“Here Lay My Hope": attribution, collaboration, and the authorship of the third addition to The Spanish Tragedy

Abstract

The authorship of the five additions to Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy remains a conundrum. Ben Jonson was first thought responsible, but a majority of scholars argue against his involvement. Other candidates have been proposed, namely Thomas Dekker, Thomas Heywood, William Shakespeare, and John Webster. Past attribution studies have mainly focused on Shakespeare due to the fourth addition, the Painter’s Scene, which has been perceived to exhibit Shakespearean quality. John Nance’s lexical study of the fourth addition makes a most compelling case: Shakespeare’s hand is almost certainly present. Warren Stevenson, Hugh Craig, Brian Vickers, and Douglas Bruster have also supported an attribution to Shakespeare; however, their research errs in assuming a single author wrote all five of the additions. This assumption is disproven by Gary Taylor’s work on the first addition, which is the first to identify Heywood, not Shakespeare, as its likely author. Taylor’s conclusion emphasizes that the additions could embody revisions by more than one playwright, such as in the case of Sir Thomas More. Therefore, the authorship of the other additions must remain conjectural until further study. My thesis is the first to independently explore the third addition’s authorship, and based on lexical evidence, the following analysis disproves claims of Shakespeare’s presence within the third addition.