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Thomas Kyd and the Ur-Hamlet
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
For some reason, the dramatist Kyd almost entirely dropped out of public notice during the 17th and 18th centuries. This is the more remarkable when we remember the popular favor which greeted certainly the Spanish Tragedy and perhaps other of his productions during the last decade of the 16th and the first quarter of the 17th century. It was one of the achievements of 19th century scholarship to restore Kyd to his place among the great Elizabethan dramatists. In this restoration, a single paragraph from Nash's prefatory Epistle to Greene's Menaphon has played a conspicuous role. It has now come to be all but universally accepted by scholars that this paragraph refers to Kyd, and in it are found not a few otherwise unknown facts of his literary history. This paragraph also has the distinction of containing the first reference in the English language to Hamlet; and a study of the context has led students to the opinion that, according to Nash, Kyd was the author of the Ur-Hamlet.
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References
page 729 note 1 The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare, edited by the late Edward Malone, 1821.
page 729 note 1 The First Quarto Edition of Hamlet, 1603, London, 1880, Herford and Widgery.
page 729 note 2 A Chronicle History of the Life and Work of Shakespeare, Frederick Gard Fleay, London, 1886.
page 729 note 3 Dictionary of National Biography, article Thomas Kyd.
page 729 note 4 The Authorship of the Early Hamlet, pp. 282–295, in An English Miscellany, Oxford, at the Clarendon Press, 1901.
page 729 note 5 First in Englische Studien, vol. xv, and Anglia, vols. xii and xiii; and later in his Thomas Kyd und sein Kreis, von Gregor Sarrazin, Berlin, 1892. All citations in this article from Sarrazin are from his Thomas Kyd und sein Kreis.
page 729 note 1 The Spanish Tragedy, edited by J. Schick, J. M. Dent & Co., London, 1898.
page 729 note 2 The Works of Thomas Kyd, edited by Frederick S. Boas, M. A., Oxford, at the Clarendon Press, 1901.
page 729 note 3 Ueber Titus Andronicus, Dr. M. M. Arnold Schröer, Marburg, 1891.
page 729 note 1 Fleay, pp. 10–15.
page 729 note 2 If it can be shown that the reference is to Kyd, then it is quite possible, as Prof. Manly has suggested to me, that Nash (contrary to the view of Sarrazin) had no intention of concealment, that his thrusts at the dramatist would be easily recognized by those to whom they were addressed and that Nash chose this method, rather than the more direct one, purely for rhetorical effect.
page 729 note 3 Mod. Lang. Notes, vol. xvii, p. 290.
page 729 note 4 It may be worthy of note that those who see in the paragraph references to one or more dramatists besides Kyd are confronted by the additional difficulty of determining to what one Nash means to give the credit for the Ur-Hamlet.
page 729 note 1 Um so mehr als diese Fabel eine freie Variation Nashs ist. Keine der Aesopischen Fabeln, in welcher ein Zicklein oder Bock vorkommt, hat einen äknlichen Inhalt; wohl aber ist in einer derselben (Fabulae Aesopicae, ed. Camerarius, p. 221, vgl. Phaedri abularum Aesopiarum libri quinqui, ed. Luc. Mueller, p. 68) von einem Affen die Rede, welcher den Fuchs wegen seines schmucken Felles und seines schönen Schwanzes beneidet. Nash hat also offenbar statt des Affen das Zicklein in die Fabel hinein escamotirt, um ein Wortspiel auf Kyd zu gewinnen.”—Sarrazin, p. 100.
“The ‘Kidde in Aesop’—this is indeed, I think, calling
page 729 note 1 Einstein, The Italian Renaissance in England, 1903, Chap. vii, and Miss M. A. Scott, Elizabethan Translations from the Italian, Pub. Mod. Lang. Assoc., 1895–1899.
page 729 note 1 Cf. Gorboduc, iv: 2: 234–235, iii: i: 16–18; Wounds of Civil War (Dodsley-Hazlett, vol. 7), pp. 124, 184, 157, 168, 114, 112; Arraignment of Paris, iv: i: 269–271, ii: i: 138–139. For these and scores of other instances of repetition of initial “and” and “if” in contemporary English plays I am indebted to Prof. F. G. Hubbard of the University of Wisconsin.
page 729 note 2 Bang, Englische Studien, vol. 28, p. 282.
page 729 note 1 Cf. Sp. Tr. i: i: 60–75 with the Aeneid vi: 440–702.
page 729 note 1 Prof. Manly has called my attention to the fact that the “borrowing” seems to have been made, not from the translation, but from the Latin !
page 729 note 1 “whereuppon I thought it as good for mee to reape the frate of my owne labours, as to let some unskilful pen-man or Noverint-Maker starch his ruffe and new spade his beard with the benefit he made of them.” — The Works of Nash, ed. by Grosart, vol. iii, p. 214.
page 729 note 1 Thus interpreted, the words, “have not yet learned the just measure of the Horizon without an hexameter “not only fit perfectly Nash's argument in the paragraph, but they are also in harmony with his views expressed elsewhere. Cf. Works of Thomas Nash, edited by Grosart, vol. ii, p. 218: “For that was a plannet exalted above their hexameter Horizon;” ibidem, pp. 237–238, Nash at length inveighs against the use of the hexameter in English.
page 729 note 2 Professor McCallum, p. 294; and Professor Thorndike, p. 290.
page 729 note 1 Einstein, Chapter viii.