Thomas Hawkins (literary editor)

The new edition of the Hanmer Shakespeare was launched in 1769 by a letter from Thomas Percy to Thomas Warton.^[5] Thomas Hawkins was brought by the Oxford University Press, and was paid £250 for his editorial work.^[6] It was supported by Sir John Hawkins, Percy and Warton in expanding Hanmer's original and much-criticised efforts. The glossary was doubled in size, and the commentary clarified. But it still fell short of the contemporary work in annotating Shakespeare, with Samuel Johnson, Edmond Malone and George Steevens.^[5]

As part of his research, Thomas Hawkins published in his Origin the attribution of The Spanish Tragedy, an Elizabethan play, to Thomas Kyd. His theory is now part of standard scholarship.^[7] It was a deduction from a mention of "M. Kid" as the author of the play, in Apologie for Actors, a 1612 work of Thomas Heywood. The Origin of the English Drama itself was a collection of the earlier English dramas, in three volumes, published with a dedication to Sir John Hawkins.^[8][9]

• Thomas Hawkins (1773). The Origin of the English Drama: Illustrated in Its Various Species ... by Specimens from Our Earliest Writers. Vol. I. Printed at the Clarendon Press.