Leaving aside the fringe-dwellers who don’t believe “the Stratford man” wrote any of the plays published under his name, attribution scholars have employed sophisticated, increasingly computerised “stylometric” methodologies to ascertain exactly which parts, lines and phrases in each play attributed to Shakespeare were written by the playwright himself, and which by other writers. Despite the apparently scientific deployment of evidence, however, the results are by no means settled among the various exponents.
The one major point of agreement within this intimidating and contentious branch of Shakespeare research is that the Romantic-era genius writing in splendid isolation has been well and truly swept away, to be replaced by a figure who was one of many in an Elizabethan community of collaborating playwrights who were also actors and shareholders in London’s theatrical companies.
Nonetheless, and to keep things in perspective, we need not abandon our regard for a singular Shakespeare as a master-craftsman of the stage. Will Sharpe’s measured approach in Shakespeare and Collaborative Writing (2023) shows that the wholly collaborative plays of which he was joint author were written only in his early apprenticeship years (Titus Andronicus and the Henry VI plays) and when he had semi-retired at the end of his career (Pericles, Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen), which leaves all those between (except Timon of Athens) as written alone and unaided.
Thus, as Darren Freebury-Jones shows in his new book, Shakespeare’s Borrowed Feathers, the vast majority of plays in the First Folio (a kind of posthumous publishing collaboration) are entirely single-authored, marked by Shakespeare’s inimitable, chameleon-like and richly metaphorical signature style, though replete also with recontextualised verbal “borrowings” from fellow dramatists and writers. We need not worry that Shakespeare’s pre-eminence, recognised by the Folio editors and contemporaries, will be swept away by the view that the plays we value were compiled by committee.
Freebury-Jones voices some doubts about other authorship schools, in particular the New Oxford Shakespeare team led by Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor and John Jowett in the 1980s, which radically changed the editorial landscape towards acknowledging collaboration. But he turns away from debates about systematic collaborations and conscious adaptations to peg out his own allotment. His interest is in the extent to which Shakespeare was influenced by the verbal constructions of his contemporaries, in some of whose plays he himself acted.
To do this, he uses a recent computer database with what must be the most forbidding title imaginable for a work on drama, Collocations and N-Grams, developed by digital scholar Pervez Rizvi. This resource has digitised an almost complete collection of the surviving texts of 527 early modern plays dated between 1552 and 1657, enabling us speedily and in granular detail to find matches of words and phrases between plays.
Freebury-Jones recognises that this “treasure trove” enables a scholar to identify with great precision mutual influences between dramatists repeating exact shared word sequences (“n-grams”) and matching phrases spliced with intervening words (“collocations”). These he analyses to identify Shakespeare’s “borrowed feathers,” pillaged from or shared with his contemporary writers. The result is a “revelation” of micro-level verbal mirroring that doesn’t rely on assumptions of joint authorship but instead on mutual influences, some stronger than others. And when he does raise his eyes above the computer spreadsheets, he reveals himself to be a sensitively close reader, showing how shared phrases are purposefully adapted to illuminate different dramatic contexts.
Freebury-Jones does intervene in attribution studies in some cases, for example arguing that collaboration between Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe in the Henry VI plays may have been overstated and that Thomas Kyd is a stronger presence in Shakespeare’s works than otherwise believed. But his main focus is on linguistic and dramatic influence between dramatists, and in these stakes even Shakespeare’s self-styled rival Robert Greene has claims: “Greene’s feathers, far more colourful than often credited, helped the works of later playwrights to take flight.”
Professional ties were also social, and Freebury-Jones provides at the beginning of each chapter entertaining pen-portraits of a motley range of personalities before moving to the nitty-gritty of their stylistic influence on Shakespeare. For these alone the book might reach a more general audience, though Stanley Wells’s authoritative Shakespeare and Co. (2006) provides more biographical detail.
Among the subjects of Freebury-Jones’s portraits is the playwright John Lyly, now largely forgotten, who pioneered a new kind of dramaturgy written for boy actors with mixed genres from which Shakespeare forged romantic comedy, and a uniquely scholastic style that became famous in his time as “euphuism” and which Shakespeare parodies. Marlowe burst on the theatrical scene with his altogether more volcanic presence, carrying the racy aura of espionage, while Kyd, his early room-mate, was probably unjustly caught up in accusations of crime, tainted by association. Freebury-Jones shows that both were enormously influential over Shakespeare.
Robert Greene, who famously announced to the coterie world of playmakers the emergence of an “upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers” as “the only Shake-scene in a countrey,” was dogged by lifelong penury and suffered an early and infamous death. Ben Jonson, who (unlike Marlowe) lived to be Shakespeare’s main dramatic rival and frenemy, was turbulently implicated in a criminal underworld, providing jargon and a rogues’ gallery of characters to the dramatic repertoire.
And on we go through a range of writers including Peele, Dekker, Marston and Middleton, ending with John Fletcher, who was accepted as the true heir by fully collaborating on at least the two last plays in the Shakespearean canon.
Freebury-Jones’s detailed evidence builds towards an argument that the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatrical world was a community of writers who were acquaintances, rivals and hired journeymen, and that they freely borrowed “feathers” from each other in openly intertextual fashion. In an age when literary imitation was a central plank of humanist education at school, it is not surprising that early modern drama was “a veritable avian community, a magpie nest, each writer borrowing from each other” and that many of the borrowings would have often been recognised by audiences.
Though lacking attributions by name (and in an age before strict copyright laws operated), the process was perhaps not so different in spirit from modern scholars scrupulously documenting their sources and acknowledging friends and teachers who have contributed suggestions and inspiration that enhance the autonomy of the final product. This did not always pre-empt charges of plagiarism or professional rancour though Shakespeare seems to have avoided these through his adroitly adapted recoinings to new contexts and uses.
Freebury-Jones has some of his own stylistic habits. For example, he often half-advances a stimulating hypothesis but then coyly half-retracts it as unprovable — “Was Peele Shakespeare’s first co-author?”; “Are we witnessing Shakespeare’s recall of lines he delivered on stage here?” — signalling findings that are tentative and pointing to new searches.
Armed with the Collocations and N-Grams database of plays as his primary research tool, Freebury-Jones necessarily tells only a portion of the story of Shakespeare’s stylistic borrowings and evolution. The playwright was also an avid and deep reader of prose and poems, and we would need a computer cache even more voluminous to explore this wider terrain of influence.
After all, among Shakespeare’s primary sources were Holinshed’s Chronicles for all the English history plays, North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans for the Greco-Roman plays, and almost certainly the huge output in poetry and translations by George Chapman (perhaps the “rival poet” of the sonnets). In developing his unique brand of romantic comedy Shakespeare dramatised Thomas Lodge’s prose fiction Rosalynde, while the late romance tragi-comedy The Winter’s Tale was based on Robert Greene’s Pandosto. Moreover, Shakespeare shows keen appreciation of Sir Philip Sidney’s lengthy Arcadia, the most celebrated proto-novelistic romance of the period, and Spenser’s allegorical epic The Faerie Queene, which held the same lofty status in poetry.
Specific episodes Shakespeare adapted for the stage have been thoroughly dredged by Freebury-Jones and others, but these are all huge works that Shakespeare had evidently read and learned from. Alert to contemporary popular fashions and on the lookout for novel language and analogues, he had also evidently read some of the many pamphlets describing rogue life in the Elizabethan criminal world. Plenty more grist to the mill for scholars in their own collaborative task of re-creation. •
Shakespeare’s Borrowed Feathers: How Early Modern Playwrights Shaped the World’s Greatest Writer
By Darren Freebury-Jones | Manchester University Press | £25 | 272 pages
