Shakespeare’s Tutor: The Influence of Thomas Kyd by Darren Freebury-Jones (review)

Reviewed by: Shakespeare's Tutor: The Influence of Thomas Kyd by Darren Freebury-Jones Goran Stanivukovic Shakespeare's Tutor: The Influence of Thomas Kyd. By Darren Freebury-Jones. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 2022. ix+236 pp. £80. ISBN 978– 1–5261–6474–2. Darren Freebury-Jones's latest book represents a continuation of his revisionary scholarship on adaptation, imitation, and attribution, documenting how the Elizabethan dramatists' plays were 'hybrid' and 'polyvocal' (p. 32). The notion of 'stylistic individuality' (p. 32) which Freebury-Jones explores in this path-breaking monograph is complex given the growing evidence that reveals deep, subtle, and multiform stylistic interaction between Shakespeare and his contemporaries. As [End Page 405] Freebury-Jones demonstrates in seven illuminating and evidence-packed chapters, Shakespeare's engagement with Thomas Kyd enabled the dramatic structure, the dramatic types (or characters), and the verbal and rhetorical style of his writing, especially in the early plays, in ways that differentiate authorship from influence and individual from interbred or blended style. Freebury-Jones records types of contact at different levels of writing (from scene composition to verse line-ending) between texts and authors. Freebury-Jones succinctly maps out the history of methods and techniques employed since at least the nineteenth century for studying Kyd's style and for assessing his impact on Shakespeare. At the same time, using quantitative evidence, he scrutinizes the key properties of style and writing—verse patterns, word choices, phraseology, feminine endings, grammatical and syntactic features, rhyme schemes, rhetorical devices, stichomythia as a scene-making form—and he argues persuasively that Shakespeare returned to Kyd throughout his career. In his imitation of Kyd, for instance, Shakespeare not only 'elaborated and refined' (p. 108) the figure of the vengeful woman (Bel-imperia served as the model for Margaret in the early chronicle plays), which Kyd himself adapted from Seneca, but also intensified and elaborated Kyd's dramatic structures and styles for theatrical effect. Freebury-Jones's fine-grained analyses show brilliantly that Shakespeare approached Kyd's writing as a commercial dramatist. When Shakespeare imitated he did so to subvert the audience's expectations by giving back to his audience the recognizable styles and forms, those features of writing that had proven effective in stage performance, but he does so by enhancing their constituent parts. Thus, a fascinating if indirect proposition in this book is that the success of imitation and adaptation depends on a subtle and precise strategy of adapting popular styles of the source for even more popular and effective new results in theatre accomplished by the adaptor. One of the greatest contributions of this book lies in the argument about the central role Kyd played in the composition of the First Part of the Henry VI trilogy of plays. The main argument rests on the assessment of strong 'statistical findings' and 'quantifiable difference' (p. 111) underpinning the inference that Kyd should be 'recognized' as a 'contributor, indeed the play's main author' (p. 113). This argument for Kyd's hand in 1 Henry VI is balanced against 'supporting evidence for Nashe's authorship' (p. 113) of some parts in this play. The claim for Kyd's authorship is put forward persuasively and against reservations voiced by the attribution scholarship despite, as the author notes, 'an extensive history of independent witnesses vouching for his [Kyd's] authorship' (p. 113). Freebury-Jones is right to state that in attribution scholarship, getting a 'sense of the history' (p. 113) is fundamental for making a new argument. Regardless of what future attribution historians may propose on the matter of authorship, it will be difficult to avoid engaging with Freebury-Jones's evidence and findings. In addition to the bold argument arising from tight and clear evidence, another strong feature of this book is that it is not overwritten; the author manages to [End Page 406] convey an astonishing amount of evidence with concision in accessible and direct critical language. Goran Stanivukovic Saint Mary's University, Halifax Copyright © 2024 The Modern Humanities Research Association

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