A Review of Darren Freebury-Jones’s Shakespeare’s Tutor: The Influence of Thomas Kyd

I told a friend that I was reading a book called Shakespeare’s Tutor (Manchester U. Press, 2022), and he asked, “Shakespeare needed help at school?” Let’s clarify the title.

Darren Freebury-Jones knows that Thomas Kyd and William Shakespeare had no formal educational relationship in the sense my friend questioned. Freebury-Jones believes that Kyd had a previously unrecognized impact on Shakespeare as a playwright and that impact is seen in the way Shakespeare learned about playwriting by seeing Kyd’s plays, that Shakespeare became Kyd’s after the fact collaborator when he added scenes to two already established plays, and that he directly collaborated with Kyd on a third play. This is a very big claim, and the proof rests on the evidence presented in this book.

To present this evidence, Freebury-Jones must first expand Kyd’s canon. Incorporating the work of generations of previous scholars and adding evidence of his own, Freebury-Jones studies feminine endings, pause patterns, weak and strong syllables, function words, compound adjectives, linguistic preferences, n-grams, verbal parallels, and several dramaturgical matters to understand Kyd’s stylometrics and dramaturgy in Kyd’s acknowledged extant plays The Spanish Tragedy, Soliman and Perseda, and Kyd’s loose translation of Robert Granier’s Cornèlie. Many scholars before Freebury-Jones found that King Leir, Fair Em, and most controversially, Arden of Faversham were excellent matches for one or another of Kyd’s stylometrics and suggested him as the possible author of these anonymous works. Freebury-Jones reviews the past evidence, adds his own, and…