The irony of chance, by a freak of Ben Jonson's, has attached to the most ill-fated of authors the name of "Sporting Kyd". Born about 1558 the son of a scrivener in the City, Kyd was educated at Merchant Taylors' School. He was not a member of either University. It is by a piece of luck, for his biographers, that he was satirized by Nash as one who stole from a French translation of Seneca's tragedies; and so produced a play, "Pompey the Great, his fair Cornelia's Tragedie," one who "will afford you whole Hamlets," and who took up the business of translating from the Italian. By pursuing these and other sarcastic hints of Nash's, Kyd has been identified as the author of the most truly popular of early Elizabethan plays "The Spanish Tragedy"; of what the Germans call the "Ur-Hamlet," the oldest English Hamlet play; and the translator of "The Householder's Philosophic," in prose; while he is thought guiltless of the first part of "Jeronimo," a prelude, meant to be humorous, to his "Spanish Tragedy". To that work, again, additions were made, and Ben Jonson was paid for making them, though they are thought not to resemble his manner, and he frequently girds in his own later dramas at the popular "Spanish Tragedy". It is a long tissue of horrors and revenges in blank verse, old Hieronymo slowly pursuing the slayers of his son, Horatio, and contains, like "Hamlet," a play within a play, in which the actors in a fencing scene slay each other in earnest, to glut Hieronymo's revenge. As in "Hamlet" there is a ghost, but ghosts were common in the dramas of Seneca and his English imitators. Hieronymo, when apprehended, bites his tongue out, and stabs himself and a Duke who happens to be convenient in his neighbourhood.
If Kyd were really the author of the first play of "Hamlet," based on a Danish story which English actors who played in Germany in 1587 may have brought home, the fact would be interesting. If we only possessed a copy of this first "Hamlet," we should know how much, if anything at all, Shakespeare retained from the original play. Kyd is credited with being the first to show the change and development of characters under the sway of the events of the drama, though this can scarcely be proved save by a long comparison of all the characters in the plays of other writers. Grotesque as are his horrors, when we compare those of "Titus Andronicus" and of successors of Shakespeare who ought to have known better, we wonder at his moderation.
Kyd's end was lamentable. He was arrested, and tortured, in May, 1593, on suspicion of having written a placard threatening a massacre of undesirable aliens in London, who interfered with home industries. In his papers was found part of a perfectly serious though heterodox discourse on a theological topic, apparently intended to be submitted to a Bishop. He cleared himself of the placard, and, in a letter to Puckering, the Lord Keeper, said that he had the theological piece from Marlowe, that it was among his papers by accident, and that Marlowe, then just dead, was an evil man, and no friend of his.
Kyd now lost the patronage of a peer, unnamed, and by December in the following year he was dead; his family renounced the administration of what possessions he may have left behind him. He has of late been the subject of minute English and German research, like every one who had, or may have had, the faintest connexion with Shakespeare. The indecision of Hieronymo (Act III. scene 12) in revenging himself on Balthasar for slaying Horatio, Hieronymo's son, and hanging him up in Hieronymo's summer-house, has other motives than the indecision of Hamlet. But this indecision, and the play within the play, and Kyd's supposed authorship of the "Ur-Hamlet," which lies behind the First Quarto of "Hamlet," make Kyd interesting to critical specialists.
These predecessors of Shakespeare need to be mentioned, though perhaps only Marlowe's dramas are now commonly read by lovers of poetry. Though these men wandered in the wilderness, so to speak, they pointed out the way to Shakespeare, and made the world familiar with rude forecasts of the forms of the romantic comedy, the historical play, and the tragedy. Several wrote blank verse well, occasionally; Marlowe brought blank verse, not precisely dramatic, but rather reflective, to the highest beauty. Almost all the early dramatists also graced their plays with charming songs.
All of these early dramatists had that sweet and birdlike English note of song, "woodnotes wild," which (to an English ear) is rare in all but the early poetry of France. We have observed this note in the lyrics of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Time did not stifle the music, it is prolonged in the fashionable love-romances and in the early dramas. Thus even Nash, the least poetical of his associates, has his
Adieu, farewell earth's bliss
This world uncertain is,
which, with its refrain,
Lord, have mercy on us,