KYD STUFF
May 12, 2005

by Joe Sobran

     In college I was once assigned to read a play called 
THE SPANISH TRAGEDY, one of the big hits of the 
Elizabethan theater. I was taught that it was written by 
Thomas Kyd, who was also believed to have written an 
early version of HAMLET -- largely because THE SPANISH 
TRAGEDY, like the HAMLET we know as Shakespeare's, 
features murder, revenge, a ghost, a suicide, and a 
play-within-the-play.

     Until recently, I believed all this. But as usual, 
the textbook account of history turns out, under 
inspection, to be a glossy oversimplification.

     Almost nothing is actually known of Kyd. He is said 
to have been born in 1558 and to have died in 1594. He 
was apparently tortured to tell the authorities what he 
knew about the murky playwright Christopher Marlowe, whom 
he accused of blasphemy and who apparently died in a 
brawl in 1593 (though details of his death remain 
disputed).

     All we really know about THE SPANISH TRAGEDY is that 
it went through more than ten printings (even the exact 
number is unclear) from around 1590 to 1633. None of 
these identified its author; only a 1612 reference to 
"Mr. Kid" credits him with the play.

     As for the idea that Kyd also wrote an early play 
about Hamlet, there is no evidence for this whatsoever -- 
though many scholars swear he did. But a passing joke by 
Thomas Nashe about Hamlet's name in 1589 has convinced 
the scholars that there must have been an earlier play 
about the Prince of Denmark by then -- and that it had 
been written by someone other than Shakespeare, since the 
scholars agree that he couldn't have written his HAMLET 
before about 1600.

     Unfortunately for the scholars, no trace of this 
supposed play has ever been found. If Kyd had written 
such a play, as well as the hugely popular SPANISH 
TRAGEDY, why wasn't it printed even once?

     In other words, the whole idea of an "earlier" 
Hamlet play depends on the dubious assumption that Nashe 
couldn't have been referring to Shakespeare's version in 
1589. This in turn assumes that Shakespeare was too young 
to have written his masterpiece so early. Which further 
assumes that "Shakespeare" was the Stratford man, William 
Shakspere, born in 1564 and only 25 at the time of 
Nashe's joke about Hamlet and his "tragical speeches."

     But Nashe was almost surely referring to the 
Shakespeare play. In 1592 he wrote a diatribe against 
drunkenness that strongly resembles Hamlet's speech on 
the subject in Act I, Scene IV. Like Hamlet, Nashe 
singles out the Danes as notoriously "swinish" sots and 
uses various other words in the same speech, such as 
"heavy-headed," "manners," "nature," and "vice."

     Others referred to a Hamlet again in 1594 and 1596. 
Though the scholars insist these meant that hypothetical 
"early" play, it appears much more likely that they meant 
the only version whose existence is undoubted: 
Shakespeare's, which by 1603 had been performed in 
London, at Oxford and Cambridge Universities, and 
elsewhere. In 1607 it was even staged aboard an English 
ship off the coast of Sierra Leone! In 1626 a troupe of 
English actors also took it to Dresden.

     Even Shakespeare's authentic version presents 
nightmares for editors, because three different versions 
of it have actually survived: a short, corrupt edition in 
1603, a much longer and better edition in 1604, and a 
1623 version that cut about 220 lines from the 1604 
edition but added 80 new ones and changed many others.

     Sorting all this out is a labor of Hercules, since 
we can't know quite what Shakespeare intended. So modern 
textbook editions of HAMLET are far from being as 
definitive as they seem. Editors still come to blows over 
some of the most famous lines in Hamlet's "tragical 
speeches." Is his flesh "solid," "sallied," or "sullied"?

     But in order to maintain the notion that Shakspere 
of Stratford was "Shakespeare," the scholars have to keep 
insisting that Thomas Kyd or someone else had written 
that nonexistent early version of HAMLET. If this were 
the case, however, a text of that play, or at least some 
unmistakable mention of it, even a quotation from it, 
would have turned up by now. The only "evidence" that it 
ever existed is the circular logic of the scholars who 
say it "must have" existed.

     Of course it all depends on who Shakespeare was and 
how old he was. If the scholars have gotten these basic 
facts wrong, it's no wonder that they've been confused 
about so many other things.

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