Kyd, Thomas, 1558-1594

LC control no.	n 50058277
Descriptive conventions	rda
Personal name heading	Kyd, Thomas, 1558-1594 *Browse this term in* LC Authorities or the LC Catalog
Variant(s)	Kid, Thomas, 1558-1594
Associated place	London (England)
Birth date	1558
Death date	1594
Profession or occupation	Dramatists
Found in	InU/3 cent. drama files (usage: Thomas Kid) Wikipedia, September 19, 2016 (Thomas Kyd; Thomas Kyd (baptised 6 November 1558; buried 15 August 1594) was an English playwright, the author of The Spanish Tragedy, and one of the most important figures in the development of Elizabethan drama; he was the son of Francis and Anna Kyd and was baptised in the church of St Mary Woolnoth in the Ward of Langborn, Lombard Street, London; in October 1565 the young Kyd was enrolled in the newly founded Merchant Taylors' School, whose headmaster was Richard Mulcaster; fellow students included Edmund Spenser and Thomas Lodge; evidence suggests that in the 1580s Kyd became an important playwright, but little is known about his activity; The Spanish Tragedie was probably written in the mid to late 1580s; other works by Kyd are his translations of Torquato Tasso's Padre di Famiglia, published as The Householder's Philosophy (1588); and Robert Garnier's Cornelia (1594); plays attributed in whole or in part to Kyd include Soliman and Perseda, King Leir, Arden of Feversham and Edward III; Kyd is more generally accepted to have been the author of a Hamlet, the precursor of the Shakespearean play (Ur-Hamlet); some poems by Kyd exist, but it seems that most of his work is lost or unidentified; he is also the presumed author of a pamphlet in prose entitled The Murder of John Brewen (1592); the last we hear from the playwright is the publication of Cornelia early in 1594; Kyd died later that year at the age of 35, and was buried on 15 August in St Mary Colechurch in London; in December of that same year, Kyd's mother legally renounced the administration of his estate, probably because it was debt-ridden; St Mary Colechurch was destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666, and not rebuilt; thus Thomas Kyd's grave was lost to posterity) Encyclopædia Britannica, via WWW, September 19, 2016 (Thomas Kyd, English Dramatist; Thomas Kyd, (baptized Nov. 6, 1558, London, Eng--died c. December 1594, London) English dramatist who, with his The Spanish Tragedy (sometimes called Hieronimo, or Jeronimo, after its protagonist), initiated the revenge tragedy of his day; the son of a scrivener, Kyd was educated at the Merchant Taylors School in London.; he seems to have been in service for some years with a lord (possibly Ferdinando, Lord Strange, the patron of Lord Strange's Men); The Spanish Tragedy was entered in the Stationers' Register in October 1592, and the undated first quarto edition almost certainly appeared in that year; the only other play certainly by Kyd is Cornelia (1594), an essay in Senecan tragedy, translated from the French of Robert Garnier's academic Cornélie; he may also have written an earlier version of Hamlet, known to scholars as the Ur-Hamlet, and his hand has sometimes been detected in the anonymous Arden of Feversham, one of the first domestic tragedies, and in a number of other plays; about 1591 Kyd was sharing lodgings with Christopher Marlowe, and on May 13, 1593, he was arrested and then tortured, being suspected of treasonable activity; his room had been searched and certain "atheistical" disputations denying the deity of Jesus Christ found there; he probably averred then and certainly confirmed later, in a letter, that these papers had belonged to Marlowe; that letter is the source for almost everything that is known about Kyd's life; he was dead by Dec. 30, 1594, when his mother made a formal repudiation of her son's debt-ridden estate)
Associated language	eng