He was one of the most celebrated English playwrights of the 16th century, yet none of his plays survived, and today the name of Thomas Watson is virtually unknown. Now the writer, poet and pioneer of the English madrigal – who also saved the life of the playwright Christopher Marlowe in a street brawl – is being seen in a new light.

Watson has been identified as the most likely primary author of Arden of Faversham, the first domestic tragedy in English, which was published anonymously in 1592. Many scholars believe that five of the play’s scenes were co-authored with William Shakespeare.

Based on a notorious murder of 1551, Arden is about a woman from Faversham, Kent, who conspires with her lover to kill her husband and struggles to “wash away this blood”, just like Lady Macbeth.

Over five years of research, Professor Gary Taylor, a leading Shakespeare scholar, has found stylistic, biographical and historical links to Watson in almost every scene. He concludes that there is “strong and consistent evidence” for his authorship.

Watson was a polymath whose talents extended from writing poetry in Latin to creating the first published set of English madrigals. In 1595, Shakespeare was described as “Watson’s heire” by William Clerke, in a work titled Polimanteia, but only recently have scholars even realised that Watson was a playwright.

Watson was greatly admired at the time, celebrated for tragic plays before Marlowe or Shakespeare became famous Gary Taylor, Shakespeare scholar

“Almost everything Watson did was original,” said Taylor, professor of literature at Florida State University and general editor of The New Oxford Shakespeare. “Even specialists only know one tiny aspect of his work, instead of putting it all together.”

Taylor’s new research will be published in The Review of English Studies later this year. He is also among leading contributors to Early Shakespeare, 1588-1594, a major reappraisal of Shakespeare’s early career, to be published this month by Cambridge University Press. This will contain essays on Arden by other scholars.

Dr Rory Loughnane, its co-editor and a senior lecturer at the University of Kent, said: “Taylor’s identification of Watson’s hand in Arden … is a major finding, not least for our understanding of Shakespeare’s early career. Though obscure now, Watson was a polymath and, like his close friend Marlowe, a celebrated poet, translator and dramatist. Watson was also extremely well-connected within London’s literary scene; that he collaborated with Shakespeare, who was then in his mid-20s, reveals the sorts of influential circles the ambitious Stratford man moved in at the very beginning of his career.”

Taylor said: “We’re looking for a writer who is capable of writing a great play. Watson was greatly admired at the time, celebrated for tragic plays before Marlowe or Shakespeare became famous.”

Arden authorship contenders have included Thomas Kyd, who wrote The Spanish Tragedy. Taylor said: “Watson looks more likely than any other writer of the 1580s or early 1590s. As a native Londoner with legal training, born in the 1550s and praised by his contemporaries as an early master of tragedy in the commercial theatres, Watson shares the biographical profile that first led critics to suspect Kyd’s hand in the play.”

He added: “A lot of the material is funny, and Watson … was also famously funny. In 1596, one writer remembered ‘the froth of witty Tom Watson’s jests’.”

Among other biographical evidence, Taylor draws parallels between Arden and Watson’s defence of Marlowe when he was attacked in the street in 1589: “The husband who would be famously murdered is defended by a friend in an earlier attack. That incident in the play is not in the historical sources. It’s totally made up by the playwright. The friend is also totally made up.”

Taylor has compared Arden with Watson’s surviving literary prose and poetry, using databases of playwrights working between 1585 and 1595. The study revealed that “some features of Arden are shared with no one but Watson”.

He added: “If Watson did write most of Arden, then we need to seriously consider him for other plays written before September 1592 when he died, probably of the plague.”