posted on 12 Jan 2025

Thomas Kyd: A Dramatist Restored by Brian Vickers

This is a book full of passion, scholarship and controversy - controversy both confronted and generated by the author who is bold and uncompromising in his championing of his claims for Thomas Kyd.

Kyd, an Elizabethan playwright, may well be a name that most people will not have heard of - like many of his contemporaries he finds himself cast into heavy shadow by the dominance of William Shakespeare. But to reduce the Elizabethan dramatic landscape to just a single presence is, of course, a simplistic reading of what was an astonishingly creative milieu.

I have to put up my hand and confess that Elizabethan literature is a long way from my own areas of specialism (20th century working class fiction, if you’re interested) but I know enough to connect Thomas Kyd with The Spanish Tragedy - which, I understood, introduced some important elements of the revenge tragedy genre that would be influential on other playwrights, including Shakespeare. But at that point, before picking up this book, that ill-formed nugget was all I could bring to the table.

What I hadn’t understood was the fiery crucible of academic debate that is generated by disputes over the issue of attribution - by that I mean getting to the bottom of who should be credited with actually writing the plays that survive from that period. Every now and then the press has a passing flirtation with someone claiming that they have definitive proof that Shakespeare did or didn’t author the plays attributed to him but in the academic community these attribution debates rage like wildfire.

I love the fact that Brian Vickers steps right into the conflagration and uses his book to set out a thoughtful and combative argument to justify his claim that he can increase the number of plays positively attributed to Kyd by three. And he knows that there will be those who disagree just as vehemently and he doesn’t dodge these issues. In my view, this is exactly what good books do - they prompt and invite debate and disagreement.

Even if the sometimes dense and difficult technicalities of literary attribution sometimes slip past you (and me), you’ll still find plenty to fascinate if you have an interest in Elizabethan literature - and, let’s face it, why would you have stuck with this review if you haven’t? Vickers gives over separate chapters to discussing each of the plays he ascribes to Kyd and that itself is a feast - the disputes over attribution are a little extra to keep you fascinated.

I’m not going to suggest that this is light reading because it certainly isn’t. It is, I would suggest however, a book that anyone with scholarly aspirations in this area of literary study should and would want to read and for those with more of a lay interest, you will enjoy discovering more about Thomas Kyd and the debates about what he did or didn’t write.

Available from Princeton University Press, you will be able to get this from your local independent bookshop - who will be happy to order it for you if they don’t have it on their shelves.

 

Terry Potter

January 2025