Shakespeare: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd

Author:Peter Ackroyd [Ackroyd, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Historical, Literary
ISBN: 9781400075980
Google: mKDgmAEACAAJ
Amazon: 140007598X
Publisher: Anchor
Published: 2006-07-15T18:25:43+00:00

There were other tasks to perform. It was he who perused plays submitted for approval by other writers, and it was no doubt his task to revise and generally to prepare manuscripts for performance. He was asked to rewrite difficult passages or introduce a speech at an opportune moment. He provided prologues or epilogues for the revival of old plays, and rewrote contentious passages to avoid the censorship of the Master of the Revels. He was a swift worker. It should always be remembered that the great majority of the plays written in this period have wholly disappeared. Within the hundreds that have been lost, there will have been many touches of genuine Shakespeare.

His role as a company man may help to explain why he was not perhaps concerned with the publication of his plays in his own lifetime. The fellowship of the players was so intense that the plays themselves may have been considered to be in a sense common property, a communal effort that should remain within the community. It would have been considered inappropriate, and against the spirit of their fellowship, for him to cause to be published these works under his own name. One contract survives for another dramatist in which it is stipulated that the author “should not suffer any play made or to be made or composed by him” to be printed “without the license from the said company or the major part of them.”2 Shakespeare’s agreement is unlikely to have taken the form of a contract, but he felt a deep obligation to give them his work. The great virtue of this informal understanding was that the company preserved his plays; the work of no other playwright, with the possible exception of Jonson, was kept intact in this manner.

The difference between Shakespeare and Jonson is in any case instructive. Jonson was willing to introduce himself as an author, as an individual outside the bounds of any company or fellowship; Shakespeare, of an older generation, was much more at ease in the collaborative and guild-like venture of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men where the individual was subsumed within the group. His status was much closer to that of a craftsman than an “artist” in any modern sense. It was only after his death that his fellow professionals, in an act of group piety, formally published his plays.

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