The number of plays attributed to the sixteenth-century playwright Thomas Kyd doubles in the new edition | platform

The number of plays attributed to the sixteenth-century playwright Thomas Kyd has doubled in a major new edition.

The forthcoming second volume of the Collected Works of Thomas Kyd makes a strong case for his sole or partial authorship of plays previously attributed to William Shakespeare or Christopher Marlowe.

Kidd’s traditionally accepted dramatic works are the revenge play The Spanish Tragedy, the love tragedy Solomon and Persida, and the classical tragedy Cornelia.

His oeuvre now includes such works as the domestic tragedy Arden of Faversham, which is attributed only to Kyd and “not at all” to Shakespeare, as others had previously assumed.

In the first critical edition of Kyd’s collected works from 1901, he was presented as a “tragically neglected major playwright”. Its nine scholars argue that the restored work positions Kyd as a leading Elizabethan playwright, unfairly overshadowed by his great contemporaries, as well as “expanding our understanding of a golden period of literature and theatre.”

Dr Darren Freebury-Jones, a former academic at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon, is the publication’s associate editor. He told The Guardian: “Kyd’s oeuvre has now been expanded from three plays to eight. In the case of Arden of Faversham, Fair Em, The Miller’s Daughter of Manchester and parts of Henry VI Part 1 and Edward III, this is the first time they have been presented in a critical and collected theatrical version like Kyd has, despite the long history of these plays associated with him.”

The evidence presented in the new volume includes computational analysis of linguistic details, as well as similarities in layout and description. He attributes the first part of Henry VI to Kyd, Thomas Nashe, and Shakespeare, but not to Marlowe as previously assumed.

“Kidd is very different from Shakespeare in many respects, particularly with regard to rhyme,” said Freeberry-Jones, whose books include Shakespeare’s Borrowed Feathers, a study of the early modern authors who inspired Shakespeare. “He has this strange habit of deconstructing his rhyme schemes. So, when you read his text, you think, ‘No, that doesn’t rhyme.’ And after a couple of lines, you have a rhyming word.”

“It’s very different from Shakespeare. The Arden of Faversham sits firmly within Kyd’s vocabulary which is very different from Shakespeare’s.”

He added that Arden of Faversham corresponds closely with Kidd’s other texts in terms of stage directions, for example. “The stage directions beginning with ‘Then they’ are unique to Kyd in commercial drama of the period. There are also several distinct internal repetitions, such as the exact image of ‘heartache’ and the phrase ‘good device’, which appear in Kyd’s plays, but not in the larger documented group of dramatists such as Shakespeare.”

“We can broaden our appreciation and understanding of Shakespeare by comparing his plays with those performed at the same time.”

Professor Sir Brian Vickers of the University of London, general editor of Kydd’s edition, said: “With the exception of Shakespeare, Marlowe has enjoyed the greatest publicity of all the Elizabethan dramatists, although the number of plays he actually wrote is very small. This is partly due to the coincidence of his being notorious, because he died in a terrible pub fight in Deptford with a dagger in his eye, which gives you a certain fame.”

“While Kyd – who once shared a room with Marlowe – was a serious writer, he has continued his work as one of the industrious and conscientious writers who never became famous. He deserves to have his plays performed today.”