Collecting Thomas Kyd: A Conversation with Darren Freebury-Jones

**Philip Rowe** (0:10)
Welcome to The History Of European Theatre podcast, and thanks for joining me on this journey through millennia of theatrical history. Episode 212, Collecting Thomas Kyd, A Conversation With Darren Freebury-Jones.
For today's guest episode, it is a warm welcome back to the podcast for Darren Freebury-Jones. On this occasion, Darren is here to discuss Thomas Kyd and the works that have been attributed to him in the new two-volume edition of His Collected Works, for which Darren is the associate editor. It's always a pleasure to talk to Darren, and as a friend of the podcast, he needs only the briefest of introductions. Dr Darren Freebury-Jones is author of several works on early modern theatre, including Reading Robert Greene, Recovering Shakespeare's Rival, Shakespeare's Tutor, The Influence of Thomas Kyd, and his latest work, Shakespeare's Borrowed Feathers, has now just been published in a paperback edition.
In addition to these works and his role as associate editor for the first critical edition of The Collected Works of Thomas Kyd since 1901, he has also investigated the boundaries of John Marston's dramatic corpus as part of the Oxford Marston Project and is general editor for The Collected Plays of Robert Greene, published by Edinburgh University Press. His findings on the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries have been discussed in national newspapers in the UK and on BBC Radio. His debut poetry collection, Rambling, was published by Broken Sleep Books in 2024 In 2023, he was elected a Fellow to the Royal Historical Society in recognition of his contributions to historical scholarship. I spoke to Darren over a Zoom call. For probably what most people know about Thomas Kyd, it comes down to the very influential Spanish tragedy, of course, two other plays and a hint of a version of Hamlet to his name. But you are Associate Editor of now two volumes of his Collected Works. So I think my first question has to be, how did you fill those books?

**Darren Freebury-Jones** (2:12)
I love that question. So yes, it's two volumes, it's two volumes only.
And our starting points, so I'm Associate Editor and Sir Brian Vickers is the General Editor. Our starting point wasn't just that we're going to produce a Collected Works, and then how are we going to fill up two volumes? Our prompt was very much the evidence and the historical scholarship that assigns far more plays, to Thomas Kyd, than the traditionally accepted three plays of the Spanish tragedy, Doleman and Posada, which is a full-length treatment of the play within a play in the Spanish tragedy, and Thomas Kyd's translation from the French of Robert Garnier, Cornelia.
So that was what prompted us to produce these volumes, was presenting an expanded Thomas Kyd canon and reconsidering his place in the landscape of early modern popular entertainment and literary works.

**Philip Rowe** (3:16)
The first play that we should probably talk about is Ardent of Favisham, because for some time that has been considered possible that it was one of his works, or equally one of Shakespeare's, but you ascribe it more firmly to him perhaps than has ever been done before?

**Darren Freebury-Jones** (3:31)
Yes, it's a tremendous play, Ardent of Favisham, and I think in part its high quality is led to links to Shakespeare, and I think it was a drama that was certainly influential for Shakespeare, and there's a good chance he might very well have acted in it, but I don't think there's any convincing evidence that Shakespeare had a hand in it. I think the evidence points to the play being homogenous, to being the product of a single author's hand, and that author I firmly believe is Thomas Kyd. So this is a true crime drama, Ardent of Favisham.
It depicts the murder on Valentine's Day. Most unfortunate timing in 1551 of a former mayor of Favisham in Kent, Thomas Ardent, and he was murdered by some hired assassins, his wife, Alice Ardent, and her lover. And it's worth considering the publisher and printer provenance of this play in the first instance, because I think that's quite interesting. So the play usually dated around 1590, and it was published in Quartiform in 1592 by Edward White. And Edward White had a hand in publishing no fewer than four of the six sole authored plays in the newly proposed canon of Thomas Kyd that we're presenting. So Solomon of Posada was printed for White by Edward Old. And there's some evidence of confusion in the Stationer's Register entry of May 1594, as to whether Adam Islip or White owned the rights to The True Chronicle History of King Lear, another play we assigned to Kyd. So Islip's name was crossed out of the record and replaced by White's. And White also published an unauthorized edition of The Spanish Tragedy in 1592 And Abel Jeffs was fined 10 shillings for publishing an illegal edition of Ardna Favisham that very year. And White was also fined for publishing his edition of The Spanish Tragedy, which belonged to Jeffs. So you've got the tremendous scholar, Lucas Erne.