ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter we examined what Kyd and Marlowe found when they began to write for the popular stage. Now we shall look at what Shakespeare found when he began to write: what kind of verse nurtured the young actor and the budding author? Some of his early contemporaries, such as Thomas Kyd, were older than he; others, such as Christopher Marlowe, were close to Shakespeare in age but probably began writing earlier than he did. Kyd and Marlowe are the main figures of this period, and their influence on their contemporaries and on the whole period of subsequent dramaturgy was substantial. We shall examine their known canon: seven plays by Marlowe, three by Kyd, and several plays by other known and anonymous authors. We shall analyze three more plays that might belong to Kyd: Fair Em, King Leir and, questionably, Arden of Faversham, and two more in which Kyd was a possible co-author: 1 Henry VI and Edward III. In order to get a better idea of the period and to shed some light on the authorship of several anonymous or debatable plays, we shall take a close look at the versification of 14 more plays. In addition to Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will (Nashe arguably wrote Act 1 of 1 Henry VI), I analyze four plays by Greene; three by Peele (Peele’s verse style interests us especially in relation to Titus Andronicus); Lodge’s Wounds of Civil War; three anonymous plays, Fair Em, Arden of Faversham, and King Leir, claimed by Brian Vickers to belong to Kyd (Vickers 2008); the famous play Edward III, part of which is probably Shakespeare’s; and the three plays that the scholarly consensus attributes to Kyd: The Spanish Tragedy, Soliman and Perseda, and Cornelia (a translation). We also shall look at The First Part of Hieronimo (sometimes spelled Ieronimo or Jeronymo), at times attributed to the pre-Spanish Tragedy Kyd; and two more anonymous plays, Locrine and Edmund Ironside. Both latter plays used to belong to Shakespeare apocrypha. Richard Proudfoot mentioned that Locrine might be by Lodge (private communication).
