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Collaborative Playwriting: The Chettle, Dekker, Heywood Syndicate

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2009

Neil Carson
Neil Carson
Affiliation:
University of Guelph
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Extract

That a large number of Elizabethan plays are the product of dramatic collaboration is well known. Just how this process of ‘collective creation’ operated in the public theatres, however, remains something of a mystery. Attempts to explore the mechanics of collaborative play writing have been of different kinds. The most common have been studies of published plays undertaken in the hope that characteristics of style would reveal the shares of contributing dramatists. In spite of valuable work (notably by Cyrus Hoy), however, too many of these studies suffer from the weaknesses described by Samuel Schoenbaum in his analysis of the limitations of conclusions about authorship based on internal evidence. As a consequence, assertions about patterns of collaboration based on the identification of an author's stylistic characteristics, such as those made in the early 19205 by Dugdale Sykes, are not as fashionable as they once were.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , Spring 1989 , pp. 13 - 23
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 1989

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References

Notes

1. Bentley, G. E. estimates that ‘as many as half of the plays by professional dramatists in the period incorporated the writing at some date of more than one man’, The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare's Time (Princeton, 1971), p. 199.Google Scholar

2. ‘The Shares of Fletcher and His Collaborators in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon’, Studies in Bibliography 8–15 (1956–1962).Google Scholar

3. Internal Evidence and Elizabethan Dramatic Authorship (Evanston, 1966).Google Scholar

4. See for example his Sidelights on Elizabethan Drama (London, 1924.).Google Scholar

5. Quoted by Sisson, C. J., Lost Plays of Shakespeare's Age (Cambridge, 1936).Google Scholar

6. Pre-Restoration Stage Studies (Cambridge, Mass., 1927).Google Scholar

7. ‘The Booke of Sir Thomas Moore: A Chronology of Revision’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 37 (1986), 305.Google Scholar

8. Profession, p. 22.Google Scholar