May 12, 1593 -- Thomas Kyd is Arrested for libel

It may at first seem odd to include in a topic dedicated to the history of the Rule of Law the arrest of an obscure Elizabethan playwright on a charge of libel.  However, there is much more to the story than that.  First, though obscure, Kyd is considered by scholars to be one of the most important figures in the development of Elizabethan drama.  An intimate of Christopher Marlow, Kyd is thought to be the author of the Ur-Hamlet, the term used to describe a play, now lost, that appeared several years before Shakespeare's Hamlet.  Likewise, he is thought to have been the author of King Leir, which preceded Shakespeare's King Lear by almost a decade. Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy is considered to be on  par with the other great works of the age.

So apart from establishing the importance of copyright, what about Kyd's life recommends him for this blog?  It is the fact that his arrest for "libel" was actually based on the belief that Kyd (and Marlow and others within London's theater community) were atheists and/or homosexuals -- both crimes at that time.  The "libels" in question were handbills that had been posted through London in the Spring of 1593 which, among other blasphemies, denied the divinity of Christ ("Arianism").  One of these, the "Dutch Libel" was written in a style that mimicked Marlow's poetry and was thought to have been composed by him or one of the other playwrights or poets within his circle.  On May 11, 1593, the Privy Council, who served as advisors to the Queen and at the time were charged with enforcing public morality, called for the arrest of anyone suspected of being involved with the libels.  

The following day, Kyd was among the first to be arrested under the order of the Privy Council.  A search of his room resulted in the discovery of an Arianist tract (probably belonging to Marlow, who had shared the room with Kyd in the past and left many of his possessions there).  Kyd was cruelly tortured, forced to confess, and made to sign a statement implicating Marlow.  Marlow was subsequently murdered under mysterious circumstances and speculation remains to this day that his death was arranged to avoid a scandal because of his close connections to the English Crown and Government.

Although the charge of blasphemy was a serious one in the era before freedom of religion became a principle of government under the rule of law, in truth the actions of the Privy Council were directed more at an intolerance for  for homosexuality, which was thought to be rife in the theatrical community.  With respect to Marlow, Kyd and others caught up in the libel scandal, however, this belief was generated as the result of a misunderstanding of the terms used in by Arianists, including Marlow, who was as much a philosopher as a poet and playwright, -- Homoousion, Homoiousianism, Homoeanism and Heteroousianism -- these terms, derived from Greek, were used to describe the different possible natures of Christ in relation to God the Father and the Holy Spirit, but to the uneducated were mistaken for references to sexuality. 

Kyd was eventually released, and despite not having been formally charged or tried for any offense, was abandoned by his former patron.  Efforts to clear his name were fruitless.  Kyd died in 1594, a broken man, at the age of 35.