Shakespeare and Collaborative Writing

Shakespeare and Collaborative Writing offers a rich account of Shakespeare’s artistic development in, against, and beyond collaboration. We see him afresh as a poetic innovator in continual flux, and in continual artistic debt: an author shaped by others in a collaborative network of intellectual influence and dynamic interchange, and, the book argues, one that he helped substantially to create. In considering collaboration as a practice defining almost all of his earliest works, it shows that he was particularly active in its development in the early theatre scene of his nascent career, changing our sense of his development as a creative artist quite radically. Chapters exploring collaboration via theatre history, book history, and attribution debates complement the central three chapters detailing the different phases of Shakespeare’s collaborative work, which reorient our shifting sense of what it meant to him, and what he gained from it, at these other key moments of his artistic career. In reconstructing the circumstances and outcomes of his pairings with other dramatists, and scrutinizing more closely their artistic contributions, Shakespeare and Collaborative Writing reconsiders the ways in which they influenced and challenged him to adapt and experiment with his writing in ways that go beyond the features of his solo-authored canon. In undertaking a rigorous appreciation of the structures and poetics of his co-authored works, this book presents them as distinctive works of art that transform our understanding of Shakespeare the poet, dramatist, and enduring cultural icon.

Will Sharpe, Teaching Fellow in Shakespeare, The University of Birmingham

Will Sharpe is a full-time Teaching Fellow in Shakespeare at the University of Birmingham, and has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Universities of Warwick and Leeds. He contributed a monograph-length study on ’Authorship and Attribution’ to the RSC volume William Shakespeare and Others: Collaborative Plays (2013), and edited All Is True: Or, King Henry VIII for The New Oxford Shakespeare (2016). He is a revising editor of the updated Oxford Companion to Shakespeare (2015), and is editing 3 Henry VI for the Arden 4 Shakespeare Series. He is also one of the General Editors of Digital Renaissance Editions.