Thomas Kyd

The next day Kyd was among those arrested; he would later believe that he had been the victim of an informer. Francis Kydd was a scrivener and in 1580 was warden of the Scriveners' Company. In 1602 a version of the play with "additions" was publiThomas Kydd.

Although well known in his own time Kyd fell into obscurity until 1773 when Thomas Hawkins (an early editor of The Spanish Tragedy) discovered that Kyd was named as its author by Thomas Heywood in his Apologie for Actors (1612). A hundred years later scholars in Germany and England began to Thomas Kydd light on his life and work including the controversial finding that he may have been the author of a Hamlet play pre-dating Shakespeare's.