October 13, 2013, by Peter Kirwan
Collaborative Plays by Shakespeare & Others
Following today’s piece in The Observer, discussion will no doubt be starting about the claims being made by the new edition entitled Collaborative Plays by William Shakespeare and Others. The article, which highlights the claim of Shakespeare’s ‘fingerprints’ being ‘found’, conflates the actual research done with the normal media-friendly subheadings designed to catch an audience, so it’s understandable that there may well be excitement on one hand (“new Shakespeare!”) and disdain on the other (“publicity move”).
I’m one of the two Associate Editors on this volume, which started as a major AHRC-funded project that funded my PhD research, so the existence of and rationale for this volume is also responsible for allowing me to train as an academic. While this means my investment in the finished product is hardly disinterested, however, I do hope that the way in which the edition’s claims are reported in the media doesn’t detract from what could, I hope, be a significant intervention into understandings of early modern dramatic authorship.
The Shakespearean monolith dominates our field, unfairly and unhistorically, to a point that overshadows other kinds of work. This has resulted in all kinds of frustrating bias, overlooking of significant works and a prioritisation of one writer in a time and genre that rather subsumed authors to the collaborative project. ‘Shakespeare studies’ puts a skew on ‘early modern drama studies’ that is difficult to overcome. One of the most significant effects of this, I would argue, is the creation of the ‘Shakespeare Apocrypha’. In order to have a monolith, one needs to be able to distinguish the figure from the others that surround him. For the last century of scholarship, Shakespeare’s works have been divided, consciously and unconsciously, into two groups, ‘canon’ and ‘apocrypha’, the authorised and the spurious. The latter group includes plays attributed to Shakespeare in his lifetime but not included in the Folio; anonymous plays subsequently attributed to Shakespeare; and plays belonging to the King’s Men which have at some point been revised or expanded.
The division of works associated with Shakespeare into two groups in this way is pretty much unique in early modern drama to Shakespeare. The question of what is ‘in’ or ‘out’ of this particular club has unusual resonance because of the cultural investment in the figure of the Bard, in a way that the multiple collaborative, revised, plotted or partial works that figure in the canons of, say, Middleton, Dekker, Heywood, even Jonson don’t have to worry about. The whole existence of a ‘Shakespeare Apocrypha’ is, I argue, a means of providing a buffer zone between Shakespeare – the transcendent and contained author – and the fluid, messy, gloriously complex world of early modern playwriting.
But over the last thirty years or so, the shift to treat Shakespeare as a collaborative author has put strain on this model. Collaboration in Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen has been accepted for a long time, suggesting that these two plays which were excluded from the Folio may have been excluded on that basis; they are, perhaps, the exceptions that prove the rule. Collaboration has also, for centuries, been used as a get-out clause for suggesting that plays of a perceived lesser quality may be relieved from Shakespeare’s conscience – Titus, of course, being the prime example.
In recent decades, though, we’ve progressed a lot in our understanding of early modern dramatic authorship. The maligned/celebrated (delete as appropriate) computer-aided testing of plays to distinguish the hands of collaborators has brought some measure of scientific evidence to the idea that plays previously thought of as sole-authored documents contain multiple ‘hands’ (a phrasing I detest, but is common usage). Poststructuralist approaches to authorship, particularly tied in to manuscript and print culture and an understanding of the discursive circulation of texts, has made it very difficult to imagine any author working in perfect isolation, as the number of agents involved in creating a book has become ever more clear. And the fascinating moves in repertory studies towards understanding the ‘authorship’ of plays as geared in large part by the actors, playhouse, company’s interests, stock figures and motifs etc. throws any idea of independent artistic vision into chaos. To treat an authorial canon in isolation appears, in the light of these movements, to be deeply problematic.
Thus, partly prompted by the Oxford Shakespeare (1986) and by these various movements, the boundaries of the Shakespeare canon have begun dissolving. Depending on who you talk to, anything from a quarter to a third of the Shakespeare canon is now accepted as collaborative: Edward III, Henry VI, Macbeth, Measure for Measure, Pericles, Thomas More, Timon of Athens, Titus Andronicus, The Two Noble Kinsmen, Double Falsehood– editions of Shakespeare are full of non-Shakespearean contributors. Personally, I’d like to go even further than this. It seems to me that the idea of author as monolith is restrictive. I prefer to see early modern dramatic authors either as memes – recurring throughout a disparate group of plays as linking figures or motifs, treating the author through the lens of genre theory – or as loci, radial points to which works tend more or less closely, and where there are no clear distinctions. Every time we see a play like Richard II (as ‘sole-authored’ as it gets) responding to Marlowe, or a play like The Winter’s Tale drawing on the sudden 1610 interest in bears that also influenced the revisers of Mucedorus and Jonson’s masque of Oberon, the Fairy Prince, we complicate our notions of authorship.
My one concern for the new edition would be that it would be seen to be trying to expand the Shakespeare canon by pulling more plays in. This is a risk. I hope it’s a risk that is mitigated by this volume’s clear distinction from the RSC Complete Works; this is very obviously a different book. But more importantly, I hope readers look past the publicity claims to see the multiple models of authorship that, I hope, go some way towards dispelling the notion of Shakespeare as monolith and instead situate him more closely in the collaborative textual and theatrical practices that we know were standard for early modern drama. In the bid to democratise study of the early modern dramatic canon, that is, I hope this edition points out how unexceptional Shakespeare was.
The plays we’ve included are, I think, a fascinating bunch, and many haven’t been edited decently for over a century. The claims should not shock anyone who’s been following authorship studies in this area over recent years. Thomas More, Edward III and Double Falsehood have all been included in major editions of Shakespeare already, and the ‘new’ claims in the Observer piece about Arden of Faversham, The Spanish Tragedy and Mucedorus are consolidated here rather than made for the first time (as Will Sharpe’s magisterial essay makes clear). Even in these six plays, it’s already established that you’re unlikely to find any discrete lines by Shakespeare in Double Falsehood, and the claims about Arden will – I hope – continue to be debated. But these are all plays that a substantial number of scholars believe reflect an authorial component by Shakespeare, and by editing them in full rather than by excerpting selected chunks, they purport to situate Shakespeare as a minor contributor within others’ works, a role which theatre historians are keen to assert was likely but of which they are often reluctant to propose examples.
The other four plays speak to Shakespeare’s early presence as a circulating name. The London Prodigal and A Yorkshire Tragedy were both published in Shakespeare’s lifetime, as played by Shakespeare’s company, with Shakespeare’s name on the title page from their first appearance. Locrine and Thomas Lord Cromwell were more ambiguously attributed to ‘W.S.’, but were definitely being treated as Shakespeare’s by the 1660s and 1630s respectively, and all four were part of Shakespeare’s complete works from 1664 until Alexander Pope’s edition of 1725, with many sporadic appearances thereafter. From a book history point of view alone, their circulation alongside the more established plays has been disrupted in accounts by the in/out binary division, which is unfortunate. Three of these plays were also part of Shakespeare’s company and clear influences on/influenced by his work, and in the case of Locrine there are legitimate arguments that Shakespeare may have written the epilogue, as recently argued by Sonia Massai among others. In only one of these cases, Yorkshire Tragedy, has another author been confidently attributed (Middleton), but as I argue in a recent piece in Literature Compass, a model of overlapping canons is preferable to an idea of uncrossable boundaries.
It’s clear, and I don’t think anyone would deny it, that ‘Shakespeare’ is the point of interest for this edition, and it may be inevitable that the media wants to focus on the question of which bits are his. That would be an enormous disappointment. Whether or not Shakespeare wrote or contributed to any of these plays is less important to me than the picture these plays present of a Shakespeare who appears (whether textually, allusively, as a contributor or influence, as a reader or performer) embedded in the works of others, in the same way that these other authors appear embedded throughout his more established works. If we can reorient our picture of early modern drama to treat Shakespeare as part of this environment rather than as an exception to it, hopefully that will go some way towards redressing the balance in the field, and destabilising an ahistorical idea of a fixed canon seems to me a valuable part of that project. I hope people enjoy the plays, and I’m looking forward to seeing how the edition goes down. Hopefully it will also help push me towards finally completing the monograph which provides the basis of what I’ve said here.
Come for the Shakespeare. Stay for the collaboration.
[Thanks to the Twitterati who gave me the inspiration to write this]
Edit: Here’s Jonathan’s own blog post on Mucedorus.
Thanks for this, Pete. It will remind us all of the more academically nuanced but ultimately game-changing findings of the apocrypha study. It is instructive to remember Marx’s words in the 18th Brumaire: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.” I would add to this that they make history under circumstances encountered in the present. The early modern period was a result of the tide of history that led to it; Shakespeare rode that tide. And so did his contemporaries. They were all collaborators in the fundamental sense that they were all bobbing up and down in the flood of history that brought in the English Renaissance. I have looked for the new economic thinking and for dialectical thinking that signal the first stirrings of capitalism (and a protest to it) and found it in many of the plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries as well as in Shakespeare’s plays. It was that time in history, as a result of the contradictions in society, for those transformations in consciousness that can be found in early modern texts to occur. Timon of Athens is a good example; Middleton’s sarcastic city wit combined with Shakespeare’s classically-inspired protest against the money-world collaboratively strikes a powerful first note against new economics. Marx knew this; that’s why he quoted from Timon in all of his major economic writings. So, even more fundamental to the fact that other playwrights wrote on plays that we now attribute to Shakespeare and that Shakespeare wrote on plays that we attribute to other playwrights is the fact that all playwrights were participating in the revolution called the Renaissance. History is a collaborative event.
I haven’t seen the new RSC collaborative apocrypha volume, so I can’t comment on it (though I certainly look forward to Will Sharpe’s essay). But I question your claim that “it’s already established that you’re unlikely to find any discrete lines by Shakespeare in Double Falsehood”. Established by whom, or what? You’re entitled to your opinion, though you seem to have changed your mind about this, perhaps under the influence of Tiffany Stern’s SQ article. But E. H. C. Oliphant, Kenneth Muir, and your own Jonathan Bate, in the twentieth century, all identified discrete lines of Shakespeare in DF; more recently, so have Brean Hammond, Mac Jackson, Richard Proudfoot, and David Carnegie. This is a pretty significant list (even ignoring me, because I am hardly in a position to judge my own work). Readers of your blog may be interested in another Palgrave Macmillan publication, this month: “The Creation and Re-creation of Cardenio: Performing Shakespeare, Transforming Cervantes”, edited by Terri Bourus and me, which contains 16 new essays and a lot of new evidence that DF is an adaptation (rather than a forgery). It also identifies some “discrete lines by Shakespeare”—and others by Fletcher. Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that “it’s already established that you’re unlikely to find any discrete SCENES by Shakespeare in Double Falsehood”? No important scholar has ever argued that DF contains a single scene uncontaminated by Theobald.
Gary-no, I haven’t changed my mind, though I agree the emphasis probably sounds more extreme than it’s meant. It sounds a bit like you’re confusing two different arguments though. I agree that Double Falsehood is thoroughly Fletcherian and Shakespearean, and that it’s an adaptation of Cardenio – I’ve defended this position since long before Brean’s edition came out, and will continue to. I’ve also been consistent about my interest in finding actual ‘original’ Shakespeare lines in it – tending to zero.
What I should probably have said is that it’s unlikely that we’ll identify discrete Shakespeare lines with complete confidence. I’m happy to have my mind changed about that (especially when I’ve seen the new book), but I don’t have any particular interest or need to do so – for me, the Shakespearean connection does not hinge on linguistic resonances but on the far more interesting and persuasive arguments concerning plot, structure, theme, source, dramaturgy etc. These are, to my mind, what identify the play unmistakably as what remains of a lost Shakespeare/Fletcher collaboration.
The argument about discrete lines raises interesting questions. I find authorship testing compelling at the macro- rather than micro-level, and for this reason am far more persuaded by function than lexical evidence, and by mass testing of a corpus than individual and local choices. But there’s the more significant philosophical matter of whether anything can and should be considered discrete/pure/’uncontaminated’ Shakespeare in a play that was collaborative from the start and has gone through at least two significant stages of adaptation and revision. It’s for this reason I say ‘unlikely’, as even if we have a line that looks like it might be in the same form it was in 1613, it perpetuates a distinction between ‘contaminated’ and ‘uncontaminated’ that I think is an unfortunate way to think of any collaborative play.
But as always, I read the arguments about particular lines with curiosity. I’m a tough audience for them, but that’s not a problem as Double Falsehood’s ‘authenticity’ isn’t dependent on identifying excerptable Shakespeare.
It seems to me that irreconcilable, contradictory forces are pulling your argument apart here, Peter. Either authorship matters or it doesn’t. The first part of your posting implicitly asserts that authorship does matter and that we have in the past got the nature of dramatic authorship quite wrong: in the “fluid, messy, gloriously complex world of early modern playwriting” these writers collaborated to an extent that we’ve only just begun to appreciate, you seem to say.
But if understanding the phenomenon of authorship correctly is worth doing, then there’s no justification for lumping together with plays Shakespeare co-write “The other four plays [that] speak to Shakespeare’s early presence as a circulating name”. It seems to me that here you slide from “authorship is more complicated, more social, than we thought” in the first part of the posting to “authorship is so damn tricky we’re never going to figure it out” in the second, and that the latter sentiment is used to excuse failing to make the distinction between what we think Shakespeare had a hand in and what he didn’t.
In order to avoid the binarism of “uncrossable boundaries” you favour “a model of overlapping canons”. But to even begin to wield a notion of canons one must accept the notion of a boundary. Shakespeare either did or did not write part of Locrine. What people in the past believed about the authorship of Locrine is only a relevant consideration if it helps us get to the truth about who wrote what. (And, to recap, getting to a truer understanding of the historical facts of authorship is your starting point here.)
Yet you conclude with “Whether or not Shakespeare wrote or contributed to any of these plays is less important to me than . . .”. Whoa! Really? Just who wrote what is less important than something else here? If you really mean that, then it doesn’t even matter what early moderns believed about the authorship of Locrine, A Yorkshire Tragedy, and so on. You can’t make a case for us caring what they thought about the authorship of these plays at the same time as asserting that who wrote what doesn’t matter. You can’t, that is, have your cake and eat it too.
Gabriel-thanks for the contribution. I’m not persuaded by the contradictions you’re pulling out, and they might need to be addressed at greater length than I can afford here, but it seems to me that you’re aligning ‘plays on which Shakespeare collaborated’ with ‘plays in which Shakespeare had a hand’, which I wouldn’t do as the ‘hand’ to me implies the discrete, separable contribution. I think you represent my position perfectly when you suggest I argue that ‘authorship is more complicated, more social, than we thought… [and] we’re never going to figure it out [perfectly]’. But I don’t think that means we shouldn’t explore the possibilities, as authorship – in all its forms, not the most easily definable ones – matters.
I do think that canons overlap (surely this is hardly a radical position – Macbeth is in the Oxford Shakespeare and the Oxford Middleton), and the reason I prefer a model based around authors as loci or nodes, with plays in radial circles at varying distances from these, is that it removes the need for boundaries in a way that published canons don’t have the luxury of doing. The ten plays in the edition suggest a range of theoretical extents of collaboration, from the substantive contributions of Edward III to the minor discrete contributions of Mucedorus (and, I personally suspect, Locrine) to the speculative roles (plotter? arranger?) he may have had that prompted his name appearing on the title page of Yorkshire Tragedy. I don’t think this is the only possible arrangement of plays – a book requires limits – , but I hope it opens productive questions about the multiple ways in which early modern dramatists worked.
And yes, I’m more interested in the ways in which Shakespeare appears embedded in the works of others than in defining exactly which bits he contributed. Again, I don’t see the inconsistency here, and there are enough people working on the latter that I think there’s room for others to work on the former. I really appreciate your thoughts though, and they’ll be borne in mind as I continue work on the longer versions of these thoughts.
Two thoughts, Peter:
If you use “had a hand in” to mean “[made a] discrete, separable contribution [to]” then you are begging the question, since whether we can separate out the various labours that go into a collaborative work is the very thing we’re trying to decide. Jeffrey Masten takes as his starting point the assumption that collaborators in writing indissolubly mixed their labours. A signal merit of the computational stylistics approach is that it does not begin with such assumptions but rather asks the neutral question “are there countable differences between these texts?”. Over and over, computational stylistics has found that there are countable differences between texts, and that–contrary to post-structuralist theories of authorship–the distinctions most often map on to existing distinctions between known authors, and do not map so well onto distinctions of genre, date, and so on. As Hugh Craig put it, “. . . statistical studies might have revealed–were free to reveal–that authorship is insignificant in comparison to other factors like genre or period. . . . As it happens, however, authorship emerges as a much stronger force in the affinities between texts than genre or period” (“Style, statistics, and new models of authorship” EMLS 15 (2009-10)).
Second thought: your 2-dimensional spatial metaphor of “a model based around authors as loci or nodes, with plays in radial circles at varying distances from these” makes things more difficult for your position, not easier. You say that this image “removes the need for boundaries” but in fact it makes them unavoidable, since by definition a circle is a boundary line drawn at a given distance (the radius) from a locus. You’ve invoked the very terms you need to avoid if you want to argue against the validity of boundaries.
Gabriel-in relation to point 2, I suppose my mental image is of concentric circles, or more satisfactorily of coloured circles fading gradually as they move away from the central point, which is why I’m not seeing boundaries. Text isn’t the best medium for explaining, and I’m certainly not suggesting this is a finished or even necessarily ideal model, just the one that makes most sense to me at the moment.
In relation to the first, I don’t see a particular point of disagreement there, unless you suggest that because authorship is a ‘stronger’ (note the comparative) force, that that means other forces are not worth exploration. Nowhere have I suggested that authorship is not an enormously significant force in the creation of early modern dramatic texts. But I don’t think it’s the only one, nor the most interesting.
Just to stir the pot, pun intended with apologies for the mixed metaphors: who authored the cake that we can’t have and eat too?
Peter and other commenters here, how do you explain the relationship between the play Guy, Earl of Warwick and Mucedorus? Alfred Harbage first noted in 1941 that the clown Philip Sparrow of Stratford-upon-Avon, one of two main characters in Guy, Earl of Warwick, appears to burlesque William Shakespeare. E. A. J. Honigmann in 1954, John Berryman in the later half of the twentieth century, Helen Cooper in 2006, and Katherine Duncan-Jones in 2009 agreed with this theory. Philip Sparrow is a provincial clown, food thief, and lack-Latin poet of lofty ambitions who cheerfully abandons his pregnant mistress Parnell in Stratford to follow Guy on his chivalrous adventures en route to the Holy Land. He serves Sir Guy much as Sancho Panza serves Don Quixote—as a comic sidekick whose bumbling antics are a foil to his master’s noble purposes. Philip’s last name Sparrow, then pronounced Spear-O, calls to mind Shake-Spear.
In addition to apparently making fun of William Shakespeare as the hungry, cheerfully amoral clown Philip Sparrow, the author of Guy Earl of Warwick scattered joking references throughout the play to Mucedorus, which as you know was attributed to Shakespeare in the seventeenth century. To sharpen the satire, all the verbal jabs point to the same scene in Mucedorus in which Mouse searches the forest for Mucedorus and the missing Princess Amadine. Long overlooked, these links between Guy Earl of Warwick and Mucedorus were first detailed by John Peachman in a 2006 scholarly article.
When the hard-of-hearing Mouse encounters Mucedorus in the woods disguised as a hermit, he wonders why Mucedorus claims to be an “emmet,” the old English word for ant:
Mouse: Here’s through the woods, and through the woods, to look out a shepherd & a stray king’s daughter, but soft who have we here, what art thou?
Mucedorus: I am an hermit.
Mouse: An emmet, I never saw such big emmet in all my life before.
In Guy Earl of Warwick, the hard-of-hearing Philip Sparrow becomes confused after he and Sir Guy encounter a hermit on the continent:
Guy: Ye cowardly Rogue wilt thou kill a Hermit?
Philip: An Emmot quotha, ’tis one of the foulest great Emmets that ever I saw.
In Mucedorus, Mucedorus insists to Mouse that he is not an emmot, he is a hermit:
Mucedorus: I tell you sir, I am an hermit, one that leads a solitary life within these woods.
Mouse: O I know thee now, thou art her that eats up all the hips and haws, we could not have one piece of fat bacon for thee [we ate no bacon because of you] all this year.
Just as Mouse talks about “hips and haws” in connection with a lack of food, when Philip becomes separated from Guy at the conclusion of their pilgrimage he wanders through the woods complaining that he has had nothing but hips and haws to eat for two weeks:
Philip: A Pilgrimage, quotha, marry here’s a Pilgrimage indeed, why? I have lost my Master, and have been this fortnight in a Wood, where I have eat nothing but Hips and Haws.
Back in the forest scene from Mucedorus, Mouse protests his bravery to Mucedorus:
Mouse: … I’ll prove mine office good, for look sir when any comes from under the sea or so, and a dog chance to blow his nose backward, then with a whip I give him the good time of the day…
Amused by the phrase “blow his nose backward,” the author of Guy Earl of Warwick had Philip repeat it:
Philip: I know if you hear my Master’s name you’ll blow your Nose backward, and then your Laundress will call you Sloven.
Mucedorus ends his forest conversation with the clueless Mouse by asking where he can find him at Court:
Mucedorus: But where shall I find you in the Court?
Mouse: Why, where it is best being, either in the kitching a eating or in the buttery drinking: but if you come I will provide for thee a piece of beef & brewis knockle deep in fat, pray you take pains remember maister mouse.
Likewise, William Shakespeare’s hungry counterpart Philip Sparrow longs for a piece of beef and brewis:
Philip: Have ye ever an Ambry in your Cottage, where a Man may find a good Bag-pudding, a piece of Beef, or a Platter of Bruis knockle deep in Fat; for I tell thee old fellow, I am sharp set, I have not eat a good Meal this Fortnight.
John Peachman, the independent scholar who discovered these parallels, was not sure what to make of them, but he speculated that William Shakespeare was associated with Mucedorus in the popular mind. He wrote, “The rarity of these parallels makes it almost certain that they are not coincidental. The hermit/emmet joke and the rather extraordinary phrase ‘blow your/his nose backward’ appear to be unique to these two plays. ‘Piece of beef and brewis knuckle deep in fat’, though not unique, is certainly rare, and ‘hips and haws’ is uncommon. That all the parallels occur in the one scene in Mucedorus, and in each case the lines involve the respective clowns Mouse and Sparrow, simply underlines how unlikely it is that the parallels are coincidental.”
Far from being coincidental, a logical inference is that the author of Guy Earl of Warwick used William’s comic alter-ego Philip Sparrow to ridicule William’s silly playwriting style in Mucedorus. But this conclusion would mean that William Shakespeare was the main author of the clunky passages in Mucedorus, not a poetic genius who helped polish a few lines and perhaps the epilogue in 1610. I have yet to see this intriguing problem addressed in the Stratfordian literature, including by Rasmussen and Bate.
–Sabrina Feldman, author of The Apocryphal William Shakespeare (http://www.apocryphalshakespeare.com)
Thank you for your comment, Sabrina. While I don’t usually allow ‘trolling’ (you must admit, this comment has nothing to do with the original post or thread!), I’ll allow it here because you do raise some important points.
The connection between Guy, Earl of Warwick and Mucedorusis a fascinating one, and I have no problem with the notion that the former play may be ridiculing Shakespeare, which would fit with other probable lampoons of Shakespeare such as that in Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit. The parallels are persuasive enough to suggest to me that the author of the former play had Mucedorus in mind when he wrote it. But the leap from this to an argument about the authorship of Mucedorus has no basis and, far from being a logical inference, is a stretch of the most tenuous nature. Guy makes no inferences about authorship, and its lampooning associates ‘Shakespeare’ (if we accept this) with the character, not the playwright.
That a Clown as avowedly successful as Mouse was a source reused by other dramatists to mock particular targets is entirely believable, but the authorship of the character has no bearing on this whatsoever. Stage characters frequently reemerge in dramatic literature (see Black Will in Arden of Faversham, The True Tragedy of Richard III and When You See Me, You Know Me, for example) and good jokes have a long stage life. You are assuming here that explicit reference to a source must (only?) be for the purpose of mocking the original author, but I cannot see any evidence for this. If you were to seek a deeper connection, the more plausible one would be that the two plays were written to be performed by the same clown-actor, making use of his particular shtick.