Earls of Rutland, Pembroke, Montgomery, and Dorset, Lords Chandos, Scrope, Compton, North, Hay, Norris, and Dingwall, Lord Walden and his brothers, and Sir Henry Cary.
Lost Entertainment
When James dined with the Merchant Taylors on 16 July 1607 (cf. ch. iv), Jonson wrote a speech of eighteen verses, for recitation by an Angel of Gladness. This 'pleased his Majesty marvelously well',
but does not seem to have been preserved (Nichols, James, ii. 136; Clode, i. 276). FRANCIS KINWELMERSHE (>1577-?1580). A Gray's Inn lawyer, probably of Charlton, Shropshire, verses by whom are in The Paradise of Dainty Devices (1576).
Jocasta. 1566
Translated with George Gascoigne (q.v.).
THOMAS KYD (1558-94).
Kyd was baptized on 6 Nov. 1558. His father, Francis Kyd, was a London citizen and a scrivener. John Kyd, a stationer, may have been a relative. Thomas entered the Merchant Taylors School in 1565, but there is no evidence that he proceeded to a university. It is possible that he followed his father's profession before he drifted into literature. He seems to be criticized as translator and playwright in Nashe's Epistle to Greene's Menaphon in 1589 (cf. App. C), and a reference there has been rather rashly interpreted as implying that he was the author of an early play on Hamlet. About the same time his reputation was made by The Spanish Tragedy, which came, with Titus Andronicus, to be regarded as the typical drama of its age. Ben Jonson couples 'sporting Kyd' with 'Marlowe's mighty line' in recording the early dramatists outshone by Shakespeare. Towards the end of his life Kyd's relations with Marlowe brought him into trouble. During the years 1590-3 he was in the service of a certain noble lord for whose players Marlowe was in the habit of writing. The two sat in the same room and certain 'atheistic' papers of Marlowe's got mixed up with Kyd's. On 12 May 1593 Kyd was arrested on a suspicion of being concerned in certain 'lewd and mutinous libels' set up on the wall of the Dutch churchyard; the papers were discovered and led to Marlowe (q.v.) being arrested also. Kyd, after his release, wrote to the Lord Keeper, Sir John Puckering, to repudiate the charge of atheism and to explain away his apparent intimacy with Marlowe. It is not certain who the 'lord' with whom the two writers were connected may have been; possibly Lord Pembroke or Lord Strange, for whose players Marlowe certainly wrote; possibly also Henry Radcliffe, fourth Earl of Sussex, to whose daughter-in-law Kyd dedicated his translation of Cornelia, after his disgrace, in 1594. Before the end of 1594 Kyd had died intestate in the parish of St. Mary Colchurch, and his parents renounced the administration of his goods.
