We learn about this patron from Kyd’s long and pitiful letter to the Lord Keeper, Sir John Puckering, after his arrest and interrogation. The Privy Council had ordered rigorous measures to find and punish the author of attacks on London’s foreign craftsmen. Kyd was under suspicion and his rooms were searched. Unfortunately, there were found among some papers, not the wanted ‘libels’, but copies of a disputation held to be atheistical. Kyd insisted they were Marlowe’s and had been shuffled in with his own papers when the two were sharing a room in 1591. Kyd’s interrogation seems to have include the use of torture, but he was freed. (Marlowe was summoned to appear before the Privy Council, but it is assumed that he had not given his testimony before he was stabbed to death in the Deptford tavern.) Kyd’s lord was apparently not convinced of the innocence of his servant, and would entertain him no further. Hence the rather desperate letter of appeal to Puckering, asking him to use his influence. It had no success; Kyd continued to live in disgrace and, no doubt, great poverty. He wrote his free translation of Garnier’s Cornelie and dedicated it to the Countess of Sussex, speaking of ‘those so bitter times and privy broken passions that I endured in the writing it’. Cornelia was registered for publication in January 1594; before the year was out, Kyd was dead, at the age of thirty-six. In December, his mother, on behalf of her husband, formally refused to administer his estate. Her act is sometimes seen as a disavowal of her son, but is more likely simply to be a refusal to admit responsibility for his debts.
 

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It is curious that the only work which can be definitely assigned to Kyd on evidence from his own day is the translation, Cornelia. The many editions of The Spanish Tragedy never mentioned the author’s name; indeed, not a single title-page of this period boasts of Kyd as the author of the play that follows. We know that The Spanish Tragedy is Kyd’s because of Heywood’s ascription of it to him in 1612, and because of the palpable links between it and Cornelia. What hand he had in other plays remains a very dark question. It seems reasonable to assign the anonymous Soliman and Perseda to him. Kyd used a much abbreviated version of this for Hieronimo’s cataclysmic playlet in The Spanish Tragedy. There was no necessity for him to use a play written by himself, of course, and Soliman and Perseda is written in a more consistent style than The Spanish Tragedy; but there is a close kinship in phraseology and the handling of encounters between the characters. Also, Soliman and Perseda has a shell or outer framework which seems strongly Kydian. Love, Death, and Fortune act as a Chorus to introduce, watch over, and comment on the action. The three argue about the share which each has in bringing about what has been witnessed on the stage, representing, as they do, three very different influences on human affairs: emotional life, the law of nature, the sway of chance. Their effect, as audience, is to emphasize that the affairs of mankind are like the actions of a play, and to emphasize the diminutive role of individual human plans in the patterning of events. The method by which, in The Spanish Tragedy, Revenge and the Ghost of Andrea convey the same sense of life as a play is altogether more subtle, but it is the same kind of method, and leaves the same question-mark.