Let us begin with a discussion of Shakespeare’s artistic output during his lifetime. Strolling through any bookstore, it is not hard to see that Shakespeare’s plays are, in what we shall see is a modern idea of authorial ownership, attributed to him alone. While this is a nice fiction, and one that certainly contributes to the myth of Shakespeare-as-demigod, the truth of the matter is that Shakespeare’s works were often composed in collaboration with other playwrights. As Frank Kermode notes, playwrights in Shakespeare’s day “often worked in haste, and with collaborators—occasionally a different writer for each of the five different acts of a play” (5). This is perhaps unsurprising, as “theaters were owned mostly by men who formed companies…not wholly unlike…craft guilds,” and that these guild men “commissioned the plays, [and] owned them” (5 my italics). …show more content…
This way, collaboration posed no threat to any idea of authorial intent, because such an idea did not exist. Despite the widespread practice of collaboration, some of the most firmly established plays of Shakespeare’s canon—1 Henry IV, Titus Andronicus, Henry VIII, Timon of Athens, Measure for Measure, and even Macbeth—have surprisingly only recently come to be suspected collaborations (Jowett 17). An accurate catalogue of Shakespeare’s works ought necessarily to address the issue of collaboration and attribute shared-authorship where it is due. As our thought experiment of the bookstore demonstrates, this is currently not the