Mary Woolnoth on 6 November 1558; he would then be the son of Francis Kyd, a London scrivener of some standing, and his wife Anna. Both parents survived this child, who was buried at St. Mary Colchurch on 15 August 1594; for unspecified reasons, they refused to administer his estate. We have records of a brother, William, of uncertain age, and a younger sister, Ann. Thomas was enrolled in 1565 at Merchant Taylors' School (where Edmund Spenser had come four years earlier); there is no evidence of university affiliation. There is also little trace of his name in the theatrical annals of the age. Inference from a passage in Thomas Dekker's
A Knight's Conjuring (1607) associates him with the actor John Bentley and hence the Queen's Company during the period 1583-1585.
The Spanish Tragedy was first published in 1592, anonymously. We are sure of its authorship only because of three lines quoted and attributed by Thomas Heywood in his
Apology for Actors (1612); for all its popularity, the play was never printed under Kyd's name until the eighteenth century. A fairly mechanical reply to Chidiock Tichborne's famous elegy is assigned to "T. K." in
Verses of Praise and Joy Written upon Her Majesty's Preservation (1586); the only other contemporary literary figure with those initials is the unlikely Timothy Kendall, and the poem may well be Kyd's.
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