Thomas Kyd's The Householder's Philosophy and Cristoforo Landino's Comento sopra la Comedia di Dante

Abstract

Thomas Kyd's The Householder's Philosophy (1588) is a translation of Torquato Tasso's Il padre di famiglia (1582). While translating Tasso's text, Kyd made some sizeable additions to it, which would appear to spell out his stance on a series of issues. In particular, Kyd significantly expands Tasso's discussion on usury. Kyd's take on usury can be divided into two sections: first, a fiery invective followed by a quotation from Dante; second, a less heated denunciation based on a rational argument summarizing Aristotle's take on the matter. While the former seems to be Kyd's own invention, as scholars have previously suggested, no one has ever pointed out that the latter is in fact plagiarized from another Italian text, namely Cristoforo Landino's Comento sopra la Comedia di Dante (1481). Among other reasons, this discovery seems especially interesting because it adds another piece to the patchy mosaic of Kyd's intellectual life. As it happens, Kyd's decision to insert elements from such an encyclopedically comprehensive humanist text of literary criticism as Landino's Comento into a philosophical tract imbued with humanist notions concerning society, the family, astrology, philosophy, and cosmography seems further to connect Kyd with the continental intellectual milieu. The latter thus appears to have caught Kyd's interest even beyond his well-known penchant for neo-Senecan drama and French Renaissance literature.