Cultural Studies; Literature and Literary Theory; collaboration; early modern theatre
Disciplines :
Literature
Author, co-author :
Gruss, Susanne ; University of Cologne, Germany
STEVEKER, Lena ; University of Luxembourg > Faculty of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences (FHSE) > Department of Humanities (DHUM) > English Studies
External co-authors :
yes
Language :
English
Title :
Thinking about Collaboration
Publication date :
March 2024
Journal title :
Critical Survey
ISSN :
0011-1570
eISSN :
1752-2293
Publisher :
Berghahn Journals
Special issue title :
Practices of Collaboration in Early Modern Theatre
Arifa Akbar, ‘Henry VIII Review: Even Gold Phalluses Can’t Bring Little-Seen Shakespeare to Life’, The Guardian, 29 May 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2022/may/29/henry -viii-review-the-globe-amy-hodge (accessed 30 October 2023).
Ibid.
Emma Smith, ‘Shakespeare and Early Modern Tragedy’, in The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Tragedy, ed. Emma Smith and Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 132–150, here 132.
For example, Brian Vickers explores Shakespeare’s collaborations with other dramatists in Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Ton Hoenselaars argues that Shakespeare’s plays ‘were realised as part of a concentrated process of interaction with others, in a profession that was and remains “radically collaborative”’ (Ton Hoenselaars, ‘Shakespeare: Colleagues, Collaborators, CoAuthors’, in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Contemporary Dramatists, ed. Ton Hoenselaars [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012], 97–119). Shakespeare Survey dedicated a whole issue to Shakespeare’s collaborative work, including Gary Taylor’s discussion of Shakespeare’s reasons for collaborating (Gary Taylor, ‘Why Did Shakespeare Collaborate?’, Shakespeare Survey 67 [2014], 1–17, doi.org/10.1017/SSO9781107775572.001) and Will Sharpe’s analysis of Shakespeare’s collaborative authorship (Will Sharpe, ‘Framing Shakespeare’s Collaborative Authorship’, Shakespeare Survey 67 [2014], 29–43, doi:10.1017/ SSO9781107775572.003). Sharpe continues this discussion in Shakespeare & Collaborative Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), in which he frames Shakespeare as ‘an author shaped by others in a collaborative network of intellectual influence and dynamic interchange … that he helped substantially to create’. Other scholars have taken into consideration collaborations among other authors. Focusing on John Fletcher and Philip Massinger as repeat collaborators, Jeffrey Masten conceptualises collaboration as a prevalent practice in early modern theatre (Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997]). Heather Hirschfeld discusses co-authored work by Beaumont, Brome, Chapman, Dekker, Fletcher, Jonson, Marston, Middleton, Rowley, Heywood, Shakespeare and Webster, ‘examin[ing] why, for what purpose, or with what effects particular dramatists joined forces’ (Heather Hirschfeld, Joint Enterprises: Collaborative Drama and the Institutionalization of the English Renaissance Theater [Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004], 4).
Gordon McMullan, ‘“Our Whole Life Is Like a Play”: Collaboration and the Problem of Editing’, Textus XI (1996), 437–460, here 438.
G.E. Bentley, The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare’s Time, 1590–1642 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), 234, qtd. in McMullan, ‘Our Whole Life Is Like a Play’, 440.
Brian Vickers, ‘Introduction 1: Co-Authorship in Jacobean and Caroline Drama’, in The Collected Works of John Ford, vol. II, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2017), 3–32, here 7.
Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus and Gabriel Egan, eds, The New Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino, eds, Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007).
Richard Cave, ed., Richard Brome Online (University of London: Royal Holloway, 2010), http://www.dhi.ac.uk/brome.
David Bevington, Martin Butler and Ian Donaldson, eds, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, 7 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
The editorial project of the Oxford Ford is ongoing, with four volumes currently in print: Brian Vickers, ed., The Collected Works of John Ford, 4 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017–2023).
Martin Butler and Matthew Steggle, eds, The Complete Works of John Marston, 4 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
Rory Loughnane and Catherine Richardson, eds, The Oxford Marlowe: Collected Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
Andrew Hadfield and Jennifer Richards, eds, New Oxford Edition of the Works of Thomas Nashe, 6 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
‘Who Was John Marston?’, https://johnmarston.leeds.ac.uk/about/who-was-john-marston/ (accessed 30 October 2023).
‘About the Edition’, https://research.kent.ac.uk/marlowe-works/about-the-edition/ (accessed 30 October 2023).
The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson Online, ‘The Canon’, https://universitypublishingonline.org/cambridge/benjonson/about/general_intro/canon/ (accessed 30 October 2023).
McMullan, ‘Our Whole Life Is Like a Play’, 439.
Fredson Bowers, The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, 10 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966–1996).
Philip Edwards and Colin Gibson, eds, The Plays and Poems of Philip Massinger, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976).
Jeremy Lopez, Constructing the Canon of Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 185.
Ira Clark, Professional Playwrights: Massinger, Ford, Shirley and Brome (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992), 33.
Gordon McMullan, The Politics of Unease in the Plays of John Fletcher (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 144.
Rui C. Homem, ‘Philip Massinger: Drama, Reputation, and the Dynamics of Social History’, in Hoenselaars, The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Contemporary Dramatists, 212–225, here 213.
Douglas A. Brooks, From Playhouse to Printing House (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1.
Taylor Hare and David LeBlanc, ‘About the Book’, in Digital Beaumont and Fletcher, https://openpublishing.psu.edu/digital-beaumont-fletcher-about-book (accessed 30 October 2023).
Robert Henke, ‘John Webster: Collaboration and Solitude’, in Hoenselaars, The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Contemporary Dramatists, 181–196, here 181, emphasis added.
McMullan, The Politics of Unease, esp. chapter 4, ‘Collaboration’.
Andy Kesson, ‘Shakespeare, Attribution and Attrition: At Tribute Zone’, Before Shakespeare, 12 April 2017, https://beforeshakespeare.com/2017/04/12/shakespeare-attribution-and-attrition-at-tribute-zone/.
See https://collaborate.hypotheses.org/conference for the conference programme and abstracts.
In addition to the case studies that make up this special issue, conference participants analysed stage documents and early modern ‘product placement’ (Tiffany Stern), the pitfalls of attribution (Andy Kesson), meta commentary (Emily Smith), translation (Marianna Iannaccone), and pageants as an alternative form of theatrical performance (Maria Shmygol), to name but a few.
See also research projects like Before Shakespeare: The Beginnings of London Commercial Theatre, c.1565–1595 (https://beforeshakespeare.com, originally funded by the AHRC, 2016–18), which focuses on the formative years of early modern theatre as well as our contemporary understanding of early modern drama as always and necessarily collaborative.
See Lucy Munro’s important books Children of the Queen’s Revels: A Jacobean Theatre Repertory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) and Shakespeare in the Theatre: The King’s Men (London: Bloomsbury, 2020). In the latter, she reads theatre companies like the King’s Men as ‘theatre-makers in their own right [… who] exercised a generative and transformative influence on Shakespeare’s plays, and … their practices over four decades shaped traditions that would define Shakespearean performance’ (xiv). For Harry McCarthy’s work on boy actors see Performing Early Modern Drama beyond Shakespeare: Edward’s Boys (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020) and Boy Actors in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).
See Sarah Dustagheer, Shakespeare’s Two Playhouses: Repertory and Theatre Space at the Globe and the Blackfriars, 1599–1613 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017) and Callan Davies, What Is a Playhouse? England at Play, 1520–1620 (London: Routledge, 2023).
Stern’s work on the materiality of early modern plays highlights how far the playtext was in fact made up of different documents more often than not, and thus demonstrates that the idea of a ‘coherent’, unified text is a fiction when it comes to early modern drama. See, for example, Simon Palfrey and Tiffany Stern, Shakespeare in Parts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) as well as Tiffany Stern, Documents of Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Rory Loughnane and Brett Greatly-Hirsch, eds, CADRE: Co-Authored Drama in Renaissance England, https://cadredb.net. The database is currently online as a beta version.
Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber, The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 89.
See ‘Before Shakespeare’ (2016–18), ‘Box Office Bears: Animal Baiting in Early Modern England’ (funded by the AHRC, 2020–24; see https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/humanities/departments/classics-and-archaeology/research/research-projects/current-projects/2023 -2020-bob-oregan.aspx for project details) and ‘Diverse Alarums: Centering Marginalised Communities in the Contemporary Performance of Early Modern Plays’ (AHRC, 2023–25; see https://beforeshakespeare.com/category/galatea/ for project details). A Bit Lit can be found via https://abitlit.co/ or on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/abitlit).
Aston Cockain, ‘An Epitaph on Mr. John Fletcher, and Mr. Philip Massinger, who lie buried both in one Grave in St. Mary Overie’s Church in Southwark’, in A Chain of Golden Poems (London: W. G., 1658), here 100 (italics in original). The poem also makes an appearance in a number of publications on early modern collaboration on which we have built. See, for example, Masten, Textual Intercourse and Hirschfeld, Joint Enterprises.
