30 Great Myths about Shakespeare by Maguire Laurie & Smith Emma

Author:Maguire, Laurie & Smith, Emma [Maguire, Laurie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2012-11-04T16:00:00+00:00

Myth 17

Shakespeare wrote alone

We tend to see genius as a solitary art: the writer alone in a garret. Shakespeare in Love shows Shakespeare at various stages of writer's block—practicing his signature, speaking to his therapist, making a false start (Romeo and Ethel the Pirate's Daughter)—before covering page after page in a love-inspired white-hot creative frenzy. Whether in success or in failure, the writer writes (or fails to write) alone. The paradigm certainly holds true in other art forms such as music. We cannot imagine Beethoven's Ninth Symphony as composed by “Beethoven and his collaborator and his revisers.” (Our phrasing comes from the Revels edition of Dr Faustus, edited by David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen, whose title page advertises the multiple hands in “Marlowe”'s play.) Mozart's Requiem is still so called despite our knowledge that it was unfinished at Mozart's death and that much—perhaps the larger part—was contributed by Franz Xaver Süssmayr.

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

The Elizabethan theater impresario Philip Henslowe regularly records payments to teams of writers. Extant manuscript plays often show more than one hand. The most famous is Sir Thomas More, which has five authors/revisers (one of the revisers was Shakespeare). When Thomas Middleton and Samuel Rowley co-authored The Changeling (1622), Rowley wrote the comic subplot, Middleton the tragic main plot. When Robert Daborne was behind on a commission for Philip Henslowe in 1613, he subcontracted an act to speed things up. Clearly, there were many models of collaboration in the Elizabethan theater.

But if it is clear that collaboration was not unusual, it is equally clear that many authors wrote alone, and preferred to write alone. Anthony Burgess plays on this in Enderby's Dark Lady when he depicts the Jacobean writing duo, Beaumont and Fletcher, who not only shared a study but, it was reported, a mistress. Burgess's Shakespeare enters a tavern and sits down “not far from Beaumont and Fletcher with their one doxy who, being born under the sign of Libra, was fain to bestow kisses and clips equally on both.” Beaumont hails Shakespeare:

“Master Shakespeare,” said Frank Beaumont timidly, “there is a matter we would 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 evidence tells a different story.

The bulk of Shakespeare's work is single-authored in all genres: comedies, histories and tragedies. Of the thirty-eight plays in the Shakespeare canon, only six are accepted to be collaborations: 1 Henry VI, Titus Andronicus, Timon of Athens, Pericles, Two Noble Kinsmen, and All Is True (Henry VIII). (The figure rises to eight if we include 2 and 3 Henry VI, about which there is no consensus.) For comparison: almost half of Thomas Middleton's canon is collaborative; over 50 percent of Elizabethan plays were collaborative.

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