and sorrowed as became a freend (Sp. T., 1.4.36–​7) Already tyerd and loaden with my teares. And loe (me thought) came glyding by my bed (Corn., 3.1.74–​5) But for thy kindnes in his life and death (Sp. T., 1.4.50) Both in his life and at hys latest houre (Corn., 3.3.4) The third and last, not least (Sp. T., 1.7.47) And lastly, not least (4.3.24) And last, not least (Corn., 5.1.434) Amongst the rest of what you have in charge (Sp. T., 2.3.32) Amongst the rest of mine extreame mishaps (Corn., 3.3.82) That howerly coastes the center of the earth (Sp. T., 3.1.23) And wandreth in the Center of the earth (Corn., 2.1.241) But thus we see our innocence (Sp. T., 3.1.82) But thus We see it fareth (Corn., 4.2.91–​2) For dye they shall, slaves are ordeind to no other end (Sp. T., 3.2.119) And liveth to no other end (Corn., 4.1.188)

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Besides, this place is free from all suspect (Sp. T., 3.4.82) No place was free from sorrow (Corn., 5.1.248) What, he that points to it with his finger? (Sp. T., 3.6.66) Did homage to it with his deerest blood (Corn., 3.3.10) And broken through the brazen gates of hell (Sp. T., 3.7.9) He spurrs his horse, and (breaking through the presse) (Corn., 5.1.287) And band with bitter execrations be The day and place (Sp. T., 3.7.65–​6) Brave Romains, know this is the day and houre (Corn., 5.1.112) To be avenged on you (Sp. T., 3.12.78) Armes to be aveng’d on hym (Corn., 4.1.60) With mournefull eyes and hands to heaven upreard (Sp. T., 3.13.68) With blubbred eyes and handes to heaven uprear’d (Corn., 5.1.130) Shew me one drop of bloud fall from the same (Sp. T., 3.13.129) If yet our harts retaine one drop of blood (Corn., 3.2.65) But know, while Cassius hath one drop of blood (4.1.147) But such as have upon thine articles (Sp. T., 3.14.49) But such as had brave spirits (Corn., 5.1.90) When I was yong, I gave (Sp. T., 4.1.70) When I was young, I saw (Corn., 2.1.138)   Composite word count: 37,888 Total number of matches: 21 Percentage of matches: 0.06

Cornelia and Soliman and Perseda And almost yoked all the world beside (Corn., 1.1.117) Dearer to me than all the world besides (S&P, 2.1.284) Or over-​runne the world from East to West (Corn., 1.1.148) Emperor of the world. From East to West (S&P, 3.4.4–​5) Alas, my sorrow would be so much lesse (Corn., 2.1.171) Our present joyes will be so much the greater (S&P, 5.1.13)

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From deepest hell, and with their tops (Corn., 2.1.268) Fetch his imperiall Carre from deepest hell, And ride in triumph (S&P, 5.5.35–​6) God graunt these dreames to good effect bee brought (Corn., 3.1.65) And now, to turne late promises to good effect, Be thou (S&P, 4.1.180–​1) Caesar doth tryumph over all the world, And all (Corn., 4.2.42–​3) By wasting all I conquer all the world. And now (S&P, 5.5.14–​15) Haply the newes is better then the noyse (Corn., 5.1.26) it will be better then the Fox (S&P, 1.3.227–​8) Except some fewe that stayd (Corn., 5.1.93) Except some few that turne (S&P, 4.1.42) Bravely to fight for honor of the day (Corn., 5.1.96) The prize and honor of the day is his (S&P, 1.4.4) At tilt, who woone the honor of the day? (3.1.16) And with a cheerefull looke surveigh’d the Campe (Corn., 5.1.107) Then, sweeting, blesse me with a cheerefull looke (S&P, 4.1.93) Runnes up and downe (Corn., 5.1.184) Why, would you have me runne up and downe (S&P, 1.4.109) And (when my soule Earths pryson shall forgoe) (Corn., 5.1.464) And when my soule from body shall depart (S&P, 5.4.137)   Composite word count: 34,461 Total number of matches: 12 Percentage of matches: 0.03

King Leir and The Spanish Tragedy But none of them her partiall fancy heares (KL, 1.64) Ah, but none of them will purge the heart (Sp. T., 3.8.3) And yet, me thinks, my mind (KL, 3.216) and yet

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Appendix me thinks the strength (19.1719–​20) And yet me thinks you are (Sp. T., 4.1.76) He shrikes: I heard, and yet, me thinks, I heare (4.4.108) Of him that was the cause (KL, 3.231) What then became of him that was the Bashaw (Sp. T., 4.1.127) I would your Grace would favour me so much, As make me partner of your Pilgrimage (KL, 4.356–​7) Now would your Lordships favour me so much, As but to grace me with your acting it (Sp. T., 4.1.81–​2) Brother of Cornwall, met in happy time: I thought (KL, 5.424–​5) Signior Horatio stoopt in happie time. I reapt (Sp. T., 1.4.102–​3) The Regent, and the Soveraigne of my soule (KL, 6.532) And faire Perseda soveraigne of my soule (Sp. T., 4.4.40) Urge this no more, and if thou love thy life (KL, 6.569) But open’t not, and if thou lovest thy life (Sp. T., 3.4.73) My Lord? I told you (KL, 7.585) That I, my Lord? I tell thee (Sp. T., 3.14.57–​8) To show the cause of these thy sad laments (KL, 7.637) Woe to the cause of these constrained warres (Sp. T., 3.7.61) It shall be so, because the world shall say (KL, 7.734) As all the world shall say Hieronimo (Sp. T., 4.1.153) And no man knowes what (KL, 8.747) And no man knowes it (Sp. T., 3.4.46) Oh, how thy words adde sorrow to my soule (KL, 10.911) These pleasant sights are sorrow to my soule (Sp. T., 1.6.3) But if he were with me (KL, 11.940) But if he be thus (Sp. T., 3.12.96) But if he be your rival (4.4.47) Else all the world shall never me persuade (KL, 12.950) As all the world shall say Hieronimo (Sp. T., 4.1.153) But that I know his qualities so well (KL, 12.955) But that I know your grace for just and wise (Sp. T., 1.2.166)

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Let me see them (KL, 12.995) Why, let them enter, and let me see them (Sp. T., 3.13.50) Whence springs the ground of this unlookt for wo (KL, 14.1138) Whence growes the ground of this report (Sp. T., 3.14.72) It is ynough, we make no doubt of thee (KL, 15.1220) O that I will my Lords, make no doubt of it (Sp. T., 1.1.14) I, this is it (KL, 15.1223) I, this was it (Sp. T., 1.4.86) I could give it her, and ne’re hurt (KL, 15.1228) I give it her and thee (Sp. T., 3.14.31) Lord, you have no cause (KL, 16.1238) Hieronimo, I hope you have no cause (Sp. T., 3.14.31) As easy is it for foure-​footed beasts (KL, 16.1265) As easy is it for the slimy Fish (16.1269) As easy is it for the Blackamoore (16.1271) Alas, how easie is it for him to erre (Sp. T., 3.14.89) I could teare ten in pieces with my teeth (KL, 17.1329) Shivering their limmes in peeces with my teeth (Sp. T., 3.13.123) And in a maner put them to no payne (KL, 19.1468) Distract, and in a manner lunatick (Sp. T., 3.12.89) And here I vow (KL, 19.1555) And heere I vow (Sp. T., 4.1.42) in sight of heaven I swear (KL, 19.1625) I sweare, in sight of heaven (Sp. T., 4.1.25) The plot was layd (KL, 19.1701) The plot is laide (Sp. T., 4.3.28) Here ile leave you: If any aske you (KL, 19.1753–​4) For ile leave you, if you (Sp. T., 3.11.3) The heavens are just, and hate impiety (KL, 22.1909) The heavens are just, murder cannot be hid (Sp. T., 2.5.57) As I have strict commandment from the King (KL, 22.1931) Upon precise commandement from the King (Sp. T., 3.2.102)

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Appendix There is good packing twixt your King and you (KL, 22.1932) That which may comfort both your King and you (Sp. T., 1.5.33) she loved me as a child (KL, 24.2250) Yet might she love me as her brother’s freend (Sp. T., 2.1.23) Yet might she love me as her beauties thrall (2.1.27) thou mayst see Thy childrens children (KL, 24.2328–​9) thou maiest see Thy hate (Sp. T., 3.10.81–​2) Or true content repose within my brest, Till I have rooted out this viperous sect (KL, 24.2344–​5) But how can love finde harbour in my brest, Till I revenge the death of my beloved (Sp. T., 1.4.64–​5) Tis now undone, and if that it be knowne (KL, 25.2384) For it beseemes us now that it be knowne (Sp. T., 3.14.15) Whereas our ships are ready to receyve us (KL, 26.2391) Mine eare is readie to receive ill newes (Sp. T., 1.4.56) For here I sweare (KL, 26.2411) For heere I sweare (Sp. T., 4.1.25) Under the colour of a forged letter (KL, 29.2589) Under the colour of a duteous freend (Sp. T., 1.3.66) Within the thicket two long houres and more (KL, 30.2593) In all this turmoyle, three long houres and more (Sp. T., 1.2.63)   Composite word count: 44,715 Total number of matches: 39 Percentage of matches: 0.09

King Leir and Soliman and Perseda To be inrol’d in Chronicles of fame (KL, 1.71) To be enrolled in the brass leaved booke (S&P, 1.3.3) Of him that was the cause of your first being (KL, 3.231) When Brusor lives that was the cause of all (S&P, 5.4.93)

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Lord Mumford, you have saved me a labour (KL, 4.362) save me a labour (S&P, 1.4.93) save me a labour (2.2.4) save me a labour (2.2.81) my Lord is weary of his life (KL, 5.405) art thou wearie of thy life (S&P, 2.2.77) Sweet Gonorill, I long to see thy face (KL, 5.406) I long to see thy face, brave warrior (S&P, 1.4.11) And so be tane for spyes, and then tis well (KL, 7.589) Nay, my Perseda knowes, and then tis well (S&P, 1.2.29) For if I do, I think my heart will breake (KL, 7.627) I must unclaspe me, or my heart will breake (S&P, 2.1.85) Well, I will counsell him the best I can (KL, 8.769) Thee to requite, the best I can, Ile do (22.2654) Ile doe the best I can (S&P, 1.4.112) That he that cannot flatter (KL, 9.816) That he that can bring foorth (S&P, 2.1.335) You should have such a thought, to give it me. Nay, if thou talke (KL, 10.895–​6) O, if thou beest magnanimious, come before me. Nay, if thou beest (S&P, 1.3.156–​7) Should leane upon the person of a King (KL, 14.1100) Shouldst come about the person of a King (S&P, 1.5.72) Me thinks, I should remember (KL, 14.1125) Me thinks I should not part (S&P, 4.1.204) So will I be to any friend (KL, 15.1208) As carefull will I be to keepe (S&P, 1.2.46) if need require? I have (KL, 15.1211–​12) if neede require. I, but (S&P, 2.1.214–​15) Against my sister, whom I love so deare (KL, 18.1416) Tis for Perseda, whom I love so well (S&P, 3.5.17) For feare of death is worse then death it selfe (KL, 19.1470) And losse of happines is worse than death (S&P, 1.5.125)

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Appendix Feare not, my Lord (KL, 19.1481) Feare not, my Lord (23.2065) Feare not, my Lord (S&P, 5.2.144) I give it thee (KL, 19.1523) I give it thee (S&P, 1.3.176) It hath frighted me even to the very heart (KL, 19.1636) And all I had, even to the very clothes (24.2254) And I am weake even to the very death (S&P, 5.4.129) Thou art deceyved; for I am past the best (KL, 19.1760) Ah, foolish man, therein thou art deceived; For, though she live (S&P, 5.4.51–​2) To whom I was so kind (KL, 19.1770) To whom I am so long true (S&P, 5.3.8) In all my life time, than I have bin hither (KL, 20.1796) Than I have bene to gratious Soliman (S&P, 5.2.8) What all the world besides could ne’re obtayne (KL, 21.1871) Dearer to me than all the world besides (S&P, 2.1.284) As ever you respected him for dower (KL, 22.1957) As ever you respect his future love (S&P, 2.1.26) And that you do resemble, to be briefe, Him that first robs (KL, 22.1963–​4) To be briefe, him that will try me (S&P, 1.3.116) Do you heare, sir? you looke like an honest man; Ile not stand to do you a pleasure (KL, 23.2008–​9) I pray you, sir, hold your hands, and, as I am an honest man, Ile doe the best I can to finde your chaine (S&P, 1.4.112–​13) I, like an envious thorn, have prickt the heart (KL, 23.2057) Till it have prickt the hart (S&P, 1.5.16) The first and second flattered me with words, And vowd (KL, 24.2248–​9) That I with words and stripes (S&P, 2.1.70) let me speak my mind, And in few words (KL, 24.2341–​2) I spoke my minde, And did discharge (S&P, 1.5.56–​7)

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Or that my strength were equall with my will (KL, 25.2372) My mercy in conquest is equall with my manhood (S&P, 1.3.106)   Composite word count: 41,288 Total number of matches: 30 Percentage of matches: 0.07

King Leir and Cornelia Bordring within the bounds of Albion (KL, 1.53) Within the bounds of further Brittanie (Corn., 1.1.138) Though it be ne’re so much (KL, 2.120) Then th’evill it selfe, though it be nere so sore (Corn., 4.2.167) I know not what; and yet I feare some ill (KL, 3.217) And yet I feare you (Corn., 4.2.100) But untill now I never had the fathers (KL, 5.443) I never had the thought (Corn., 4.2.93) I am the King of Gallia (KL, 7.713) be the King Of such a number (Corn., 3.2.72–​3) Unto the furthest quarters of the earth, And all (KL, 13.1081–​2) The sea, the earth, and all is almost ours (Corn., 4.2.25) To think your will should want the power to do (KL, 14.1109) That have the powre to doe (Corn., 3.3.130) Now when thou wilt come make an end of me (KL, 19.1742) (Which brightly shone) shall make an end of me (Corn., 5.1.118) You would go in progresse downe to the sea side (KL, 21.1857) Downe to the Sea-​side (Corn., 5.1.62) What all the world besides could ne’re obtayne (KL, 21.1871) And almost yoked all the world beside (Corn., 1.1.117) tis always knowne, A man may do (KL, 24.2227–​8) you know. A man may (Corn., 4.2.125–​6)

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Appendix Till I be there (KL, 24.2355) I burne till I be there (Corn., 4.1.73) I hope we shall be there. And in five hours (KL, 26.2431–​2) I was there, and in mine armes (Corn., 2.1.184) it grieves me, that perforce (KL, 30.2517) It grieves me that I know (Corn., 3.1.24)   Composite word count: 38,149 Total number of matches: 14 Percentage of matches: 0.04

Arden of Faversham and The Spanish Tragedy he that loves not me. But through his favour (AF, 1.32–​3) he loved not me. But Balthazar loves (Sp. T., 2.4.58–​9) Nay, love, there is no credit in a dream (AF, 1.74) And theres no credit in the countenance (Sp. T., 3.1.18) Stay, Adam, stay; thou wert wont to be (AF, 1.121) That thou wert wont to wearie (Sp. T., 4.1.6) I’ll see he shall not live (AF, 1.146) If Balthazar be dead, he shall not live (Sp. T., 1.3.91) Ungentle and unkind Alice, now I see That which (AF, 1.205–​6) But now I see that words (Sp. T., 3.1.17) and all the world shall see (AF, 1.329) As all the world shall say (Sp. T., 4.1.153) I’ll take a little to prevent the worst (AF, 1.383) But to prevent the worst (14.294) But, Pedringano, to prevent the worst (Sp. T., 3.1.78) Thou shalt not need; I will importune thee (AF, 1.432) I thank you, it shall not need. I had a sute (Sp. T., 3.2.61–​2)

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When he is dead, he should have twenty more (AF, 1.568) If Balthazar be dead, he shall not live (Sp. T., 1.3.91) But on your left hand shall you see the stairs That leads directly to my master’s chamber (AF, 3.183–​4) There is a path upon your left hand side, That leadeth from a guiltie Conscience (Sp. T., 3.11.13–​14) The many good turns that thou hast done to me. Now must I quittance with betraying thee (AF, 3.197–​8) Come neere, you men, that thus importune me. —​ Now must I beare a face of gravitie (Sp. T., 3.13.55–​6) What dismal outcry calls me from my rest? (AF, 4.87) O was it thou that call’dst me from my bed? (Sp. T., 3.2.16) Where thou shalt see I’ll do as much (AF, 5.33) Where thou shalt see the author of thy death (Sp. T., 1.1.87) For here I swear, by heaven and earth (AF, 7.5) For heere I sweare, in sight of heaven and earth (Sp. T., 4.1.25) You have supplanted Arden for my sake And will extirpen me (AF, 8.40–​1) You (gentle brother) forged this for my sake, And you, my Lord (Sp. T., 3.10.64–​5) But here she comes (AF, 8.44) But heere she comes (Sp. T., 3.10.24) But I will dam that fire in my breast Till by the force (AF, 8.48–​9) But how can love find harbour in my brest, Till I revenge (Sp. T., 1.4.64–​5) Lest that my words be carried with the wind And published (AF, 8.64–​5) Tost with the winde and tide (Sp. T., 3.13.103) till now I knew thee not (AF, 8.99) I, now I know thee (Sp. T., 3.13.160) Why speaks thou not? What silence (AF, 8.125) Why speakest thou not? What lesser libertie (Sp. T., 4.4.178–​9)

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Appendix But that I hold thee dearer than my life (AF, 10.31) Erasto, dearer than my life to me (Sp. T., 4.4.31) Nay, say not so; for if (AF, 12.17) soft and faire, not so: For if (Sp. T., 3.12.16–​17) I ne’er did him wrong. I think so (AF, 13.57–​8) I pray you, sir, we have done him wrong. I warrant (Sp. T., 3.7.24–​5) That I may come behind him cunningly (AF, 14.120) That I may come (by justice of the heavens) (Sp. T., 3.6.6) And with a towel pull him to the ground, Then stab him till his flesh be as a sieve (AF, 14.121–​2) Which pauncht his horse and dingd him to the ground. Then yong Don Balthazar with ruthles rage (Sp. T., 1.4.22–​3) Here would I stay and still (AF, 14.134) Heere therefore will I stay, and take (Sp. T., 3.3.16) But that I know how resolute you are (AF, 14.135) But that I know your grace (Sp. T., 1.2.166) That is the next way to betray my self (AF, 14.346) Pray you, which is the next way to my Lord (Sp. T., 3.11.53) But wherefore stay you? (AF, 14.389) But wherefore stay you? (Sp. T., 3.6.100) I loved him more than all the world beside (AF, 14.408) Because she lov’d me more then all the world (Sp. T., 2.6.6) But now I find it and repent (AF, 18.18) Madame, tis true, and now I find it so (Sp. T., 4.1.35) Seeing no hope on earth, in heaven is my hope (AF, 18.36) Tis heaven is my hope. As for the earth (Sp. T., 3.1.35–​6)   Composite word count: 43,335 Total number of matches: 32 Percentage of matches: 0.07

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Arden of Faversham and Soliman and Perseda Which makes me wish that (AF, 1.13) And makes me wish that (S&P, 3.1.26) Franklin and I will down unto the quay (AF, 1.89) I with the rest will downe unto the strand (S&P, 3.3.5) To fetch my master’s nag (AF, 1.143) is sent to fetch my maister (S&P, 4.2.80) Well, let her keep it (AF, 1.155) But Fortune would not let her keepe it (S&P, 3.3.4) What were thy words (AF, 1.192) What are thy words (S&P, 2.1.154) Arden to me was dearer than my soul (AF, 1.197) Whose life to me was dearer then mine owne (S&P, 5.2.99) What will you do, sir (AF, 1.308) What would you do, sir (S&P, 1.3.179) I do appeal to God and to the world (AF, 1.319) I make it knowne to you and to the world (S&P, 1.1.31) Hell-​fire and wrathful vengeance light on me. If I dishonour her (AF, 1.336–​7) Which if I do, all vengeance light on me (S&P, 2.1.111) And mischief light on me if I sweer false (5.2.69) Or, whilst he lives, once more importune thee. Thou shalt not need (AF, 1.431–​2) Nor suffer this or that to trouble thee: Thou shalt not neede (S&P, 3.1.137–​8) Ah, Master Greene, be it spoken in secret here (AF, 1.492) For be it spoke in secret heere (S&P, 5.2.56) To let thee know all that I have contrived (AF, 1.536) To let thee know I am no coward (5.25) I have persevered to let thee know (S&P, 1.2.21) Some words are passed, And haply (AF, 1.601–​2) My word is past, and I recall (S&P, 4.1.154) be in good health (AF, 3.4) my maister was in good health (S&P, 2.2.6)

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Appendix when she hath lost her mate (AF, 3.5–​6) when she hath lost her gold (S&P, 2.1.231) Where is the letter, sirrah? let me see it (AF, 3.24) Come, sirra, let me see (S&P, 1.4.72) Then be not nice (AF, 3.160) Then be not nice Perseda (S&P, 1.2.23) Worse than the conflict at the hour of death (AF, 4.20) Even in the hour of death (S&P, 5.4.96) I am no coward, I. I tell thee, Shakebag (AF, 5.25–​6) I had not feard thee, I; I tell thee, my skin holds (S&P, 4.2.37–​8) Where thou shalt see (AF, 5.33) Where thou shalt see (S&P, 3.1.150) but soft, me thinks ’tis shut (AF, 5.34) But soft me thinkes he is not satisfied (S&P, 5.2.114) I’ll bear you company (AF, 6.46) And ile beare you companie (S&P, 1.4.71) Enchanted me! Nay, if thou ban (AF, 8.79–​80) come before me. Nay, if thou beest (S&P, 1.3.156–​7) Than either thou or all thy kin are worth (AF, 9.18) worth more then thou and all thy kin are worth (S&P, 1.4.74) to go To the Isle of Sheppey (AF, 10.9–​10) are ready to goe to the triumphs (S&P, 1.2.90–​1) Why should he thrust his sickle in our corn? (AF, 10.83) That thrust his sickle in my harvest corne (S&P, 4.1.221) Mosby, leave protestations now, And let us bethink us (AF, 10.100–​1) Leave protestations now, and let us hie (S&P, 1.4.29) Why, then, by this reckoning (AF, 11.26) Why then by this reckoning (S&P, 1.4.85)

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Ay, but you had not best to meddle (AF, 11.28) Where you had not best go to him (S&P, 2.2.50–​1) to run away with (AF, 12.7) to run away with this Chaine (S&P, 2.1.286) You are well enough served to go without a guide (AF, 12.26) Nay, I use not to go without a paire of false Dice (S&P, 2.1.221) Shakebag, did not I tell thee as much? (AF, 12.32) You are deceived, sir; he swore not. I tell thee, jester (S&P, 1.3.138–​9) In following so slight a task as this (AF, 12.51) May soon be levied for so slight a taske (S&P, 1.5.28) we’ll meet him on the way And boldly (AF, 12.68–​9) Then Ferdinando met us on the way, And revil’d (S&P, 2.2.19–​20) And hurt thy friend whose thoughts were free from harm (AF, 13.93) To wrong my friend, whose thoughts were ever true (S&P, 2.2.28) To link in liking with a frantic man (AF, 13.105) And is she linkt in liking with my foe? (S&P, 4.2.70) But that I hold thee dearer than my life (AF, 14.15) Farewell, my country, dearer then my life (S&P, 2.1.281) Shall compass me; and were I made a star (AF, 14.146) In Scotland was I made a Knight (S&P, 1.3.17) Although I wished you to be reconciled (AF, 14.170) That all in hast I wish you to depart (S&P, 4.1.195) Come, Master Mosby, what shall we play for? (AF, 14.223) What shall we play heere? (S&P, 2.1.226) You know I do not love to be alone (AF, 14.323) Of all things I do not love to preach (S&P, 2.1.228) Arden, thy husband and my friend, is slain (AF, 14.375) all my friends are slaine (S&P, 4.1.43) I loved him more than all the world beside (AF, 14.408) Dearer to me than all the world besides (S&P, 2.1.284)

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Appendix Let me see his body (AF, 14.409) I see his body all to soone (S&P, 2.1.300) But wherefore stay we? (AF, 16.19) But wherefore stay we? (S&P, 1.6.37) For thee I mourn more than for myself (AF, 18.21) For whom I mourned more then for all Rhodes (S&P, 4.1.162)   Composite word count: 39,908 Total number of matches: 47 Percentage of matches: 0.12

Arden of Faversham and Cornelia Sweet Mosby is the man that hath my heart (AF, 1.98) And when the man that had afright the earth (Corn., 3.1.9) Suck venom to his breast, and slay himself (AF, 1.232) Sighing he sets it to his brest, and said (Corn., 5.1.314) And that she knows, and all the world shall see (AF, 1.329) The world should see me (Corn., 5.1.116) He well may be the master of the house (AF, 1.640) That we may rest the Maisters of the field (Corn., 5.1.141) So shalt thou purchase Mosby for thy friend, And by (AF, 3.169–​70) But for thy friends and Country (Corn., 4.2.144) And, should I not deal currently (AF, 3.205) And shall I not have lived (Corn., 4.2.138) Methinks I see them with their bolstered hair (AF, 4.72) Me thinks I see them while (lamenting thus) Theyr harts and eyes lye hovering over us (Corn., 5.1.136–​7) For here I swear, by heaven (AF, 7.5) I sweare by heaven (Corn., 4.1.47) And spoke as smoothly as an orator (AF, 8.128) That glide as smothly as a Parthian shaft (Corn., 4.2.14) Or govern me that am to rule myself (AF, 10.85) Tyme past with me that am to teares converted (Corn., 3.1.14)

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A fault confessed is more than half amends (AF, 13.145) For I am more then halfe your prysoner (Corn., 2.1.26) My house is clear, and now I fear them not (AF, 14.356) I feare them not whose death is but deferd (Corn., 4.2.123) I loved him more than all the world beside (AF, 14.408) And almost yoked all the world beside (Corn., 1.1.117) How long shall I live in this hell of grief? (AF, 16.12) O, shall I live in these laments (Corn., 5.1.432)   Composite word count: 36,769 Total number of matches: 14 Percentage of matches: 0.04

Arden of Faversham and King Leir you are an honest man of your word (AF, 1.247) prove men of your words (KL, 19.1548) true old men of your words (19.1554) And fain would have your husband (AF, 1.268) If you will have your husband (KL, 15.1217) And that she knows, and all the world shall see (AF, 1.329) Else all the world shall never me perswade (KL, 12.950) And then, I hope, they’ll cease (AF, 1.356) And then, I hope, we shall find friends (KL, 23.2045) How causeless they have injured her and me. And I will lie (AF, 1.357–​8) That as I am, you will accept of me, And I will have (KL, 7.719–​20) I can make a gree (AF, 1.547) I cannot make a banquet (KL, 9.786) They be so good that I must laugh (AF, 1.551) Which art so good, that thou wilt prove (KL, 30.2578) Yet thy friend to do thee any good I can (AF, 2.17) If that I have will do thee any good, I give it thee (KL, 19.1522–​3)

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Appendix the plate was found with me, And I am bound to answer (AF, 2.39–​40) Thou hast left all, I, all to come with me, And I, for all, have nought to guerdon thee (KL, 14.1105–​6) faces with me, and I know not of it (19.1574) Friend, thy commission is to deale with me, And I am he that hath deserved all (19.1700–​1) I cannot paint my valour out with words (AF, 3.108) I cannot paynt my duty forth in words (KL, 1.277) The foolish knave is in love with Mosby’s sister; And for her sake (AF, 3.120–​1) Upon th’unkind suggestions of her sisters: And for her sake (KL, 10.914–​15) I am so heavy that I can scarce go (AF, 5.16) Tis newes indeed, I am so extreme heavy, That I can scarcely keepe my eye-​lids open (KL, 19.1434–​5) Where thou shalt see I’ll do as much as Shakebag (AF, 5.33) Can do as much, as they do (KL, 30.2609) For here I swear, by heaven (AF, 7.5) For here I sweare by that (KL, 26.2411) How mean you that? (AF, 8.60) The hole! how meane you that? (KL, 5.454) Enchanted me! Nay, if thou ban (AF, 8.79–​80) to give it me. Nay, if thou talke (KL, 10.895–​6) Be clear again, I’ll ne’er more trouble thee. O no, I (AF, 8.134–​5) Why that am I, let that ne’re trouble thee. O no, tis I (KL, 19.1711–​12) Come, let us in to shun suspicion (AF, 8.166) Come, let us in, to celebrate with joy (KL, 6.574) My honest friend that came along with me (AF, 9.104) That had no cause to come along with me (KL, 14.1102) would God it were not past (AF, 10.14) would God it were so well (KL, 12.976)

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That time nor place nor persons alter me, But that I hold thee dearer than my life (AF, 10.30–​1) She never yet committed trust to me, But that (I hope) she found me alwayes faythfull (KL, 15.1206–​7) meet him on the way (AF, 12.68) attend upon him on the way (KL, 18.1364) I speak it in an agony of spirit (AF, 13.33) And makes me in an agony of doubt (KL, 25.2359) A death tormenting more than death it self (AF, 13.121) For feare of death is worse then death it selfe (KL, 19.1470) Nay, hadst thou loved me as thou dost pretend (AF, 13.122) To shew thou lovest me as thy sisters do (KL, 1.86) And be a mediator ’twixt us two (AF, 13.134) And be a mediator to my Queene (KL, 18.1412) Faith, in a manner I have (AF, 14.11) in a manner I can fight (KL, 31.2622) but went to the clerk (AF, 14.17–​18) but go to the next tree (KL, 19.1460) But that I know how resolute you are (AF, 14.135) But that I know his qualities so well (KL, 12.955) Fetch in the tables; and when thou hast done (AF, 14.157–​8) About it then, and when thou hast dispatched (KL, 17.1352) You may enforce me to it if you will; But I had rather die than bid him welcome (AF, 14.180–​1) I’d undertake it, if you will but bid me (KL, 17.1315) Be you as strange to me as I to you (AF, 14.208) So like to me, as I am to myself (KL, 7.676) My husband being forth torments my mind. I know something’s amiss (AF, 14.303–​4) Madam, your threats no whit appall my mind, I know my conscience guiltlesse (KL, 2.1950–​1) But it had done before we came back again (AF, 14.360) With us, when we come back again (KL, 23.2037)

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Appendix We are informed that here he is; And, therefore, pardon us (AF, 14.370–​1) I know he is, and therefore meane to try him (KL, 19.1545) I knew now what I did. I thought (AF, 14.386–​7) For if I do, I think my heart will breake (KL, 12.627) I loved him more than all the world beside (AF, 14.408) What all the world besides could ne’re obtayne (KL, 21.1871) I have the gold; what care I though it be known? I’ll cross the water (AF, 15.11–​12) Tis now undone, and if that it be knowne, Ile make as good shift as I can for one (KL, 25.2384–​5) I knew not of it till the deed was done (AF, 18.20) and I know not of it (KL, 19.1574) I have lived too long (AF, 18.35) I have lived too long (KL, 19.1672)   Composite word count: 43,596 Total number of matches: 40 Percentage of matches: 0.09

Fair Em and The Spanish Tragedy To dim the brightness of the day with frowns (FE, 1.8) To over-​cloud the brightnes of the Sunne (Sp. T., 2.4.2) Whose strength subdues me more than all the world (FE, 1.29) Because she lov’d me more then all the world (Sp. T., 2.6.6) Will bring thy body and thy soul to shame (FE, 2.59) Woe to thy birth, thy body, and thy soul (Sp. T., 3.7.63) To spend the time in solace and disport (FE, 3.42) Meanewhile let us devise to spend the time (Sp. T., 1.5.108) And not to spend the time in trifling words (2.1.44) But is that true, my lord? I hope you do but jest (FE, 4.63) Why, and my Lord, I hope you heard me say (Sp. T., 3.10.15)

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I’faith I aim at the fairest (FE, 5.26) For glorious cause still aiming at the fairest (Sp. T., 1.4.11) I have not seen him this four days at the least (FE, 5.130) Indeed, these many days I have not seen him (16.58) I have not scene him to demeane him so (Sp. T., 3.12.84) it was my chance to be thrust (FE, 6.12) It was my chance to write a Tragedie (Sp. T., 4.1.77) Why then, my lord, I thank you for my night’s lodging (FE, 6.22) My Lords, I thanke you for Horatio (Sp. T., 3.14.123) and I myself in presence (FE, 6.28–​9) And I my selfe in an Oration (Sp. T., 4.2.183) I have a letter to deliver to the Lady (FE, 6.48) I have a letter to your Lordship (Sp. T., 3.4.50) Let me entreat your wonted kind consent (FE, 8.4) But, good my Lord, let me entreate your grace (Sp. T., 4.3.5) Let me entreat your grace (4.3.11) Thus stands the case: Thou knowest from England (FE, 8.23–​4) Thus stands the case: it is not long, thou knowst (Sp. T., 2.1.45) Well, well, my lord, I like you (FE, 8.33) so well? My Lord, I am ashamed (Sp. T., 3.14.146–​7) He is my friend, and I do love the man (FE, 8.61) Erasto is my friend; and while he lives (Sp. T., 4.4.43) In hope your oath is true (FE, 8.142) In hope thine oath is true (Sp. T., 2.1.90) carry thither with us. As for that, sir (FE, 14.9–​10) And if she hap to stand on tearmes with us, As for her sweet hart (Sp. T., 3.10.20–​1) I would desire you to take the pains to bear this (FE, 14.41) My Lord, let me entreat you to take the paines To exasperate (Sp. T., 3.4.30–​1) That were a breach against the law of Arms (FE, 17.21) That were a breach to common law of arms (Sp. T., 1.3.47)

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Appendix I did devise to ease the grief (FE, 17.108) I will to ease the grief (Sp. T., 3.7.30) Speak, Manvile, to whether didst thou give thy faith? (FE, 17.156) Say, worthy Prince, to whether didst thou yield? (Sp. T., 1.2.160) he will none of you (FE, 17.161) Will none of you restraine his fury? (Sp. T., 3.12.80) As to crave a word with you (FE, 17.236) Hieronimo, my father craves a word with you (Sp. T., 3.14.128)   Composite word count: 34,724 Total number of matches: 23 Percentage of matches: 0.07

Fair Em and Soliman and Perseda May this be she, for whom I crossed (FE, 3.24) for this is she, For whom I mourned (S&P, 4.1.161–​2) a word you speak that I can hear (FE, 5.142) a note that I could hear (S&P, 1.2.12) of all things I cannot abide (FE, 7.23) Of all things I do not love (S&P, 2.1.293) Madam, be it in secret spoken (FE, 8.75) For be it spoke in secret heere (S&P, 5.2.56) to whom I am so bound (FE, 8.115) To whom I am so long true servitor (S&P, 5.3.8) and as thou lovest me (FE, 11.36) Brusor, as thou lovest me (S&P, 5.2.134) Joy of my heart and comfort of my life! For thee I breathe my sorrows in the air (FE, 13.6–​7) For what was he but comfort of my life? For what was he but comfort of my life? (S&P, 3.2.7–​8) Dare you lay your hands Upon your sovereign (FE, 13.11–​12) Both lay your hands upon the Alcaron (S&P, 5.2.72)

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would have me as an open gazing-​stock to all the world (FE, 16.46–​7) To be a laughing stock to all the towne (S&P, 2.2.67) That in thy presence (FE, 17.82) That in thy presence (S&P, 4.1.52) Sir, may a man Be so bold as to crave a word with you? (FE, 17.235–​6) Ile be so bolde as to dive into this Gentle mans pocket (S&P, 2.1.295–​6) Why, it is true, and you are both deceived (FE, 17.244) he was true, And you too credulous (S&P, 2.2.26–​7)   Composite word count: 31,297 Total number of matches: 12 Percentage of matches: 0.04

Fair Em and Cornelia Composite word count: 28,158 Total number of matches: 0 Percentage of matches: 0.00

Fair Em and King Leir Ah, good my lords, misconster not the cause (FE, 1.9) Ah, good my Lord, condemn not all for one (KL, 10.908) Ah, good my Lord, it ill befits (14.1099) Bright Blanch, I come; sweet fortune, favor me, And I will laud thy name eternally (FE, 1.80–​1) That as I am, you will accept of me, And I will have you whatsoe’re you be (KL, 7.719–​20) As if we were in our precedent way (FE, 2.42) As if we were no better than her selfe (KL, 2.100) I will give you over (FE, 2.83) I’ll give you over (KL, 21.1847)

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Appendix she is your love (FE, 3.69) she is your loving daughter (KL, 24.2319) What is the cause of your unlooked-​for stay (FE, 4.51) Of him that was the cause of your first being (KL, 3.231) even as long as I have not been half well (FE, 5.9) so long as I have any skin on my back (KL, 12.1016) To spend my time in grief and vex my soul, To think my love (FE, 5.93–​4) Oh, how thy words adde sorrow to my soule, To thinke of my unkindnesse (KL, 10.911–​12) I grieve to see my Manvile’s jealousy (FE, 5.103) I grieve, to see my Lord thus fond (KL, 3.335) Yet stay, sweet love, to whom I must disclose (FE, 5.125) quite devoyd of love; To whom I was so kind (KL, 19.1769–​70) What’s that to me? I speak not (FE, 5.131–​2) Leave that to me, I will expound (KL, 19.1487) I am content with my night’s lodging (FE, 6.32) To say, I am content with any one (KL, 2.184) Were he the monarch of the world (FE, 6.65) Might I be made the Monarch of the world (KL, 7.593) As if you were the Monarch of the world (24.2321) But now no more; here cometh Valingford (FE, 7.7) No more, here comes the Queen (KL, 17.1299) a man that you do not little esteem (FE, 8.80) So that you do not tie mine eyes (KL, 4.367) So that you do not tie my tongue (4.369) to whom I have faithfully vowed my love (FE, 11.32) To whom I have already past my word (KL, 19.1645) Of her, to whom I have been so unkind (24.2284) that’s as much as to say you would tell (FE, 11.39) that’s as much as to say, you set (KL, 27.2461) Is this my father (FE, 11.47) be this: My father (KL, 18.1361–​2)

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that you should speak (FE, 14.35) We are afrayd that you should speak with him (KL, 18.1383) The only stay and comfort of his life (FE, 15.7) Dear Ragan, stay and comfort of my life (KL, 5.413) I am bound by duty (FE, 16.49–​50) For I am bound by nature (KL, 16.1240) That for my sake thou shouldst endure (FE, 17.85) drink that for my sake (KL, 15.1222) I joy to see your grace so tractable (FE, 17.229) To see your Grace used thus (KL, 14.1130)   Composite word count: 34,985 Total number of matches: 23 Percentage of matches: 0.07

Fair Em and Arden of Faversham Bright Blanch, I come; sweet fortune, favor me, And I will laud thy name eternally (FE, 1.80–​1) How causeless they have injured her and me. And I will lie at London (AF, 1.357–​8) beseemed a knight And gentleman of no mean descent (FE, 2.2–​3) When all the knights and gentlemen of Kent (AF, 1.343) stoop to take up the toll-​dish (FE, 2.85–​6) Who, in a manner to take up the fray (AF, 12.72) But time and fortune hath bereaved me of that, And I, an abject in those gracious eyes (FE, 5.60–​1) ’tis thou hast rifled me of that, And made me sland’rous to all my kin (AF, 8.74–​5) Yet is the matter of such consequence (FE, 8.11) Dare swear a matter of such consequence (AF, 3.151)

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Appendix Madam, be it in secret spoken (FE, 8.75) Ah, Master Greene, be it spoken in secret here (AF, 1.492) but rather than I will be found (FE, 8.81) But rather than I pocket up this wrong (AF, 1.307) The next time that Sir Robert (FE, 8.85) the next time that I meet the hind (AF, 5.44) the next time that I meet the slave (5.52) Thou hadst not lived to brave me as thou dost (FE, 9.9) Nay, hadst thou loved me as thou dost pretend (AF, 13.122) Mariana, here I swear to thee by heaven (FE, 10.8) Yet, Arden, I protest to thee by heaven (AF, 14.214) I care not much to take horse and ride (FE, 14.3) Ere noon he means to take horse and away (AF, 1.92) we will presently take horse and away (FE, 14.48–​9) Ere noon he means to take horse and away (AF, 1.92) Have I dissembled for thy sake? And dost thou now (FE, 16.57–​8) Made shipwreck of mine honour for thy sake? And dost thou say (AF, 1.189–​90) beguile me, I have made myself deaf (FE, 16.76) pardon me; I have made a promise (AF, 9.108–​9) And so I’ll leave you, and go comfort (FE, 16.100) I’ll leave you, and at your dag’s discharge (AF, 9.40) come out of the fire, I would (FE, 17.131) flashing of the fire. I pray (AF, 9.10–​11) But that I held the same in high regard (FE, 17.179) But that I hold thee dearer than my life (AF, 10.31) To hear them speak, or saw them when they came (FE, 17.183) Why, I saw them when they both shook hands (AF, 16.32) Any ways to rid my hands of them (FE, 17.187) And I will cleanly rid my hands of her (AF, 8.43)

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Yea, two or three. What are they? (FE, 17.237) Why, have I two or three, what’s that to thee? (AF, 3.142) and thereon will I stand (FE, 17.252) And thereon will I chiefly meditate (AF, 8.121)   Composite word count: 33,605 Total number of matches: 21 Percentage of matches: 0.06

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References

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Index

Achelley, Thomas 2, 167 Ackroyd, Peter 181 Adams, Joseph Quincy 82 Admiral’s Men 172 Allde, Edward 4, 12, 53 Andrewes, Lancelot 2, 22 Archer, Edward 3, 6, 12 Arden of Faversham 8, 15–​19, 24, 29, 36, 65, 79, 91–​2, 94, 97, 99–​101, 103, 107, 135, 139, 168, 170, 176, 177, 180, 182–​3, 184, 185 authorship attribution history of 12–​15 early publication history of 12 phraseology 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 66–​75, 83–​7 prosody 35, 42, 43, 44, 76–​9, 115 rhyme 151 stage directions 52, 53, 117, 118 vocabulary 53, 55–​6, 75–​6, 157 Baldwin, T. W. 22, 60, 82, 167 Barker, R. H. 182 Bate, Jonathan 144, 145 Bentley, John 2, 167 Boas, Frederick S. 7 Booke of Sir Thomas More, The 34

Bourus, Terri 25–​8 Brooke, C. F. Tucker 13 Bruster, Douglas 116, 152 Burby, Cuthbert 142 Busby, John 6 Byrne, Muriel St Clare 37 Cairncross, A. S. 59, 83 Capell, Edward 143 Carrère, Félix 14 Chamberlain’s Men 21, 30, 111, 114, 120, 133, 138, 140, 184 Chambers, E. K. 110, 113, 134, 144 Christofides, R. M. 171 Coldocke, Francis 4, 20 Comedy of Errors, The 90, 132 Coral, Jordi 4 Cornelia 2, 7, 12, 14, 97, 98, 99, 148 early publication history of 6 phraseology 47, 49, 50, 51, 67, 69, 148, 155 prosody 35, 41, 43, 44, 45, 46, 77, 78, 79, 115, 116, 117, 151, 152 rhyme 114, 136 vocabulary 56, 76, 156 Crawford, Charles 13, 14, 38, 120 Cunningham, Karen 10

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232

Index

Davies, John, of Hereford 59 Dekker, Thomas 2, 25, 35, 62, 167 Derby’s Men 80, 142 Dessen, Alan C. 127 Deutermann, Allison K. 95 Drawdy, Miles S. 11, 19, 98, 161 Edward III 30, 67, 138, 140, 142, 155–​65, 184, 186 authorship attribution history of 143–​9 early publication history of 142 phraseology 155 prosody 152 rhyme 149–​51 vocabulary 152–​4 Eliot, T. S. 14, 181 Erne, Lukas 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 12, 17, 26, 52, 60, 61, 63, 75, 127, 138–​9, 180, 181, 182 Fair Em 8, 19–​24, 91, 92, 107, 129, 180 authorship attribution history of 20 early publication history of 19 phraseology 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 67 prosody 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 78, 115, 116, 117 rhyme 149 stage directions 53, 117 vocabulary 54, 55, 56, 157 First Part of Hieronimo, The 7, 8, 45, 46, 48, 109 Fleay, F. G. 9, 13, 114, 143 Fletcher, John 142, 183 Freeman, Arthur 2, 7, 62 Froissart, Jean 146 Garnier, Robert 2, 6, 12, 32, 51, 76, 96, 101, 106, 136, 148

George, David 80 Greene, Robert 1, 20, 21, 24, 33, 42, 43, 59, 62, 75, 79, 110, 118, 151, 171, 172, 173, 175, 180, 185 Greer, C. A. 110 Greg, W. W. 82, 83 Halliwell-​Phillipps, J. O. 59 Hamlet 29, 60, 80, 140, 185 First Quarto of 25–​8, 33 Harbage, Alfred 3, 24 Hart, Alfred 26, 64, 75, 120 Hart, H. C. 111, 112, 124, 130 Hawkins, Thomas 3, 5 Henning, Standish 19, 22 Henry V 30, 163–​5 Henry VI Part 1 30, 67, 121–​35, 144, 148, 165, 168, 177, 184 authorship attribution history of 110–​14 diction 136, 137 early publication history of 109–​10 phraseology 118–​21, 137, 154, 155 prosody 115–​17, 151, 152 rhyme 114–​15, 135–​6, 148, 149 stage directions 117–​18 vocabulary 118, 154 Henry VI Part 2 33, 34, 54, 59, 68, 91, 109, 111, 125, 128, 137, 154, 183 Henry VI Part 3 33, 34, 59, 62, 63, 64, 81, 83, 94–​5, 109, 110, 111, 137, 140, 183 Henslowe, Philip 21, 80, 109, 110, 111, 138 Heywood, Thomas 3, 28, 58, 62, 140, 167 Holinshed, Raphael 15, 51, 110, 127, 146, 175, 177

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332

Index Householder’s Philosophy, The 2, 14, 21, 26 Islip, Adam 8 Jackson, MacDonald P. 28, 49, 51–​2, 65, 66, 68–​71, 72–​8, 79, 84, 85, 86, 87, 91, 117–​18, 147, 177 Jeffes, Abel 3, 12 Jones, John 82 Jonson, Ben 2, 25, 58, 59, 61, 62, 137, 138, 180, 185 Julius Caesar 61, 90 Kesson, Andy 95 King John 26, 61, 81, 90, 137 King Lear 26, 36, 80, 82–​3, 90, 173–​5, 185 King Leir 8, 10–​12, 16, 17, 23, 24, 26, 36, 58, 80–​2, 83, 84, 90–​1, 94, 98–​100, 101, 106, 107, 128, 139, 169–​70, 173, 174, 175, 178, 180, 183, 185 authorship attribution history of 9–​10 early publication history of 8, 12, 53, 80, 83 phraseology 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 67, 85 prosody 42, 43, 45–​6, 78, 115, 116 rhyme 149, 151 stage directions 53 vocabulary 53, 54, 55, 56, 152, 154, 157 Knowles, Richard 80 Knowles, Ronald 109 Knutson, Roslyn 110, 139 Koskenniemi, Inna 75, 154 Kyd, Anna 2 Kyd, Francis 2, 4, 13, 36

233

Lake, David 35, 40 Lambrechts, Guy 147, 148 Lancashire, Ian 125 Lee, Sidney 173 Ling, Nicholas 6, 25 Literature Online 38, 39, 66, 119 Lodge, Thomas 2, 9, 21, 25, 151, 185 Logan, Robert 181 Love’s Labour’s Lost 108, 137 Lyly, John 1, 32 euphuism 17, 108 Macbeth 169, 175–​9, 185 MacLean, Sally-​Beth 167 Maguire, Laurie E. 28 Malone, Edmond 9, 20, 110, 171 Marlowe, Christopher 1, 3, 21, 33, 34, 37, 42, 43, 53, 59, 69, 75, 78, 92, 110, 114, 116, 117, 118, 119–​21, 151, 152, 170, 175, 180, 181, 182, 185 Marston, John 62, 137, 138 McNeal, Thomas H. 58, 128, 169, 178 Melchiori, Giorgio 146, 157, 165 Merchant of Venice, The 77, 80, 85 Merchant Taylors’ School 2, 22 Meres, Francis 142, 167 Merriam, Thomas 53, 54 Merry Wives of Windsor, The 27, 170 Middleton, Thomas 35, 182, 183 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 91 Miksch, Walter 13, 14 Mincoff, Marco 111, 126, 134 Moseley, Humphrey 143 Much Ado about Nothing 81, 166–​70, 185

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Index

Mueller, Martin 34, 39, 49, 51, 61, 62, 63, 67, 71, 80, 84, 85, 86, 118, 119, 140, 154, 180 Muir, Kenneth 28, 145 Nashe, Thomas 20–​1, 22, 24, 25, 30, 59, 62, 96, 110, 111–​13, 114, 115, 116, 124, 131, 134, 138, 180, 184 New Oxford Shakespeare, The 65–​6, 72, 119, 140, 182 Newington Butts playhouse 21 Newman, Thomas 19 Nicolson, George 142 Oliphant, E. H. C. 13, 182 Oras, Ants 34–​5, 43–​4, 77, 116–​17, 152 Othello 170–​3, 185 Painter, William 146 Pavier, Thomas 7, 137 Pearlman, Elihu 126, 135 Pearson, Jacqueline 169, 170 Peele, George 26, 33, 43, 59, 61, 75, 80, 118, 119, 151, 171, 185 Pembroke’s Men 59–​60, 63, 80, 84, 110, 111, 142 Potter, Lois 15 Proudfoot, Richard 20, 143, 146, 149, 152 Puckering, John 2, 21 Queen’s Men 80, 167 Ribner, Irving 18, 19 Richard II 145 Richard III 80, 81–​2, 83, 85, 86, 89, 94, 95–​6, 101–​4, 129, 132, 142, 145, 184

Richardson, Catherine 182 Rizvi, Pervez 37, 38–​40, 48–​9, 67, 69, 72, 89, 92, 105–​6, 137, 140, 145, 155, 169, 171, 173 Robertson, J. M. 9, 16, 114, 122, 123, 124, 147, 158 Rogers, Richard 143 Romeo and Juliet 61 Rose playhouse 3, 26, 80 Routh, James E. Jr 114 Rubow, Paul V. 9, 10, 14, 20, 38 Rudman, Joseph 65 Sams, Eric 22, 158 Sarrazin, Gregor 114, 147 Scarlet, Thomas 142 Schick, Josef 20 Schoone-​Jongen, Terence 59 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus 4, 5, 7, 11, 12, 18–​19, 20, 21, 24, 32, 50, 61, 93, 94, 96, 101, 103, 105, 106, 108, 115, 127, 128, 148, 157, 162, 172, 176, 177, 178, 180 Shapiro, James 174 Sharpe, Will 19, 144, 145 Sinclair, John 71 Skura, Meredith 81, 83 Slater, Eliot 149 Soliman and Perseda 2, 5–​6, 7, 11, 13, 15, 20, 24, 61, 63–​4, 73–​4, 82, 90, 94, 95, 97, 102, 106, 127, 148, 171–​2, 173, 178, 183, 185 authorship attribution history of 4, 31 early publication history of 8, 12, 53, 62, 80 phraseology 47, 49, 50, 51, 67, 70, 85, 119, 120, 155

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532

Index prosody 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 77, 78, 79, 115, 151, 152 rhyme 114–​15, 151 stage directions 52, 117 vocabulary 53, 54, 55, 75, 76, 152, 154, 156 Southworth, John 62, 63, 64 Spanish Comedy of Don Horatio, The 7, 29 Spanish Tragedy, The 2, 3–​4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, 23, 24, 61, 62, 84, 89–​90, 93–​4, 95, 97, 101–​2, 108, 115, 127, 136–​7, 148, 166, 168, 172, 176, 178, 183, 185 additions to 137–​40, 185 authorship attribution history of 3 diction 136–​7 early publication history of 3, 8, 12 phraseology 47, 49, 50, 51, 67, 69, 70, 85, 119, 120, 148, 154–​5 prosody 41, 42, 43–​4, 45, 46, 78, 79, 117 rhyme 114 vocabulary 53, 54, 55, 75, 76, 95, 118, 156 Spenser, Edmund 2, 101 Stalker, Archibald 111 Stanley, Henry 19 Star Wars 7, 137 Stephenson, Joseph F. 65 Stoppard, Tom 29 Strange’s Men 3, 7, 19, 30, 109, 110, 171 Sussex’s Men 80 Swinburne, Algernon Charles 181 Sykes, H. D. 14, 74, 102

235

Taming of the Shrew, The 54, 59, 68, 91, 104–​5, 142, 168, 183 Tarlinskaja, Marina 35, 41, 42, 45–​6, 78–​9, 117 Tasso, Torquato 2, 14, 20, 172 Taylor, Gary 109, 111, 115, 119–​21, 144, 167, 168, 181–​2 Thompson, Ann 104–​5, 108 Timberlake, Philip 33–​4, 41–​3, 76, 115–​16, 132, 143–​4, 145, 151–​2 Titus Andronicus 61, 67, 80, 89, 94, 142, 173 Tobin, John 60 Troilus and Cressida 85, 90 Two Gentlemen of Verona, The 64, 90, 183 Ur-​Hamlet 2, 20, 21, 24, 26, 28, 29, 139, 140, 185 Valenza, Robert 152 Van den Berg, Kent T. 163, 164 Van Es, Bart 58, 105, 129 Vickers, Brian 2, 7, 20, 27, 38, 40, 46, 47, 65, 68, 73, 78, 93, 94, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 117, 120, 136, 138, 148, 149, 158, 162, 182 Vincent, Paul J. 111, 118, 119, 123, 126, 127, 128, 129, 133–​4 Vitkus, Daniel 171, 172 Watson, Thomas 2, 121, 166, 167, 168, 170 WCopyfind 38, 39 Wells, Stanley 144, 160, 185 Wells, William 9, 38, 42, 85, 96, 114, 147

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Index

Wentersdorf, Karl 149 White, Edward 4, 8, 12 Wiggins, Martin 8, 31, 33, 40, 52, 92, 142 Wilder, Lina Perkins 60 Williams, William Proctor 65 Wilson, John Dover 111, 112, 113, 124, 126, 128, 134, 135, 169

Wine, M. L. 53, 68, 176 Witherspoon, Alexander Maclaren 12, 76, 106 Wotton, Henry 4, 5, 15, 20 Yang, Albert 56, 154 Yarington, Robert 36

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