Shakespeare

The lines became catchphrases, repeated and parodied by other dramatists. They were picked up and redeployed by Shakespeare in Titus Andronicus, when Titus appears in a similarly discomposed state to cry: “Who doth molest my contemplation?” (2106).

Kyd himself was still a young man when he wrote the play. He was born in 1558, just six years before Shakespeare, and was the son of a London scrivener; like Shakespeare he endured a relatively brief education at grammar school, and seems then to have entered his father’s trade. Little is known about him because, as a writer for the playhouses, little was required to be known. One of the few references to him is that of “industrious Kyd,” which suggests that he wrote a great deal for his daily bread. He seems to have begun his career as a playwright for the Queen’s Men in 1583, but by 1587 he and Christopher Marlowe had both entered the service of Lord Strange’s Men. Shakespeare may have followed them. The Spanish Tragedy was enacted by that company, as was Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and The Massacre at Paris.

It is important to note that playwriting was a young man’s occupation – Kyd and Marlowe being no more than twenty-three or twenty-four (and perhaps even younger) when they began their work. “My first acquaintance with this Marlowe,” Kyd later wrote in an exculpatory letter, “rose upon his bearing name to serve my Lord [Strange] although his Lordship never knewe his service, but in writing for his plaiers.”⁴ This immediately raises an intriguing possibility. If Shakespeare joined Lord Strange’s Men in 1586, then he would very soon have become acquainted with Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe; he would, as it were, be part of the same affinity of writers. He acted in their plays. He may even have collaborated with them. It has often been observed how, in his earliest dramas, Shakespeare seems alternately to imitate and parody both dramatists. What could be more natural in a junior member of this confraternity than to copy those whom he was ambitious to succeed? It was the time, after all, of their maximum effectiveness and success. The Spanish Tragedy was so popular that it propagated a number of imitations and was revised in 1602, after the playwright’s death, with additions by Ben Jonson. So for almost twenty years it remained part of the staple fare of theatrical entertainment. What else would the young Shakespeare do but copy it?

There was one other association between Kyd and Shakespeare. Neither had been to university. As products of the grammar school only, they were both criticised by the “university wits” for their lack of learning. They were condemned by Nashe, Greene and other graduates as ex-scriveners or ex-schoolmasters, in terms that make it very difficult to know which of the two is being addressed. So there was a connection.

It was a small and intense world. These young dramatists stole lines and characters from one another. They criticised one another. Their plays were put on in competition, one with another, like the works of the Greek tragedians. The success of The Spanish Tragedy in 1586 seems to have inspired, or provoked, Marlowe into writing another play of bombastic eloquence. The two parts of Tamburlaine were acted at the end of the following year, but the speed of production and performance suggests that Marlowe had already written the plays in outline. They did constitute a revolution in English drama, however, but like other young artists Marlowe quickly acquired notoriety for his life as much as for his art. He was generally regarded as an atheist, a blasphemer and a pederast. He had become, after his first success upon the stage, a notorious renegade.