Roundtable: What is Early Modern Collaboration?

Despite – or perhaps because – of the heat around dramatic attribution (Shakespeare, we’re looking at you), theories of dramatic authorship still tend to privilege the creative output of a single authorial mind. This narrow focus is mirrored in the ongoing commodification of single authorship as a marketable product which continues to interfere with critical work on collaboration. Collaborative drama is diagnosed as discontinuous or contradictory, and a range of creative, editorial, playmaking, and print practices tend to be lumped together under the term ‘collaboration’.

This round table tries to move beyond this simplistic thinking, moving across the spheres of theatre history, editing, performance and textual transmission, to develop new models for understanding the collaborative forms of early modern dramatic production. We intend to open up a wider discussion of the impact of early modern collaboration on the development of English drama on the one hand, and twenty-first-century understandings of authorship and the marketability of early modern plays on the other. Complementing our interest in collaboration as an early modern practice of cultural production, we will also reflect on the current political climate which sends contradictory messages about collaboration at the different levels of PhD, tenure, citation, and research-leave funding.