Shakespeare

doi:10.1017/CCO9780511994524.009

7 - Shakespeare

Colleagues, collaborators, co-authors

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2012

Ton Hoenselaars

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Ton Hoenselaars

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Ton Hoenselaars: Affiliation:
Universiteit Utrecht, The Netherlands

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Summary

With Shakespeare so firmly established on the Parnassian heights of world literature, some readers of his work still find it difficult to imagine that the dramatist’s plays were realised as part of a concentrated process of interaction with others, in a profession that was and remains ‘radically collaborative’. However, Shakespeare was never fully autonomous, the sole regulator or manager of the text’s meaning. Studying him we must not fail to acknowledge a broad range of contemporary cultural and historical determinants that together impacted on the creation and signification of that text, more or less beyond the reach of the author’s quill. As the plays were being written, but also as they were being performed, each time they negotiated realities including generic decorum, the specific material conditions of the stage and of the age, as government regulations and a series of conceptions of class, gender, race and religion were being redefined as part of a complex creative process. However, even if the early modern author, as Stephen Orgel put it, was ‘by no means at the center of the collaboration’, a reading of theatre history and culture can never entirely exclude the individuals, dramatists and collaborative playwrights who were continually redefining notions of dramatic authorship and engaged in realising these on the stages around the nation’s capital. As Jeffrey Knapp has argued more forcefully, ‘an institutional analysis of Renaissance drama can and indeed must keep authors squarely in the picture’.

Shakespeare had scores of colleagues and collaborated with many in the theatre and its periphery. Some of them contributed to bringing his plays to life at the Globe, the Blackfriars playhouse, or at court – including the actors on stage, the backstage crew and the audience in the auditorium, and occasionally also on the stage. Others, too, including the scribes, bookkeepers, censors and printers, have contributed to shaping the appearance of the Shakespearean texts we read and see performed today. Their impact may be different in kind and consequence, but it must not be ignored.

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Contemporary Dramatists , pp. 97 - 119

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9780511994524.009 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2012

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7 - Shakespeare

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