Matt Ryan | Newcastle University
There are dozens of non-contemporary portraits of Shakespeare: rakish Shakespeares, heroic Shakespeares, brooding, unassuming, and courtly Shakespeares. Sometimes he’s bewigged; elsewhere, he sports an earring; here, he wears an immaculate doublet, there a worn-out tunic. Each of these portraits contributes to our ever-evolving interpretative relationship with England’s most famous dramatist. Across this four-hundred-year relationship, however, one trope has proved particularly resilient: Shakespeare as individual genius.
James Faed’s sumptuous nineteenth-century engraving vividly articulates this ideal. Sat at his desk, at work on a dog-eared manuscript, our hero is imagined in the throes of poetic invention. His cloak and hat hurriedly tossed aside, a book thrown open at his feet, this Shakespeare, we’re encouraged to imagine, has burst into his study to jot down his latest earth-shattering line. Lost in thought, he stares rapt into middle distance, quill suspended in mid-air. Entirely absorbed in his own imaginative world, alone and surrounded by bound volumes, this is a seductive snapshot of a solitary master in action. While this isolative version of Shakespeare’s creative approach has been challenged by several waves of scholarship, it still holds weight in some quarters. The recent work of Ben Higgins, Jennifer Young, Chris Laoutaris, and Will Sharpe has reapproached this debate with renewed zeal, and Darren Freebury-Jones’s Shakespeare’s Borrowed Feathers is another dazzling contribution to this growing movement in Shakespeare studies.
Authorship in the early modern period has long been understood as a collaborative enterprise. And Jeffrey Masten, Helen Smith, Gary Taylor, and Heather Hirschfield have, for at least the last fifty years, done much to excavate the tight-knit literary ecosystems of Elizabethan England. Writers lived and worked together; they begged, borrowed, and stole ideas from one another. Within the walls of the playhouse and the print shop, they built creative relationships with actors, theatre managers, printers, publishers, and booksellers. In this intimate and densely networked world, literary production can only be understood as the product of many hands. Despite this path-breaking work, however, there is still a frustrating reluctance among bardolaters to recognise that ‘Shakespeare was, like every other dramatist in the period, a borrower’.
Undeterred by the ‘acid-laced’ debates that swirl around Shakespeare’s collaborative practices, Freebury-Jones enters the fray armed with a methodology that is both exacting and empathetic. Grounded in innovative computational analysis, Borrowed Feathers pinpoints several startling linguistic, structural, and dramaturgical comparisons between Shakespeare and a sprawling cast of his peers. This meticulous, data-driven approach allows Freebury-Jones to draw back the curtain and reveal a new portrait of Shakespeare, one ‘embedded in a network of affiliation and indebtedness within the early modern writing scene’. Rendering Shakespeare this way returns him to the network of writers from which he emerged and encourages us to rethink his plays and the wider landscapes of early modern drama.
These networks were peopled by dozens of early modern creatives, and across the nine chapters of Borrowed Feathers, we get to meet to several of them. While Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and John Lyly are often considered part of Shakespeare’s orbit, Freebury-Jones ensures that the influence of John Fletcher, George Peele, Robert Greene, Thomas Dekker, John Marston, and Thomas Middleton is also recognised. Several of these interlocutors are given their own chapter, and this allows Freebury-Jones the space to excavate dozens of parallels that are firmly anchored in his analytical detective work. Before this journey begins, however, Borrowed Feathers sets the scene by immersing us in the dynamic and interconnected theatrical communities of early modern London.
When Shakespeare first arrived in the capital, he made a living as an actor. He seems to have trod the boards for the rest of his career, and Freebury-Jones reminds us that his time in the tiring would have seen our budding bard learn about different dramatic styles, shifts in taste, and the business of the theatre. The most compelling argument here, and one often overlooked, is the powerful impact mouthing the words of his contemporaries must have had on the young dramatist. Employed as an actor in a period that placed significant emphasis on ‘aural understanding’, Shakespeare would have had to retain lines for several roles at a time. Brought into close contact with a whole universe of verse cadences, dramatic devices, images, and plot points, this was surely an invaluable experience for the magpie-eyed playwright, allowing him to transform what he picked up into his own work. This practice of hoarding and recycling textual snippets was a rhetorical strategy hammered into every early modern schoolboy. And so, Freebury-Jones argues, the dramatists discussed in Borrowed Feathers were – consciously or not – forever gobbling up and reusing one another’s work. This created a dramatic corpus full of the ghostly voices of past dramatists; voices channelled with new force by their peers.
Sensitive to the varied and multi-layered impact of being enmeshed in such an intricately networked world, Freebury-Jones’ data-driven methodology allows us to hear these voices more clearly. At the centre of this approach is Pervez Rizvi’s Collocations and N-grams, a database of 527 plays dated between 1552 and 1675. Rizvi’s database records which word sequences (or n-grams) are shared between dramatic texts and contains numerical data on which plays share verbal similarities ‘according to such factors as common authorship, chronology, genre, and influence’. Analytical evidence drawn from this database forms the backbone of Borrowed Feathers and the depth and clarity of this data leads Freebury-Jones to reshape long-held assumptions about Shakespeare and his collaborators.
One such assumption is the relative importance of Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd to Shakespeare’s legacy. By far the more (in)famous of the two, Marlowe often takes top billing, and plenty of ink has been spilt about his influence on the younger dramatist. For instance, Park Honan’s Christopher Marlowe: Poet & Spy (2005) refers to their relationship as ‘collusive,’ and a few years earlier, Harold Bloom scoffed that Shakespeare served a ‘seven-year apprenticeship’ under Marlowe. More recently, Marlowe has been held up by the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016) as co-author of Shakespeare’s Henry VI trilogy. Borrowed Feathers does not deny the impact Marlowe had on Shakespeare but uses data from Collocations to apply a ‘healthy sprinkle of sodium’ to these claims. Taking issue with the computational approach favoured by the editorial team behind the New Oxford Shakespeare, Freebury-Jones uses his own analytical data to demonstrate that Shakespeare’s verse in the Henry VI plays is in fact ‘significantly different’ from the style favoured in Marlowe’s extant work.
Freebury-Jones may ruffle some feathers with the argument that Marlowe’s influence on Shakespeare has been overplayed, and a few more might shake loose at the suggestion that Thomas Kyd’s role in his career has been undercooked. That Kyd influenced Shakespeare is undeniable, but Borrowed Feathers suggests that ‘the extent of those influences has been severely underestimated’ in comparison to his relationship with Marlowe. Drawing our attention to their shared interest in structural innovations and self-conscious theatricality, Freebury-Jones suggests that it was Kyd who led the way in these areas across the 1580s and 90s. Alongside these dramaturgical observations, Borrowed Feathers also traces an intricate web of verbal connections in the work of Shakespeare and Kyd. These connections highlight the presence of Kyd’s Soliman and Perseda (1593) in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1593), The Comedy of Errors (c. 1593), and Othello (1602), and suggest that Shakespeare revised The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1592) after Kyd’s death in 1594. Freebury-Jones also reminds us that Henry VI pt.1, Hamlet and King Lear all drew from earlier staged iterations of these narratives, each likely written, in part at least, by Kyd. While Shakespeare undoubtedly owed much to contemporary celebrities like Marlowe, Robert Greene, and John Lyly, Borrowed Feathers contends that ‘the time has come’ to recognise that he was also indebted to Kyd.
Freebury-Jones’ most compelling contribution is his close focus on the specifics of dramatic collaboration. Often, whenever the question of co-authorship arises in discussions of Shakespeare’s work, he is positioned as ‘a hired man… who had found a niche for himself as a reformer of old plays’ (Bate and Rasmussen). Understood as a senior partner perfecting the work of his peers, this approach refuses to see that, at times in his career, Shakespeare would have been the student. It also rules out any consideration of simultaneous collaboration. In its chapters on Shakespeare’s work with George Peele and John Fletcher, Borrowed Feathers presents us with an alternative proposition: that these men wrote together, in a mutually beneficial relationship founded on trust. Teasing out evidence of each dramatist’s input, Freebury-Jones excavates how these men divided up scenes, balanced main- and sub-plots, and developed shared linguistic and structural patterns.
Borrowed Feathers is a bold book that uses an innovative analytical approach to challenge the ‘isolative discourse that still pervades some discussions of early modern drama today’. As Freebury-Jones concedes, it could have been done differently, and perhaps a thematic, or play-focused approach might have proved more flexible. Yet, the author-led structure of Borrowed Feathers is also its greatest strength, allowing Freebury-Jones to connect plays and playwrights in striking new ways. In the critical landscape of Shakespeare studies, authorship marks a territory criss-crossed by fierce boundary disputes. Breaking new ground here is no mean feat, but the weight of meticulous evidence Freebury-Jones brings to the table ensures that Borrowed Feathers does so with real authority.
Despite, or perhaps because of, the perilous terrain that encircles discussions of Shakespeare’s creative collaborations, this corner of early modern studies is one of the most well-trodden in literary history. Even James Faed couldn’t resist a return trip. A year after he created his portrait of Shakespeare, he produced another engraving, this time surrounding the dramatist with his contemporaries. Scattered across the room, this motley crew share seats, lean over one another, chatter among themselves, and look directly into one another’s eyes. Reimagining the isolated genius as part of a community of peers, Faed returns Shakespeare to where he came from. Borrowed Feathers stages a similar performance, taking another important step toward finally putting Shakespeare back in his place: as part of an intricate constellation of writers working with and drawing from one another.
Further Reading:
Ben Higgins, Shakespeare's Syndicate: The First Folio, its Publishers, and the Early Modern Book Trade (Oxford: OUP, 2022).
Chris Laoutaris, Shakespeare’s Book (Birmingham: William Collins, 2023).
Emma Smith, This is Shakespeare (Oxford: Penguin, 2019).
Heather Hirschfield, Joint Enterprises: Collaborative Drama and the Institutionalisation of English Renaissance Theatre (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004).
Jennifer Young, 'Reading Shakespeare Through Collaboration: Agency, Authority and Textual Space in Shakespearean Drama.' PhD Thesis. (London: Kings College London, 2013).
Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, authorship and sexualities in Renaissance drama (Cambridge: CUP, 1997).
Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen (eds) RSC William Shakespeare: Complete Works (London: Bloomsbury, 2022).
Will Sharpe, Shakespeare and Collaborative Writing (Birmingham: OUP, 2023).
Matt Ryan is an AHRC-funded PhD candidate at Newcastle University, researching the collaborative relationships between printers, publishers, booksellers and writers in Elizabethan England.
Twitter/X: @Heggledepeg