Today’s Poem: Cornelia
A guest column by Darren Freebury-Jones on the new publication of The Collected Works of Thomas Kyd
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.
Darren Freebury-Jones writes:
The Elizabethan poet and dramatist Thomas Kyd (1558–1594) was baptised in the London church of St. Mary Woolnoth, Lombard Street, on November 6, 1558. He began at Merchant Taylors’ School in 1565, where he was taught by the formidable scholar and teacher Richard Mulcaster, whose pupils also included such luminaries as Thomas Lodge, Lancelot Andrewes, and Edmund Spenser.
Kyd is best-known as the author of The Spanish Tragedy (1587), an immensely popular revenge play, the blockbuster of the Elizabethan period. He wrote as well a Turkish tragedy of love titled Soliman and Perseda (1588) and Cornelia (1594), from which Today’s Poem is drawn — beginning as an adaptation of Robert Garnier’s French drama Cornélie (1573) and traversing (via the story of Cornelia Metella, the widow of Pompey) the same period of Roman history as Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (1599). Kyd also seems to have been responsible for a lost Hamlet play from 1588, which preceded Shakespeare’s version by around a decade.
Kyd’s life was racked and ruined when he was caught up in the Dutch Church Libel, alongside his London roommate, fellow poet Christopher Marlowe. Marlowe was accused of having written a heretical poem calling for the murder of Protestant refugees, which was posted on the walls of the Dutch Church in Broad Street on May 5, 1593.
Kyd was dragged into ensuing tragedy when, during a search of their lodgings, officers discovered what they considered to be libellous documents, which Kyd claimed belonged to Marlowe. At the time, Marlowe was staying at a courtier’s house in Scadbury, Kent. While Marlowe was enjoying this gorgeous manor, a huge brick and timber building surrounded by ancient trees, Kyd was arrested and tortured in Bridewell. The tragic protagonist in Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy frequently calls for “Justice, O Justice,” and the injustice Kyd faced was exceptionally bitter.
After Kyd was released, he sought patronage in desperate hopes of evading poverty. In the dedication to the Countess of Sussex in Cornelia, he alludes to the bitter times and broken passions he had endured. There are moments within the text of Cornelia itself when Kyd veers wildly from his French source material and expresses such bone-aching sadness that we hear his personal voice. This is most palpable in the verses that open Act III, in which Cornelia laments, “Time past with me that am to tears converted, / Whose mournful passions dull the morning’s joys,” seeing no hope of “future happiness.”
When Kyd writes like this, the breath catches in the throat. We feel all his pain, his sense of utter dejection and futility, all the physical and mental torture he has undergone, compressed into a single speech delivered by his heroine. It’s a moment of stunning poetry.
In the dedication to the Countess of Sussex he promises another tragedy, to be called Portia, which, like Cornelia, would most likely have been a closet drama written to be printed rather than performed in the public theatres. The work never appeared. Kyd died in 1594 at the age of thirty-five. He was buried on August 15 in St. Mary Colechurch, which was destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666 — his grave lost to posterity.
Kyd’s traditionally accepted works are fragments of an explosive career, particles that have only sometimes caught the eye of scholars and readers. The Collected Works of Thomas Kyd aims to give the playwright and poet the long-withheld justice he deserves.
from Cornelia, Act III
by Thomas Kyd
The cheerful cock, the sad night’s comforter, Waiting upon the rising of the sun Doth sing to see how Cynthia shrinks her horn While Clitie takes her progress to the east, Where wringing wet with drops of silver dew Her wonted tears of love she doth renew. The wand’ring swallow, with her broken song, The country wench unto her work awakes, While Cytherea, sighing, walks to seek Her murdered love transformed into a rose Whom (though she see) to crop she kindly fears, But (kissing) sighs, and dews him with her tears. Sweet tears of love, remembrancers to time; Time past with me that am to tears converted, Whose mournful passions dull the morning’s joys, Whose sweeter sleeps are turned to fearful dreams, And whose first fortunes, filled with all distress, Afford no hope of future happiness.
St. Mary Woolnoth is the church mentioned in The Waste Land whose clock has a dead sound on the final stroke (of nine?). And Kyd, or rather his work I guess, also appears in the poem. There's some resonance for ya.