This chapter reveals the extent to which Shakespeare borrowed from Christopher Marlowe’s plays, and how Marlowe’s ghost appears to have haunted him throughout much of his career. It also, however, explores key differences between the dramatists’ styles, including rhetoric and phraseology. Finally, the chapter investigates claims that Marlowe and Shakespeare co-authored plays and shows that those suspected collaborations are distinctly different from Marlowe in terms of poetic style. While Shakespeare sought to emulate Marlowe in his earliest plays, he also saw opportunities to distinguish himself from his predecessor through more flexible verse, more nuanced applications of rhetorical schemes, and an overall suppler dramatic style. The chapter also argues that we have been getting the title The Taming of the Shrew wrong for all these years.
While the idea of Shakespeare guiding younger dramatists in his later co-authored plays is now generally accepted, there remains some unwillingness to accept that Shakespeare himself was guided in earlier collaborations. Scholars still prefer to imagine Shakespeare improving, or even salvaging, the work of more experienced dramatists, rather than learning from the process of co-authorship at the beginning of his career. This conclusion interrogates such reticence in tandem with older scholarship reluctant to see Shakespeare as a borrower, scholarship that instead assumes other dramatists borrowed from him. It looks at the ways in which the compilers of the First Folio helped to create the image of Shakespeare as a solitary genius. Shakespeare’s dramatic identity was shaped in large part by the people with whom he collaborated most. It is time for readers to fully recognise that in his lifetime Shakespeare was a member of a community of playwrights, his works embedded in a network of affiliation and indebtedness within the early modern writing scene. He was not, to quote Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, ‘the only Shake-scene in a country’.
This chapter investigates the ways in which George Peele’s history plays and tragedies influenced Shakespeare’s dramatic output. It also details Shakespeare’s absorption of Peele’s dramatic language but identifies significant departures in terms of poetic style. The chapter argues that Shakespeare co-authored Titus Andronicus with Peele in a process of simultaneous collaboration, while other scholars have contended that Shakespeare revised or finished off Peele’s play. The chapter then looks at an example of Shakespeare adapting a play by Peele in King John, and the differences between co-authorship and adaptation.
Taking the first allusion to Shakespeare as an ‘upstart crow beautified with our feathers’ in the pamphlet Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit as its starting basis, this introduction asks how we can determine Shakespeare’s debts to his contemporary playwrights. Alongside analysis of allusions, studies of similarities in dramatic narrative and structure, characterisation, and explorations of the ways in which dramatists appear to have parodied each other, the book introduces a resource called Collocations and N-grams. This database enables us to uncover objective data linking early modern plays and to pinpoint lines Shakespeare appears to have borrowed from earlier dramas. We can therefore ‘pluck a crow’ through advances in technology and our understanding of the order in which plays were written.
This chapter investigates the colossal contributions John Fletcher made to early modern drama. Fletcher was a deeply collaborative playwright, but many of the theories on his collaborations continue to present insoluble difficulties. This chapter offers a significant reinvestigation of Fletcher’s canon and provides new insights into how Shakespeare and Fletcher worked together on Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen. The chapter also investigates evidence that traces of Shakespeare and Fletcher’s lost play Cardenio survive today.
This chapter explores Shakespeare’s relationship with his Elizabethan predecessor, John Lyly, who established several precedents for Shakespeare’s plays, particularly genre-bending elements of plays often labelled comedies. Taking advantage of Collocations and N-grams, the chapter reveals for the first time that, although Shakespeare does not appear to have been overly familiar with Lyly’s dramatic language at the beginning of his career, he consulted Lyly’s earlier Romance plays when writing for the indoor Blackfriars Theatre, where Lyly’s plays had previously been performed by the Children of Paul’s. This reveals Shakespeare as a man of the theatre, seeking inspiration from his dramatic predecessor to entertain audiences.
This chapter argues that Shakespeare’s ability to weave elements of other dramatists’ plays into his own works was attributable in large part to the rhetorical training he received at school and as an actor who performed in other men’s plays as well as his own. The chapter offers a detailed survey of the theatre of the time, the ways in which Shakespeare was conscious of the strengths, limitations, and dimensions of the stage, and the various playing companies working during the period to fulfil a commercial operation, entertaining audiences by writing in and conflating a variety of genres to make money. The chapter looks at the different ways in which company managers, actors, and playwrights worked together, including different forms of collaboration, such as co-authorship, revision, and adaptation, all ways in which Shakespeare worked with other playwrights.
As a result of the infamous attack on Shakespeare in Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, Robert Greene’s relationship with Shakespeare is often framed in malignant terms. This chapter shows, however, that Greene’s impact on Elizabethan stage conventions has been underappreciated, and that his dramatic output contributed to Shakespeare’s dramaturgy. Having investigated Greene’s traditionally attributed plays, the chapter looks at plays newly assigned to him, the tragedies Locrine and Selimus. The former was included in Shakespeare’s 1664 Third Folio, which tells a fascinating story of how Shakespeare found himself arrayed in Greene’s feathers long after both men had died, while the chapter shows that Shakespeare recalled Selimus in plays such as King John and King Lear.
Shakespeare's Borrowed Feathers takes readers on a captivating journey through the intricate web of influence that shaped the works of William Shakespeare. The book delves into the vibrant world of early modern playwrights, unveiling the profound impact of contemporaries like Marlowe, Kyd, and Middleton on Shakespeare's output. With meticulous research and fresh perspectives, this compelling work illuminates the intricate dance of ideas, inspirations, and adaptations that flowed between playwrights of the era. From the echoes of Lyly's wit to the collaborative genius of Fletcher, the book offers startling insights into Shakespeare's artistic development. Freebury-Jones invites readers into Shakespeare’s theatrical landscape, shedding light on the interconnected community of playwrights who shaped the era. By employing innovative methods of analysis, the book beckons us to recognise the power of acknowledging Shakespeare's debts to his fellow dramatists. Shakespeare's Borrowed Feathers offers new ways of looking at the masterpieces that have enchanted audiences for centuries, reminding us that behind the genius of a single man lies a tapestry of collaborative brilliance.
Having surveyed the plays of dramatists such as Thomas Dekker and John Marston, the chapter elaborates on the fascinating life of their literary rival Ben Jonson. It offers new perspectives on Jonson’s relationship with Shakespeare, explores differences in their approaches towards drama, and points out some interesting verbal links between Jonson plays in which we know Shakespeare acted for the King’s Men, and later Shakespeare plays. These links suggest Shakespeare recalling the structure of his cues and lines, providing fresh evidence on which roles Shakespeare took. The chapter reveals, however, that Shakespeare does not seem to have borrowed heavily from Jacobean contemporary playwrights in terms of dramatic language in the same way as he did Elizabethan predecessors, suggesting that Shakespeare had developed a distinct authorial voice by this point in his career. Moreover, while Shakespeare was evidently conscious of popular genres such as masques and city comedies, he seems to turn away from them in several respects, which provides fascinating insights into Shakespeare’s individuality.