Shakespeare’s contemporaries Francis Beaumont (c. 1584–1616) and John Fletcher (1579–1625) dominated the English stage for much of the seventeenth century. Dryden’s affirmations notwithstanding, their popularity quickly faded thereafter, and Beaumont and Fletcher have been in near oblivion for centuries. Generations of critics would probably agree with T. S. Eliot’s harsh assessment: ‘The blossoms of Beaumont and Fletcher’s imagination draw no substance from the soil, but are cut and slightly withered flowers stuck into sand’. After individual experimental plays – Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607) and Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess (1608–10) – the playwrights achieved spectacular collaborative success. They are best known for developing English tragicomedy, the new, hybrid genre that dominated the English stage for nearly a century and substantively influenced future English drama.

Even though the collaborators did not technically invent tragicomedy, which was an outgrowth of the English tradition (Marston’s earlier Malcontent [1603] was registered as a ‘tragicomedia’), they perfected and disseminated it. Sir Philip Sidney disparages mingling ‘Kings & Clownes’ and ‘Horne-pypes and Funeralls’ in ‘mungrell Tragy-comedie’ and Shakespeare’s Hamlet, joining the quarrel, asserts that in serious scenes clowns should ‘speak no more than is set down for them’ (3.2.32) – that is, not add lines with improvisation. In response to these opinions, in his address ‘To the Reader’ published with The Faithful Shepherdess in 1609 Fletcher writes, ‘A tragie-comedie is not so called in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect it wants deaths, which is inough to make it no tragedie, yet brings some neere it, which is inough to make it no comedie: which must be a representation of familiar people’.

Almost every aspect of the life and career of John Ford (1586–c. 1637) presents us with a puzzle. We can be confident that he was the second son of Thomas Ford of Ilsington in Devon and his wife Elizabeth Popham, who was the niece of Sir John Popham, the Lord Chief Justice, and was related through her mother to the important South Welsh family of Stradling. One of the many important trials over which Popham presided was that of Sir Walter Raleigh, which Ford mentions in The Golden Mean, and the Stradling family included, among other interesting members, the Sir John Stradling who translated Justus Lipsius’ De Constantia, whose Stoic outlook is very much in tune with Ford’s own work. However, the name John Ford is such a common one (the dramatist shared it with at least one of his own cousins, John Ford of Gray’s Inn, to whom he dedicated his play Love’s Sacrifice) that we can never hope for absolute certainty when dealing with any of the later aspects of his career, and even when we can feel reasonably confident that we are dealing with the right man, the story tends to present oddities. The dramatist is probably the John Ford who attended Exeter College, Oxford, and went from there to the Middle Temple; however, he was never called to the bar, and his principal occupation and the source of his income remain a mystery, which is intensified by the fact that after the publication of his last known play, The Lady’s Trial, in 1639 he disappears without trace.

The course of his writing career is no clearer than that of his adult life. In 1606, at the age of twenty, he published a poem, Fame’s Memorial, mourning the death of Charles Blount, Earl of Devonshire, and a prose piece, Honour Triumphant, associated with the chivalric entertainments provided in connection with the visit of Christian IV of Denmark, brother-in-law of James I. Ford is also now usually accepted as the author of another elegy, on the Devon-born William Peter, which appeared in 1612; this was briefly and controversially attributed to Shakespeare, but the question of its authorship seems to have been settled by the publication of Brian Vickers’s exhaustive study ‘Counterfeiting’ Shakespeare.

The life and work of John Webster suggest a fundamental and probably generative paradox. On the one hand, he was deeply and continuously conditioned by urban networks generated from his father’s business, his education and his collaborative work in the theatre. On the other hand, his erudition, literary ambition and individualised poetic achievement seem to reflect some measure of independence and solitude.

Especially after Mary Edmond’s identification of Webster’s father as a wealthy coach-maker in London, it has become possible to trace certain social networks that generated collaborative relationships and even shaped ideological proclivities throughout the playwright’s life: Webster’s involvement with his father’s coach-making business and the guild that was associated with it, the Merchant Taylors’ Company; the dramatist’s probable attendance first at Richard Mulcaster’s Merchant Taylors’ School and later at the Middle Temple; his early playwriting apprenticeship as one of ‘Henslowe’s hacks’ with citizen-dramatists such as Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton, with whom he would continue to write collaborative plays his entire career; an identification with city-based Protestant values opposed to the court of James I; and a corresponding sympathy with the fifth column of militant Protestants galvanised in James’ court around the figure of William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke. Webster may have worked for his father’s coach-making enterprise, taking care of the business side of things as M. C. Bradbrook has speculated, becoming a full member of the Merchant Taylors’ Company in 1615. In 1624, he was honoured to serve as official poet for the company, designing the festivities for the investiture of Sir John Gore, a merchant taylor, as Lord Mayor of London.

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.

George Chapman (1559/60–1634) was born in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, the younger son of a well-to-do farmer. His elder brother inherited the bulk of the estate, leaving George in financial trouble for much of his life. Little is known for certain about his youth. According to Anthony Wood, the Oxford antiquary, Chapman studied some years at Oxford University, excelled at the classics, but did not take a degree. The influence of classical literature is clear throughout his work, which is erudite and abounds with allusions to ancient culture and history. After university, Chapman seems to have spent some time in the service of a knight, Sir Ralph Sadler, probably in the early 1580s, before fighting the Spaniards in the Low Countries.

By 1594, Chapman had embarked on his literary career, with the publication of his poem The Shadow of Night, followed a year later by Ovid’s Banquet of Sense. His sequel to Marlowe’s Hero and Leander (1598) is one of his best-known poems. Chapman’s learned classical allusions, often ambiguous grammatical constructions and far-fetched conceits ally him with the Metaphysical style of wilful obscurity. His poetry, Chapman boasts, is written for ‘serching spirits, whom learning hath made noble, and nobilitie sacred’, not for ‘the prophane multitude’. Learning, to Chapman, is more than bookish knowledge: it implies an urbanity that ultimately serves a moral function, allowing the scholar to learn from the great classical philosophers. Some of this elitist attitude also permeates his dramatic work, in particular the tragedies. Even the comedies for the public theatres are often based on classical sources (All Fools reworks two comedies by Terence, and The Widow’s Tears dramatises Petronius’ Satyricon), contain Latin proverbs (‘Sine periculo friget lusus’ in All Fools), allusions to classical mythology, and unusual Latin stage directions such as ‘Abscondit se’ (he hides himself), ‘Amplectitur eam’ (he embraces her), and ‘Bibit Ancilla’ (the servant girl drinks).

Of the many books that Deleuze devoted to the history of philosophy, none focuses on ancient philosophy. And yet, one could argue that few thinkers of the twentieth century have engaged with ancient philosophy, and drawn from it, as much and as systematically as Deleuze. Naturally, one could think of Heidegger as another twentieth-century philosopher whose thought was shaped through his confrontation with Greek philosophy. But where Heidegger eventually mobilizes the Presocratics against Plato and Aristotle, and seeks to extract from them possibilities of thought beyond the “closure” of metaphysics, Deleuze doesn’t envisage the history of philosophy in the same terms, and simply refuses to identify what he calls “the metaphysics of representation,” or “Platonism,” with metaphysics as such. That being said, it would be difficult to ignore that his entire philosophy – up until Logic of Sense at least – unfolds under the Nietzschean injunction to reverse, overturn, and overcome Platonism, stressing all the while the need to construct another “image of thought.” Most striking, perhaps, is the extent to which his effort to produce another image of thought requires a new thought of the image, one that he finds already at work in Greek philosophy itself. My goal, here, is threefold: to return to the source of Platonism by following the thread of the image, and show the extent to which philosophy is, from the start, and irreducibly, a matter of ethics, aesthetics, and politics; to reveal the extent to which Deleuze saw resources to overturn Platonism in ancient, and even Platonic, philosophy itself; to indicate the manner in which, drawing on those resources, Deleuze develops an anti-Platonism based on the concepts of “difference” and “repetition.”

REALISM IN HISTORY

Unlike most of his contemporaries, Deleuze was a realist philosopher. But his realist stance was deeply innovative and constituted a sharp break with the brand of realism that dominated Western thought for 2,500 years, the one created by Aristotle. As is well known, the Greek philosopher’s world was populated by three categories of entities: genus, species, and individual. Entities belonging to the first two categories subsisted essentially, those belonging to the third one subsisted only accidentally. The genus could be, for example, Animal, the species Human, and the individual this or that particular person characterized by contingent properties: being white, being musical, being just. A genus was linked to its various species (Horse, Human) by a series of logically necessary subdivisions. The genus Animal, for example, could be subdivided into two-footed and many-footed types; then subdivided into differences in extremities: hooves, as in horses, or feet, as in humans. When we reached a point at which any further distinctions were accidental, like a foot missing a toe, we arrived at the level of the species, the lowest ontological level at which we could speak of an essence or of the very nature of a thing.

Possession of these essential traits is what guaranteed the mind-independent identity of things in Aristotelian realism. It follows that any new brand of realism, if it is to be truly novel, must replace the categories of genus and species with something that does not imply an ontological commitment to transcendent entities (essences). This task is easier for species than for genera. The transcendent nature of species can be eliminated simply by transforming them into historical entities, like Darwin did. In evolutionary theory a biological species is as singular, as unique, and as historically contingent as an individual organism: a species is born when its gene pool is closed to the flow of genetic materials from other reproductive communities – that is, it is born through reproductive isolation – and its dies through extinction. In other words, species like organisms are “subject to corruption and decay,” as Aristotle would say. And their defining properties are not logically necessary.

PREFACE

It is perhaps a testimony to their influence and notoriety that Deleuze and Guattari can be located at a number of stations along the continuum between parody and homage. I want to briefly consider three seemingly distant stations, each with its own humorous elements, but deployed to different ends. These prefatory considerations will open onto questions and demonstrations of how to characterize Deleuze and Guattari’s collaborations, that is, how they, and others, posed and answered such questions, and what these tell us about their joint work. The emphasis in this contribution is less on the content of the books they wrote together than on characterizations of their process and how these characterizations have been deployed and redeployed to different ends.

The late French cartoonist and illustrator Gérard Lauzier (1930–2008) was known, among other things, for his parodies of intellectuals and the Left, including Deleuze and Guattari. Lauzier collapsed Deleuze and Guattari into a third figure of “Gilles Guatareuze” (one “t” only), described tentatively by François Dosse in terms of the rather neutral “coalescence.” Dosse provides some dialogue from a single panel – the final one – of Lauzier’s illustrations of 1978, and quotes François Fourquet, somewhat tangentially, in order to explain how an already fragile Guattari was deeply wounded by such cruel commentary:

“Life” was a major theme for Deleuze, so much so that he would say at one point: “Everything I’ve written is vitalistic, at least I hope it is” (N 143). But before we get out the pitchforks at this uttering of a forbidden word, we should remember Deleuze’s love of provocation, and read the beginning of the passage to see his idiosyncratic notion of vitalism: “There’s a profound link between signs, life, and vitalism: the power of nonorganic life that can be found in a line that’s drawn, a line of writing, a line of music. It’s organisms that die, not life. Any work of art points a way through for life, finds a way through the cracks” (N 143).

In this chapter we will skirt the relation of life and art, however, and instead focus upon Deleuze’s writings that are aimed at life as it is understood in the biological register. We’ll begin with a guide to some key biophilosophical investigations in Deleuze’s single-authored masterpiece, Difference and Repetition: chapter 2 on organic syntheses and organic time, and chapter 5 on embryogenesis. Then, in the second part of the chapter, we will consider several biophilosophical themes in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, addressing “vitalism,” “life,” “nature,” “content and expression,” “evolution and involution,” “milieus, codes, territories,” “non-organic life,” “body without organs,” and “organism.”

How are things determined to be what they are? Kant’s answer to this question defines transcendental idealism, and forms the core of Deleuze’s lifelong fascination with Kant. He criticizes Kant for reducing determination to the external application of concepts to the given. Yet what preoccupies Deleuze is a deeper account of determination in Kant: the determination of the being of the self (“I am”) by its own thinking activity (“I think”). Because this determination happens in time, the being that is determined is different from the being that is determinable. The latter, by definition, is not thought and cannot be thought, and yet it is precisely what is to be thought. Here is what, above all, fascinates Deleuze about Kant: the very act in which the I thinks its own being requires that being to squirm out of thought’s reach. Through its thinking activity the I generates difference from its being, indicating that the being of thought is both what must be thought and what cannot be thought.

The difference of thought from its being recurs throughout Deleuze’s writings on Kant. An early version of it appears in Empiricism and Subjectivity (ES 111); in an essay of the following year, Deleuze speaks of Kant in terms of “the difference internal to the Being which thinks itself” (DI 17, translation modified). It is a rich presence in Difference and Repetition (DR 58, 85–86, 276), in the essay “On Four Poetic Formulas That Might Summarize the Kantian Philosophy” (ECC 27–35, cf. KCP vii–xiii), and in his 1978 lectures. Finally, this difference is evoked in terms of the plane of immanence: