SHAKESPEAREWROTE ALONE

Myth

17We tend to see genius as a solitary art: the writer alone in a garret.Shakespeare in Love shows Shakespeare at various stages of writer’sblock – practicing his signature, speaking to his therapist, making a falsestart (Romeo and Ethel the Pirate’s Daughter) – before covering pageafter page in a love-inspired white-hot creative frenzy. Whether in successor in failure, the writer writes (or fails to write) alone. The paradigmcertainly holds true in other art forms such as music. We cannot imagineBeethoven’s Ninth Symphony as composed by ‘‘Beethoven and his col-laborator and his revisers.’’ (Our phrasing comes from the Revels editionof Dr Faustus, edited by David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen, whosetitle page advertises the multiple hands in ‘‘Marlowe’’’s play.) Mozart’sRequiem is still so called despite our knowledge that it was unfinished atMozart’s death and that much – perhaps the larger part – was contributedby Franz Xaver Sussmayr.

But if genius is solitary, theater is by definition collaborative. It requiresthe input and coordination of many groups of people: actors, costumedesigners, and musicians (to name but three). These are the collaborativepartners (or at least, some of them) at point of production. What werethe circumstances at point of composition?

The Elizabethan theater impresario Philip Henslowe regularly recordspayments to teams of writers. Extant manuscript plays often show morethan one hand. The most famous is Sir Thomas More, which has fiveauthors/revisers (one of the revisers was Shakespeare). When ThomasMiddleton and Samuel Rowley co-authored The Changeling (1622),Rowley wrote the comic subplot, Middleton the tragic main plot. WhenRobert Daborne was behind on a commission for Philip Henslowe in1613, he subcontracted an act to speed things up. Clearly, there weremany models of collaboration in the Elizabethan theater.

30 Great Myths About Shakespeare, First Edition. Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith.© 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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But if it is clear that collaboration was not unusual, it is equally clearthat many authors wrote alone, and preferred to write alone. AnthonyBurgess plays on this in Enderby’s Dark Lady when he depicts theJacobean writing duo, Beaumont and Fletcher, who not only shared astudy but, it was reported, a mistress. Burgess’s Shakespeare enters atavern and sits down ‘‘not far from Beaumont and Fletcher with their onedoxy who, being born under the sign of Libra, was fain to bestow kissesand clips equally on both.’’ Beaumont hails Shakespeare:

‘‘Master Shakespeare,’’ said Frank Beaumont timidly, ‘‘there is a matter wewould talk of, to wit a collaboration betwixt you and us here.’’

‘‘She hath enough to do fumbling two let alone three.’’

Burgess’s Shakespeare shuns collaboration of any kind, but the evidencetells a different story.

The bulk of Shakespeare’s work is single-authored in all genres: come-dies, histories and tragedies. Of the thirty-eight plays in the Shakespearecanon, only six are accepted to be collaborations: 1 Henry VI, TitusAndronicus, Timon of Athens, Pericles, Two Noble Kinsmen, and AllIs True (Henry VIII). (The figure rises to eight if we include 2 and 3Henry VI, about which there is no consensus.) For comparison: almosthalf of Thomas Middleton’s canon is collaborative; over 50 percent ofElizabethan plays were collaborative.1

We have long known that Shakespeare collaborated late in his career.In 1634 The Two Noble Kinsmen, a play not included in the 1623 Folio,was published with two names on the title page: ‘‘Mr. John Fletcher,and Mr. William Shakspeare, gentlemen.’’ Both authors were dead by1634 (Fletcher had died in 1625, Shakespeare in 1616); the title pagedescribes them as ‘‘the memorable Worthies of their time.’’ Fletcher hadbeen one of the King’s Men’s most successful dramatists for two decades,and his plays continued to be printed and reprinted. Between 1620 and1634 there were ten editions of six of his plays, including Two NobleKinsmen. 1634 saw the publication not only of Two Noble Kinsmen butof Fletcher’s single-authored The Faithful Shepherdess; the following yearsaw two more Fletcher titles reach print for the first time. Thus Fletcher’sname alone was a guaranteed selling point in 1634. There could only beone reason to put Shakespeare’s name on the title page of Two NobleKinsmen and that is that he was indeed a co-author.

One of the ways we can identify shares in collaborative works is byauthors’ linguistic fingerprints: verbal tics that work at a subconsciouslevel. So, for instance, Fletcher prefers the elided pronominal form ‘‘’em’’;Shakespeare prefers ‘‘them.’’ In Two Noble Kinsmen scenes with thesedifferent forms are fairly clearly demarcated. But some scenes have

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both forms. The collaborators obviously read each other’s scenes andcontributed to them.

Two Noble Kinsmen was written in 1613. The partnership was suc-cessful: Fletcher and Shakespeare worked together again the same year onAll Is True (Henry VIII) and Cardenio (now lost). Although Shakespearehad begun his late romances collaboratively, writing Pericles (1607)with George Wilkins,2 the partnership with Wilkins was not repeated.And the collaboration worked differently: Shakespeare seems to havebeen responsible for Acts 3–5 of Pericles, with Wilkins writing the firsttwo acts.

Let us go back to the start of Shakespeare’s career since it has somepoints of contact with the collaborative method with Wilkins. Criticshave long suspected a different hand in Act 1 of 1 Henry VI and in Act1 of Titus Andronicus. Identifying the hand(s) has been difficult. Thefavored candidate for Titus is George Peele. The issue of collaborationin 1 Henry VI is complicated by where one places it chronologically inthe sequence now known as 1–3 Henry VI. Many critics believe 1 HenryVI to have been written after 3 Henry VI, as a prequel: having written atwo-part sequence about York and Lancaster, Shakespeare came acrossa play (by Peele? by Nashe?) and adapted it. However, this theory doesnot take adequate account of the linguistic simplicity (even inferiority) of1 Henry VI in comparison to the other Henry VI plays. 1 Henry VI isone of the easiest Shakespeare plays to read. One line equals one thought;there are no complicated syntactical structures or images or ideas. It ishard to see this as the work of someone who had just written 3 Henry VIand was about to write Richard III.

The dates of these plays are pertinent (late 1580s or early 1590s for 1Henry VI, early 1590s for Titus): they are not just early in Shakespeare’scareer but early in the life of the professional Elizabethan theater. Thereare good practical reasons for collaboration. It is speedy. Two are betterthan one; three or four may be better still. The newly professionaltheater needed new plays. Between 27 December 1593 and 26 December1594 Philip Henslowe’s Diary records 206 performances of forty-onedifferent titles; if his marginal ‘‘ne’’ means ‘‘new,’’ then fifteen of thesewere brand new plays. Dramatist Robert Daborne outsourced when heneeded to meet a deadline. So too do Burgess’s fictional Beaumont andFletcher. Beaumont corrects Shakespeare’s sexual (mis)interpretation ofhis proposed collaboration: ‘‘I mean with Jack here and myself. A comedycalled Out on You Mistress Minx which must be ready for rehearsingsome two days from now and not yet started though the money taken.’’ Asecond practical consideration applies: collaboration worked as a kind ofapprentice system in which inexperienced dramatists learned from – byworking with – others. In 1612–13, Shakespeare may have been training

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his successor (John Fletcher became the King’s Men’s ‘‘attached’’ (i.e.contracted) dramatist after Shakespeare).

What about the middle of Shakespeare’s career? In 1607 he collabo-rated with Thomas Middleton on the satire Timon of Athens. The playmay be unfinished (it contains loose ends) although it is certainly stage-able. (Middleton later adapted Macbeth and Measure for Measure afterShakespeare’s death; see Myth 24.) We are just beginning to explore theextent of the working relationship between Middleton and Shakespeare atthis period. Middleton’s city comedy, A Mad World My Masters (1607),written immediately before Timon, has as one of its central characters anover-hospitable knight by the name of Sir Bounteous Prodigal. Given thatTimon is a tragic Sir Bounteous Prodigal, it may be that the collaborativeTimon of Athens was actually initiated by Middleton as a generically log-ical next step, following on from his exploration of prodigality in comicform.3 We have recently offered evidence to suggest that Middleton wasa co-author with Shakespeare on the comedy, All’s Well That Ends Well(c.1607). Critics have long noted oddities in the first printed text of thisplay (the Folio of 1623) – variations in how characters are designated inspeech prefixes, in stage directions, and in dialogue; curiously narrativestage directions that promise dialogue that does not then occur; an un-Shakespearean urban grittiness of tone, and so on. Many of the play’stextual, tonal, and stylistic features match up with the known preferencesand habits of Thomas Middleton; they are particularly concentrated incertain scenes – the comic subplot with Paroles, for instance – but theyfeature in some of the Helen scenes too.4 So we need to modify theconventional story about co-authorship in Shakespeare’s career, a storyin which he collaborated, briefly but successfully, at the beginning andthen, more regularly, at the end of his career but not successfully orregularly in the middle. It now looks like collaboration was a palatableand practical activity for him throughout, successful enough for him towant to work with two authors (Middleton and Fletcher) again.

So far we have been considering jointly authored plays. But there isanother kind of collaboration in which an author contributes a speechor a scene or a short sequence to another’s play. This is the case in themanuscript of John of Bordeaux, a sequel to Robert Greene’s popularcomedy Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1589) where Henry Chettle wroteone speech (a large blank space was left for the purpose). It is the case inthe anonymous history play Edward III, for which Shakespeare wrote theCountess of Salisbury scenes (in about 1596). It is the case for Sir ThomasMore where Shakespeare added speeches in which More addresses andcalms the rioters. This is an especially interesting case and it is worthpausing over it.

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Sir Thomas More dramatizes two key events of recent history: the‘‘evil May Day’’ riots of 1517, and More’s refusal to subscribe to HenryVIII’s divorce articles in 1532 (conflated in the play with his refusal tosubscribe to the Act of Succession in 1534). The play links the two byhaving More talk the rioters into obedience in the first half while himselfrefusing obedience to his king in the second half. The manuscript of theplay contains seven hands: five authors/revisers, a scribe, and the Masterof the Revels, Edmund Tilney, who censored the play so severely thatmany critics believe it was abandoned. At some later stage the play wasrevised. The questions that have always dogged criticism of the play are:Why would you write it at all given that it dramatizes material that couldnot be openly discussed in the sixteenth century? When was the playwritten? Why would Munday, one of the authors, a rabid anti-Catholic,write a play sympathetic to a Catholic martyr? Were the revisions madeimmediately following Tilney’s censorial prescriptions, or later? Who arethe seven hands and five authors?

John Jowett’s magisterial Arden edition (2011) steers a clear linethrough these questions.5 The original play was written by Mundayand Chettle, censored by Tilney, and an unknown playhouse scribecoordinated revisions by Chettle and three additional authors: Dekker,Heywood, and Shakespeare. Jowett places the play’s composition in thelate Elizabethan period, c.1600 (plays about Henry VIII’s reign werecoming into companies’ repertoires then) and the revision in 1603–4.Jowett feels ‘‘more secure’’ in his suggested date for the revision thanin that for the original composition. His date of 1603/4 supports thenew perspective on Shakespeare as collaborator. Instead of confiningcollaboration to the start and end of his career, we now have a scenarioin which he is writing with and for others in the middle. (It was acontractual obligation to ‘‘patch’’ other men’s plays or provide newprologues and epilogues. In 1602 Ben Jonson was paid for additions toThomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, although the case has been made thatShakespeare is the author of the published additions.6 In the same yearSamuel Bird and William Rowley were paid for additions to Marlowe’sDr Faustus.)

The deployment of so many hands is usually a sign that a revisedtext was urgently needed (especially given that the revisers workedsimultaneously, not sequentially, as the manuscript shows). Jowett’sdating of the revisions at the start of James’s reign might help us supplythe occasion. One of the perplexing questions about Shakespeare’s careeris: why did he not write city pageants (see Myth 14)? Lord Mayor’s annualprocessions (and, in 1604, James’s coronation festivities) were occasionswhen the city brought out its heavy hitters. Munday, Middleton, Jonson,Heywood, Dekker, and Peele were all commissioned to write pageants for

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the city. Why not Shakespeare? Shakespeare knew all these writers andworked with some of them at various stages in different ways (he acted inJonson’s plays, for instance, and collaborated with Peele on Titus). Therevision of More in a hurry in 1603/4 may have been related to someLondon event.

Jowett’s dating argument about Shakespeare’s addition to More c.1604,plus our suggestion about the collaborative nature of All’s Well c.1607,dislodges many of our assumptions about Shakespeare’s mid-career: wehave known that he worked collaboratively but not at that time or inthat way. Perhaps we can extend the field of consideration. GiorgioMelchiori sees a court connection in Merry Wives of Windsor (1597).He argues that this was not just a play performed at court, as many ofShakespeare’s plays were, but a play developed from a court masque thatShakespeare wrote specially for the second Lord Hunsdon (Shakespearerevised the masque into a longer version of the Herne’s Oak scene, printedsubsequently in the 1623 Folio).7 Like Jowett’s edition of Sir ThomasMore, Melchiori’s edition of Merry Wives opens the door for us to thinkabout other kinds of writing that Shakespeare was involved in. Togetherthese editions expand our concept of the social circumstances, in the cityand at court, in which Shakespeare was writing and being commissionedto write.

Notes

1 Stanley Wells, Shakespeare and Co. (London: Penguin, 2007), p. 248 n. 40,citing Eric Rasmussen, ‘‘Collaboration,’’ in Michael Dobson and Stanley Wells(eds.), The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 2001).

2 For an account of this insalubrious character see Charles Nicholl, The Lodger:Shakespeare on Silver Street (London: Penguin, 2008).

3 See Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith, ‘‘‘Time’s Comic Sparks’: The Dra-maturgy of A Mad World My Masters and Timon of Athens,’’ in Gary Taylorand Trish Thomas Henley (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Middleton(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 181–95.

4 Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith, ‘‘Many Hands – A New Shakespeare Col-laboration?’’, Times Literary Supplement, 20 April 2012, pp. 13–15.

5 Sir Thomas More, ed. John Jowett, Arden (London: A. & C. Black, 2011).6 Brian Vickers surveys a number of important new studies on Shakespeare’s

authorship in his ‘‘Shakespeare and Authorship Studies in the Twenty-FirstCentury,’’ Shakespeare Quarterly, 62 (2011), pp. 106–42.

7 The Merry Wives of Windsor, ed. Giorgio Melchiori, Arden (Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson, 2000).