The life and work of Thomas Kyd offer a perfect example of the problems posed by the erosion of evidence over time – see my post here – since what little we do know seems wholly arbitrary in its survival, yet also hints at the enormity of what we have lost.
Kyd, a prosperous scrivener’s son whose family hailed from the area around Lombard Street, was born in 1558 – he was baptised on 6 November – six years before Shakespeare and Marlowe and fourteen before Jonson. By virtue of his age, therefore, Kyd belongs more than any of them to the hinterland of Elizabethan drama, before works began to appear in print.
He was writing for the Queen’s Men more or less from its inception in 1583, which suggests that he already had an established reputation, although by the decade’s end he had moved on into the service of a patron – as yet unidentified, but most likely Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange – who had his own troupe of players. Marlowe was with him there, too: another provider of scripts for the patron’s men. In common with almost all of the drama of the 1580s, however, nearly everything Kyd wrote is lost.
Mathew Lyons 
Outstanding article. Just one quibble: Thomas Achelley did not disappear from the record in 1592. Fellow writer Matthew Roydon obtained a “surety of the peace” order against him in 1599.