Today’s Poem: Cornelia

A guest column by Darren Freebury-Jones on the new publication of The Collected Works of Thomas Kyd

Charles-Antoine Coypel, Portrait of Adrienne Lecouvreur as Cornelia, c. 1722 (Wikimedia Commons)

Darren Freebury-Jones is a vastly learned Elizabethan scholar — a lecturer at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon and author of such work as Shakespeare’s Borrowed Feathers: How Early Modern Playwrights Shaped the World's Greatest Writer and Reading Robert Greene. His new collection of original poetry is called Rambling, and very much worth readers’ time, but it was the recent announcement of The Collected Works of Thomas Kyd that caught our eye. A Welshman from Cardiff, Freebury-Jones is the associate editor (Brian Vickers, the general editor) of this first complete critical edition of Kyd in over a hundred years, incorporating major later discoveries. And so we asked him to select verses that might remind readers why we need to read Thomas Kyd.