Bard’s hand in Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy?
Thomas Kyd
The mystery behind the identity of the writer of five additional passages in Thomas Kyd’s play The Spanish Tragedy has now been solved, and it is none other than Shakespeare! Surprisingly, the proof that the Bard of Avon was involved comes from his trademark misspellings and the bad handwriting behind them.
For centuries, scholars have been searching for answers to a literary mystery: Who wrote the five additional passages in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy?
William Shakespeare’s name has been pointed out as the author of the 325 additional lines but there has been no conclusive proof. Now, English professor Douglas Bruster from the University of Texas at Austin has found evidence confirming that it is indeed the work of the Bard. According to Bruster’s textual analysis, published online in Notes and Queries, the proof lies in Shakespeare’s trademark misspellings and bad handwriting. “This is the clinching evidence we need to admit the additional passages into the Shakespeare canon. It’s not every day we get to identify new writing by Shakespeare, so this is an exciting moment,” Bruster said. Bruster examined Shakespeare’s spelling habits in the manuscript pages of the 16th-century play Sir Thomas More.
Using Shakespeare’s contributions as a guide, he identified 24 points of similarity between Sir Thomas More and The Spanish Tragedy, a play republished, with new material, at about the time of Hamlet. The findings reveal that Shakespeare’s spelling was both old-fashioned and idiosyncratic. For example, with words like “spotless” and “darkness” Shakesp-eare would use a single ‘s’. Past-tense words like “wrapped” and “blessed” he ended with a “t” (ie, “wrapt”, “blest”). Also telling is his habit of spelling the same word in two different ways (ie, “alley” spelled “allie” and “allye” in the same line).
Shakespeare’s contributions to the revised version of Kyd’s play were first suspected in 1833 by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the noted poet, philosopher and literary critic.
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