William Shakespeare's collaborations

• 1. Introduction

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  William Shakespeare's collaborations reveal a playwright who rarely worked entirely alone. Like most playwrights of his era, he revised older scripts and let others revise his own. Some of his surviving plays are joint efforts or later reworkings, and scholars still argue over exactly how many. In some cases, contemporaries recorded exactly who he worked with. In others, only modern scholarly methods have uncovered an unnamed second hand. Sometimes the identity of that other writer is firmly established. Sometimes it is a matter of scholarly consensus. Sometimes it remains genuinely unknown or disputed. Those disagreements now form their own field of study, one focused on figuring out who wrote what inside the plays credited to him. The pattern is not random. Most of these joint ventures cluster at two points in his working life. What made those two windows different, and which names keep turning up beside his?

• 2. Elizabethan Theatre's Collaborative Machine

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  William Jaggard, the printer who later assembled Shakespeare's First Folio, also published a collection called The Passionate Pilgrim under Shakespeare's name. Most of that collection, though, was written by other people entirely. That contradiction sums up the print trade Shakespeare worked within, one where authorship credits could not always be trusted. Scripts for the Elizabethan stage were often written quickly, and older scripts were revised again and again. In practice, the theatre worked more like a modern film production than like a lone poet at a desk. Collaboration was standard practice, not an exception, and the record of who wrote what has decayed as a result. That same uncertainty is why scholars now turn to computer analysis of word use and phrase patterns to sort one writer's hand from another's. A different set of names appears once that detective work turns to Shakespeare's earliest plays.

• 3. The Early Plays

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  Edward III appeared in print anonymously in 1596. It took sixty years before anyone connected it to Shakespeare, when a bookseller's catalogue named him as author in 1656. Modern scholars have pointed to passages that sound distinctly like his voice, sitting alongside stretches that read as flat and uninspired. Yale University Press became the first major publisher willing to put his name on the title page, releasing an edition of the play in 1996. By 2005, the Complete Oxford Shakespeare included the play too, crediting it to 'William Shakespeare and Others'. In 2009, the scholar Brian Vickers ran the text through a program originally built to catch plagiarism. He concluded that Shakespeare wrote roughly 40% of the play. Vickers assigned the rest to Thomas Kyd, who lived from 1558 to 1594.

  Henry VI, Part 1 raises the opposite problem, a play where Shakespeare may have written the smaller share. Some scholars argue his contribution comes to less than 20% of the text. Gary Taylor has argued that the first act belongs to Thomas Nashe instead. Paul J. Vincent goes further. He concludes that 1 Henry VI is Shakespeare's partial revision of an earlier play. In Vincent's account, Nashe wrote act one, and an unknown playwright wrote acts two through five. That original version was first staged in early 1592. On Vincent's reading, Shakespeare wrote act two, scene four. He also wrote act four, scenes two through five, plus the first 32 lines of scene seven. Vincent dates this contribution to 1594. Brian Vickers backs Vincent's case for Nashe's authorship of act one. But he credits the remaining acts to Thomas Kyd, not to an unknown writer.

  Titus Andronicus is generally treated as either a joint work with George Peele or a revision of an existing script by Peele. Sir Thomas More survives in a manuscript that includes a few pages in Shakespeare's own handwriting. The rest of the play was assembled mainly by Anthony Munday, along with other contributors.

  The Spanish Tragedy belongs indisputably to Thomas Kyd. But Thomas Pavier's 1602 edition added five new passages, 320 lines in total. The biggest addition is an entire scene built around Hieronimo talking to a painter, often called the painter scene. That scene was already circulating before Pavier's printing, since the playwright John Marston parodied it in his 1599 play, Antonio and Mellida. The five additions may date from a 1597 revival staged by the Admiral's Men. In 2013, the scholar Douglas Bruster compared spelling patterns in those additions with known samples of Shakespeare's handwriting. He concluded that Shakespeare had written them. Bruster attributed the passages' garbled state to how hard Shakespeare's handwriting was to read. A writer named George Wilkins appears next, credited with the opening acts of one particular play.

• 4. George Wilkins And Pericles

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  George Wilkins is credited with the opening two acts of Pericles, Prince of Tyre, according to most scholars who have studied the play. Shakespeare is credited with the final three acts. That two-act, three-act split leaves little of the uncertainty attached to some of Shakespeare's other collaborations. Four other plays connect Shakespeare to a different collaborator, the playwright Thomas Middleton.

• 5. Thomas Middleton's Revisions

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  Thomas Middleton appears to have added an entire scene to Macbeth, act three, scene five, centered on the goddess Hecate and the three witches. That scene includes a song that also appears in Middleton's own play, The Witch. Middleton is also thought to have inserted the Hecate passages found in act four, scene one. Measure for Measure may carry a lighter revision from Middleton too, added sometime after Shakespeare first wrote the play. As with Macbeth, the only surviving source for that text is the First Folio. Timon of Athens shows signs of the same partnership. Scholars point to Middleton to help explain the play's tangled plot and its unusually cynical tone. In 2012, Emma Smith and Laurie Maguire of Oxford University published research pointing to a fourth collaboration. Their work argues that All's Well That Ends Well was also shaped by both playwrights. A different playwright, John Fletcher, is tied to three more works, including one that survives only in report.

• 6. The Fletcher Plays

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  Cardenio survives only in contemporary reports, not in any known copy of the script itself. Those reports describe it as a joint work between Shakespeare and John Fletcher. Henry VIII is widely considered another Shakespeare-Fletcher collaboration. The Two Noble Kinsmen reached print in a 1634 quarto that names both Fletcher and Shakespeare on its title page. Each playwright appears to have written roughly half of the text. Unlike Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen was left out of the First Folio entirely. That exclusion means anyone reading only the First Folio would never learn that Fletcher had a hand in Shakespeare's work at all.