Did Shakespeare help write Thomas Kyd's 'The Spanish Tragedy?'

An English professor has claimed that he has found evidence suggesting that he five additional passages in Thomas Kyd's 'The Spanish Tragedy?' has indeed been written by William

Shakespeare.

According to textual analysis by Douglas Bruster, professor of English at The University of Texas at Austin, the proof lies in Shakespeare's trademark misspellings and the bad handwriting behind them.

Bruster said that this is the clinching evidence we need to admit the additional passages into the Shakespeare canon.

He examined Shakespeare's spelling habits in the manuscript pages of the 16th-century play 'Sir Thomas More.'

Using Shakespeare's contributions as a guide, he identified 24 points of similarity between 'Sir Thomas More' and 'The Spanish Tragedy,' a play republished, with new material, at about the time of 'Hamlet.'

The findings reveal that Shakespeare's spelling was both old-fashioned and idiosyncratic.

For example, with words like "spotless" and "darkness" Shakespeare would use a single "s." Past-tense words like "wrapped" and "blessed" he ended with a "t" (i.e. "wrapt," "blest"). Also telling is his habit of spelling the same word in two different ways (i.e. "alley" spelled "allie" and "allye" in the same line).

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the noted poet, philosopher and literary critic, was the first person to suspect that Shakespeare contributed to the revised version of Kyd's play in 1833.

The study has been published online in Notes and Queries.