William Shakespeare's collaborations

Last updated April 03, 2024

Like most playwrights of his period, William Shakespeare did not always write alone. A number of his surviving plays are collaborative, or were revised by others after their original composition, although the exact number is open to debate. Some of the following attributions, such as The Two Noble Kinsmen , have well-attested contemporary documentation; others, such as Titus Andronicus , are dependent on linguistic analysis by modern scholars; recent work on computer analysis of textual style (word use, word and phrase patterns) has given reason to believe that parts of some of the plays ascribed to Shakespeare are actually by other writers.

In some cases the identity of the collaborator is known; in other cases there is a scholarly consensus; in others it is unknown or disputed. These debates are the province of Shakespeare attribution studies. Most collaborations occurred at the very beginning and the very end of Shakespeare's career.

Elizabethan authorship

The Elizabethan theatre was nothing like the modern theatre, but rather more like the modern film industry. Scripts were often written quickly, older scripts were revised and many were the product of collaboration. The unscrupulous nature of the Elizabethan book printing trade complicates the attribution of plays further; for example, William Jaggard, who published the First Folio, also published The Passionate Pilgrim by W. Shakespeare, which is mostly the work of other writers.^{[ citation needed ]}

Shakespeare's collaborations

Early works

Edward III was published anonymously in 1596. It was first attributed to Shakespeare in a bookseller's catalogue published in 1656.^[1] Various scholars have suggested Shakespeare's possible authorship, since a number of passages appear to bear his stamp, among other sections that are remarkably uninspired. In 1996, Yale University Press became the first major publisher to produce an edition of the play under Shakespeare's name. A consensus is emerging that the play was written by a team of dramatists including Shakespeare early in his career – but exactly who wrote what is still open to debate. The play is included in the Second Edition of the Complete Oxford Shakespeare (2005), where it is attributed to "William Shakespeare and Others", and in the Riverside Shakespeare. In 2009, Brian Vickers published the results of a computer analysis using a program designed to detect plagiarism, which suggests that 40% of the play was written by Shakespeare with the other scenes written by Thomas Kyd (1558–1594).^[2]
Henry VI, Part 1 : possibly the work of a team of playwrights, whose identities are unknown. Some scholars argue that Shakespeare wrote less than 20% of the text. Gary Taylor argues that the first act was the work of Thomas Nashe.^[3] Paul J. Vincent concludes that, in light of recent research into the Elizabethan theatre, 1 Henry VI is Shakespeare's partial revision of a play by Nashe (Act 1) and an unknown playwright (Acts 2–5), the original of which was performed in early 1592. Shakespeare's work in the play, which was most likely composed in 1594, can be found in Act 2 (scene 4) and Act 4 (scenes 2–5 and the first 32 lines of scene 7).^[4] Vincent's authorship findings, especially with regard to Nashe's authorship of Act 1, are supported overall by Brian Vickers, who agrees with the theory of co-authorship and differs only slightly over the extent of Shakespeare's contribution to the play, tentatively identifying Thomas Kyd as the author of the rest of the play.^[5]
Titus Andronicus : seen as a collaboration with, or revision of, George Peele. See Authorship of Titus Andronicus.^[6]
Sir Thomas More : some pages of the manuscript of this play are in Shakespeare's handwriting, with the assembled text being a collaboration with Anthony Munday (the primary author) and others.^[7]
The Spanish Tragedy : although definitely known to be by Thomas Kyd, Thomas Pavier's edition of 1602 added five new passages to the preexisting text, totaling 320 lines, with the most substantial addition being an entire scene, known as the "painter scene", since it is dominated by Hieronimo's conversation with a painter. Even before Pavier's quarto, however, the scene seems to have been in existence and known to audiences, since John Marston parodies the painter scene in his 1599 play Antonio and Mellida . The five additions in the 1602 text may have been made for the 1597 revival by the Admiral's Men. In 2013, scholar Douglas Bruster, after comparing spellings in the additions with what we know of Shakespeare's handwriting, concluded that Shakespeare did indeed write the additions.^[8] Bruster attributed mistakes in the text of the additions to the illegibility of Shakespeare's handwriting; the resulting mistakes have led to the devaluing of the portions that Shakespeare presumably wrote.^{[ citation needed ]}

Collaboration with Wilkins

Pericles, Prince of Tyre : includes the work of George Wilkins. Most scholars take the view that Wilkins wrote the first two acts, and Shakespeare the last three.^[9]^[10]

Collaborations with Middleton

Macbeth : Thomas Middleton may have adapted Shakespeare's tragedy by introducing act 3 scene 5 - featuring Hecate and the three witches, and a song which also features in Middleton's The Witch - and the Hecate passages in act 4 scene 1.^[11]
Measure for Measure : may have undergone a light revision by Middleton at some point after its original composition. As with Macbeth, the only source is that of the First Folio.
Timon of Athens : may result from collaboration between Shakespeare and Middleton which might explain its incoherent plot and unusually cynical tone.^[12]
All's Well That Ends Well : research published in 2012 by Emma Smith and Laurie Maguire of Oxford University suggests a collaboration between Shakespeare and Middleton.^[13]

Collaborations with Fletcher

Cardenio , a lost play; contemporary reports say that Shakespeare collaborated on it with John Fletcher.^[14]
Henry VIII : generally considered a collaboration between Shakespeare and Fletcher.^[15]
The Two Noble Kinsmen , published in quarto in 1634 and attributed to John Fletcher and William Shakespeare on the title page;^[16] each playwright appears to have written about half of the text. It is excluded from the First Folio.^[17]^[18]

Related Research Articles

The earliest texts of William Shakespeare's works were published during the 16th and 17th centuries in quarto or folio format. Folios are large, tall volumes; quartos are smaller, roughly half the size. The publications of the latter are usually abbreviated to Q1, Q2, etc., where the letter stands for "quarto" and the number for the first, second, or third edition published.

Titus Andronicus is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1588 and 1593. It is thought to be Shakespeare's first tragedy and is often seen as his attempt to emulate the violent and bloody revenge plays of his contemporaries, which were extremely popular with audiences throughout the 16th century.

The Raigne of King Edward the Third, commonly shortened to Edward III, is an Elizabethan play printed anonymously in 1596, and at least partly written by William Shakespeare. It began to be included in publications of the complete works of Shakespeare only in the late 1990s. Scholars who have supported this attribution include Jonathan Bate, Edward Capell, Eliot Slater, Eric Sams, Giorgio Melchiori and Brian Vickers. The play's co-author remains the subject of debate: suggestions have included Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, Michael Drayton, Thomas Nashe and George Peele.

The Ur-Hamlet is a play by an unknown author, thought to be either Thomas Kyd or William Shakespeare. No copy of the play, dated by scholars to the second half of 1587, survives today. The play was staged in London, more specifically at The Theatre in Shoreditch as recalled by Elizabethan author Thomas Lodge. It includes a character named Hamlet; the only other known character from the play is a ghost who, according to Thomas Lodge in his 1596 publication Wits Misery and the Worlds Madnesse, cries, "Hamlet, revenge!"

This article presents a possible chronological listing of the composition of the plays of William Shakespeare.

The Shakespeare apocrypha is a group of plays and poems that have sometimes been attributed to William Shakespeare, but whose attribution is questionable for various reasons. The issue is not to be confused with the debate on Shakespearean authorship, which questions the authorship of the works traditionally attributed to Shakespeare.

Revenge tragedy is a theatrical genre, in which the principal theme is revenge and revenge's fatal consequences. Formally established by American educator Ashley H. Thorndike in his 1902 article "The Relations of Hamlet to Contemporary Revenge Plays," a revenge tragedy documents the progress of the protagonist's revenge plot and often leads to the demise of both the murderers and the avenger himself.

<i>The Spanish Tragedy</i> Play by Thomas Kyd

The Spanish Tragedy, or Hieronimo is Mad Again is an Elizabethan tragedy written by Thomas Kyd between 1582 and 1592. Highly popular and influential in its time, The Spanish Tragedy established a new genre in English theatre, the revenge play or revenge tragedy. The play contains several violent murders and includes as one of its characters a personification of Revenge. The Spanish Tragedy is often considered to be the first mature Elizabethan drama, a claim disputed with Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine, and was parodied by many Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights, including Marlowe, William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson.

Elizabethan literature refers to bodies of work produced during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603), and is one of the most splendid ages of English literature. In addition to drama and the theatre, it saw a flowering of poetry, with new forms like the sonnet, the Spenserian stanza, and dramatic blank verse, as well as prose, including historical chronicles, pamphlets, and the first English novels. Major writers include William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, Richard Hooker, Ben Jonson, Philip Sidney and Thomas Kyd.

Shakespeare's plays are a canon of approximately 39 dramatic works written by English poet, playwright, and actor William Shakespeare. The exact number of plays as well as their classifications as tragedy, history, comedy, or otherwise is a matter of scholarly debate. Shakespeare's plays are widely regarded as among the greatest in the English language and are continually performed around the world. The plays have been translated into every major living language.

The Earl of Pembroke's Men was an Elizabethan era playing company, or troupe of actors, in English Renaissance theatre. They functioned under the patronage of Henry Herbert, 2nd Earl of Pembroke. Early and equivocal mentions of a Pembroke's company reach as far back as 1575; but the company is known for certain to have been in existence in 1592. In that year, a share in the company was valued at £80.

William Shakespeare (1564–1616) was an English poet and playwright. He wrote approximately 39 plays and 154 sonnets, as well as a variety of other poems.

Thomas Millington was a London publisher of the Elizabethan era, who published first editions of three Shakespearean plays. He has been called a "stationer of dubious reputation" who was connected with some of the "bad quartos" and questionable texts of Shakespearean bibliography.

Thomas Pavier was a London publisher and bookseller of the early seventeenth century. His complex involvement in the publication of early editions of some of Shakespeare's plays, as well as plays of the Shakespeare Apocrypha, has left him with a "dubious reputation."

<i>The Oxford Shakespeare</i> Editions of William Shakespeares works produced by Oxford University Press

The Oxford Shakespeare is the range of editions of William Shakespeare's works produced by Oxford University Press. The Oxford Shakespeare is produced under the general editorship of Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor.

The Arden Shakespeare is a long-running series of scholarly editions of the works of William Shakespeare. It presents fully edited modern-spelling editions of the plays and poems, with lengthy introductions and full commentaries. There have been three distinct series of The Arden Shakespeare over the past century, with the third series commencing in 1995 and concluding in January 2020. Arden was the maiden name of Shakespeare's mother, Mary, but the primary reference of the enterprise's title is to the Forest of Arden, in which Shakespeare's As You Like It is set.

Shakespeare attribution studies is the scholarly attempt to determine the authorial boundaries of the William Shakespeare canon, the extent of his possible collaborative works, and the identity of his collaborators. The studies, which began in the late 17th century, are based on the axiom that every writer has a unique, measurable style that can be discriminated from that of other writers using techniques of textual criticism originally developed for biblical and classical studies. The studies include the assessment of different types of evidence, generally classified as internal, external, and stylistic, of which all are further categorised as traditional and non-traditional.

<i>Greenes Groats-Worth of Wit</i> 1592 tract by Robert Greene

Greenes, Groats-worth of Witte, bought with a million of Repentance (1592) is a tract published as the work of the Elizabethan author Robert Greene.

The authorship of Titus Andronicus has been debated since the late 17th century. Titus Andronicus, probably written between 1588 and 1593, appeared in three quarto editions from 1594 to 1601 with no named author. It was first published under William Shakespeare's name in the 1623 First Folio of his plays. However, as with some of his early and late plays, scholars have long surmised that Shakespeare might have collaborated with another playwright. Other plays have also been examined for evidence of co-authorship, but none has been as closely scrutinised or as consistently questioned as Titus. The principal contender for the co-authorship is George Peele.

Douglas Bruster is an American literary critic and Shakespeare scholar. He is the Mody C. Boatright Regents Professor of American and English Literature and Distinguished Teaching Professor at The University of Texas at Austin where he researches the works of William Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

References

↑ W. W. Greg, A List of Masques, Pageants, &c. Supplementary to "A List of English Plays", Appendix II, lxiv (1902)
↑ Malvern, Jack (12 October 2009). "Computer program proves Shakespeare didn't work alone, researchers claim". Times of London.
↑ Taylor, Gary. "Shakespeare and Others: The Authorship of Henry the Sixth, Part One", Medieval and Renaissance Drama, 7 (1995), 145–205.
↑ Vincent (2005: 377–402)
↑ Vickers (2007: 311–352)
↑ Goff, Moira. "Titus Andronicus – Shakespeare in quarto". www.bl.uk.
↑ Bald, R.C., "The Booke of Sir Thomas More and Its Problems." Shakespeare Survey II (1949), pp. 44–65; Evans, G. Blakemore. Introduction to Sir Thomas More. The Riverside Shakespeare. Herschel Baker, Anne Barton, Frank Kermode, Harry Levin, Hallett Smith, and Marie Edel, eds. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1974, 1997, p. 1683; McMillin, Scott. The Elizabethan Theatre and "The Book of Sir Thomas More". Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press, 1987, pp. 82–3, 140–44, etc.
↑ Schuessler, Jennifer (12 August 2013). "Further Proof of Shakespeare's Hand in 'The Spanish Tragedy'". The New York Times.
↑ "Collaborations". fbrt.org.uk.
↑ Hope, Jonathan. The Authorship of Shakespeare's Plays: A Socio-Linguistic Study (Cambridge, 1994); Jackson, MacDonald P. "The Authorship of Pericles: The Evidence of Infinitives", Note & Queries 238 (2993): pp. 197–200; Jackson 2003
↑ Shakespeare, William (1990). Brooke, Nicholas (ed.). The Oxford Shakespeare - Macbeth. Oxford University Press. pp. 57–59, 160–161n. ISBN 978-0-19-953583-5.
↑ "Timon of Athens, with Middleton". bard.org.
↑ ^ a b Maguire, Laurie (19 April 2012). "Many Hands – A New Shakespeare Collaboration?". The Times Literary Supplement. also at Centre for Early Modern Studies, University of Oxford accessed 22 April 2012: "The recent redating of All's Well from 1602–03 to 1606–07 (or later) has gone some way to resolving some of the play's stylistic anomalies" ... "[S]tylistically it is striking how many of the widely acknowledged textual and tonal problems of All's Well can be understood differently when we postulate dual authorship."
↑ "Don Quixote portal". umd.edu.
↑ Plecháč, Petr (2021). "Relative contributions of Shakespeare and Fletcher in Henry VIII: An analysis based on most frequent words and most frequent rhythmic patterns". Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. 36 (2): 430–438. arXiv: 1911.05652 . doi:10.1093/llc/fqaa032 – via Oxford Academic.
↑ Potter, Lois (ed.), Fletcher, John and Shakespeare, William The Two Noble Kinsmen The Arden Shakespeare: Third Series, Thomson Learning 1997, ISBN 1-904271-18-9.
↑ Authorship of Two Noble Kinsmen
↑ "Two Noble Kinsmen – Qualifying the authorship". uq.edu.au.

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[1] W. W. Greg, A List of Masques, Pageants, &c. Supplementary to "A List of English Plays", Appendix II, lxiv (1902)

[vickers-2] Malvern, Jack (12 October 2009). "Computer program proves Shakespeare didn't work alone, researchers claim". Times of London.

[3] Taylor, Gary. "Shakespeare and Others: The Authorship of Henry the Sixth, Part One", Medieval and Renaissance Drama, 7 (1995), 145–205.

[4] Vincent (2005: 377–402)

[5] Vickers (2007: 311–352)

[6] Goff, Moira. "Titus Andronicus – Shakespeare in quarto". www.bl.uk.

[7] Bald, R.C., "The Booke of Sir Thomas More and Its Problems." Shakespeare Survey II (1949), pp. 44–65; Evans, G. Blakemore. Introduction to Sir Thomas More. The Riverside Shakespeare. Herschel Baker, Anne Barton, Frank Kermode, Harry Levin, Hallett Smith, and Marie Edel, eds. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1974, 1997, p. 1683; McMillin, Scott. The Elizabethan Theatre and "The Book of Sir Thomas More". Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press, 1987, pp. 82–3, 140–44, etc.

[8] Schuessler, Jennifer (12 August 2013). "Further Proof of Shakespeare's Hand in 'The Spanish Tragedy'". The New York Times.

[9] "Collaborations". fbrt.org.uk.

[10] Hope, Jonathan. The Authorship of Shakespeare's Plays: A Socio-Linguistic Study (Cambridge, 1994); Jackson, MacDonald P. "The Authorship of Pericles: The Evidence of Infinitives", Note & Queries 238 (2993): pp. 197–200; Jackson 2003

[11] Shakespeare, William (1990). Brooke, Nicholas (ed.). The Oxford Shakespeare - Macbeth. Oxford University Press. pp. 57–59, 160–161n. ISBN 978-0-19-953583-5.

[12] "Timon of Athens, with Middleton". bard.org.

[13] Maguire, Laurie (19 April 2012). "Many Hands – A New Shakespeare Collaboration?". The Times Literary Supplement. also at Centre for Early Modern Studies, University of Oxford accessed 22 April 2012: "The recent redating of All's Well from 1602–03 to 1606–07 (or later) has gone some way to resolving some of the play's stylistic anomalies" ... "[S]tylistically it is striking how many of the widely acknowledged textual and tonal problems of All's Well can be understood differently when we postulate dual authorship."

[14] "Don Quixote portal". umd.edu.

[15] Plecháč, Petr (2021). "Relative contributions of Shakespeare and Fletcher in Henry VIII: An analysis based on most frequent words and most frequent rhythmic patterns". Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. 36 (2): 430–438. arXiv: 1911.05652 . doi:10.1093/llc/fqaa032 – via Oxford Academic.

[16] Potter, Lois (ed.), Fletcher, John and Shakespeare, William The Two Noble Kinsmen The Arden Shakespeare: Third Series, Thomson Learning 1997, ISBN 1-904271-18-9.

[17] Authorship of Two Noble Kinsmen

[18] "Two Noble Kinsmen – Qualifying the authorship". uq.edu.au.

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