Note 221 — XIII—MATURITY OF GENIUS

I wrote on this point in the article on Thomas Kyd in the Dictionary of National Biography (vol. xxxi.): ‘The argument in favour of Kyd’s authorship of a pre-Shakespearean play (now lost) on the subject of Hamlet deserves attention. Nash in 1589, when describing [in his preface to Menaphon] the typical literary hack, who at almost every point suggests Kyd, notices that in addition to his other accomplishments “he will afford you whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls of tragical speeches.” Other references in popular tracts and plays of like date prove that in an early tragedy concerning Hamlet there was a ghost who cried repeatedly, “Hamlet, revenge!” and that this expression took rank in Elizabethan slang beside the vernacular quotations from [Kyd’s sanguinary tragedy of] Jeronimo, such as “What outcry calls me from my naked bed,” and “Beware, Hieronimo, go by, go by.” The resemblance between the stories of Hamlet and Jeronimo suggests that the former would have supplied Kyd with a congenial plot. In Jeronimo a father seeks to avenge his son’s murder; in Hamlet the theme is the same with the position of father and son reversed. In Jeronimo the avenging father resolves to reach his end by arranging for the performance of a play in the presence of those whom he suspects of the murder of his son, and there is good ground for crediting the lost tragedy of Hamlet with a similar play-scene. Shakespeare’s debt to the lost tragedy is a matter of conjecture, but the stilted speeches of the play-scene in his Hamlet read like intentional parodies of Kyd’s bombastic efforts in The Spanish Tragedy, and it is quite possible that they were directly suggested by an almost identical episode in a lost Hamlet by the same author.’ Shakespeare elsewhere shows acquaintance with Kyd’s work. He places in the mouth of Kit Sly in the Taming of the Shrew the current phrase ‘Go by, Jeronimy,’ from The Spanish Tragedy. Shakespeare quotes verbatim a line from the same piece in Much Ado about Nothing (I. i. 271): ‘In time the savage bull doth bear the yoke;’ but Kyd practically borrowed that line from Watson’s Passionate Centurie (No. xlvii.), where Shakespeare may have met it.