.
(...) The reluctance to describe Shakespeare as a collaborative writer is puzzling – especially because scholars know that co-authorship was common on the Elizabethan stage. Christopher Marlowe collaborated. So did Ben Jonson and John Marston. When the co-authored plays of John Fletcher and Francis Beaumont were published in an expensive folio in 1647 their collaborative nature was a selling point. And when The Two Noble Kinsmen was first printed, in 1634, the title page made much of the fact that it was “written by the memorable worthies of their time, Mr John Fletcher and Mr William Shakespeare.”
In 1985 I was hired by Columbia to teach Shakespeare. At this time I was still unaware that three plays on my syllabus – Titus Andronicus, Timon of Athens and Pericles – had been co-authored. Like most Shakespeareans, I paid little attention to the largely forgotten attribution studies of the 19th century. Serious work in that field had all but died out after the greatest Shakespeare scholar of the early 20th century, Sir EK Chambers, had, in a famous 1924 British Academy Shakespeare lecture, roundly dismissed the enterprise as the work of “disintegrators”. In fact, until the past decade, the leading authorities on these matters agreed with Chambers and rejected the possibility that Shakespeare collaborated in any significant way.
Since then, thanks to the cumulative labour of scholars who began to investigate authorial habits – which playwright consistently preferred “has” and “does” and which “hath” and “doth” and so on – writers’ distinctive syntax, vocabulary and stylistic tics have become more visible. (...)
No comments:
Post a Comment