Joint Enterprises: Collaborative Drama and the Institutionalization of the English Renaissance Theater

by Heather Anne Hirschfeld

Overview

Over half of the plays of the English Renaissance were written collaboratively—by multiple dramatists working together. Joint Enterprises examines this kind of dramatic production, charting its social and professional significance as a historically embedded but personally inflected creative phenomenon. By situating individual joint works such as Eastward Hoe, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and The Changeling in specific institutional contexts, Heather Hirschfeld explores the diverse motivations driving dramatic collaborations, traces the distinct writerly relationships that developed from such energies, and analyzes their rhetorical effects in individual plays.

Drawing on a range of documentary and literary sources as well as recent methodological advances in theater history, the book presents a sequence of case studies designed to accommodate both the larger cultural setting of the early modern theater and the localized, idiosyncratic factors influencing discrete literary productions. Each chapter chronicles the professional setting of a particular joint work and then investigates its rhetorical or linguistic traces in the resultant text. This approach allows Hirschfeld to locate specific links between modes of collaborative production and forms of dramatic representation and then explicate the literary and political implications of these connections.

Hirschfeld's case studies provide a fresh account of the institutionalization—the steady growth, organization, and incorporation—of the professional drama in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English cultural life. By attending to the changing shapes and stakes of joint enterprises, she shows that dramatists did not unconsciously absorb the practice of collaborative writing from general social discourses, but rather were aware of the material and symbolic significances of their work, meanings structured by the traditions of the developing professional theater and by the cultural pressures and anxieties attendant upon a new and often fragile institution.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781558494343
Publisher:	University of Massachusetts Press
Publication date:	02/18/2004
Series:	Massachusetts Studies in Early Modern Culture
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d)
Lexile:	1640L (what's this?)

About the Author

Heather Hirschfeld is assistant professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	ix
	Introduction: Cases of Collaborative Production	1
Chapter 1	Scenes of Collaborative Production	16
Chapter 2	"Work upon that now" Collaborative Labor and Loss in the Hoe Plays	29
Chapter 3	Beaumont, Fletcher, and Shakespeare: Collaborative Drama, the Stuart Masque, and the Politics of Identification	52
Chapter 4	The Changeling and the Perversion of Fellowship	89
Chapter 5	The Late Lancashire Witches and Joint Work across Generations	118
	Conclusion: Companies in Collaboration	145
	Notes	155
	Selected Bibliography	177
	Index	197

What People are Saying About This

Arthur F. Kinney

A groundbreaking book, as it aligns English playing companies and practices with the activities and organization of the London guilds and shows how collaborative efforts in writing plays drew on many of the growing economic practices in Elizabethan and Jacobean England.

Gordon McMullan

Very timely and in all sorts of ways highly impressive.... The book engages with two significant areas of research within the field of early modern drama studies — collaboration/ authorship on the one hand and friendship/ affect on the other — and offers significant new material to both.

Editorial Reviews

"Very timely and in all sorts of ways highly impressive. . . . The book engages with two significant areas of research within the field of early modern drama studies—collaboration/ authorship on the one hand and friendship/ affect on the other—and offers significant new material to both."—Gordon McMullān, King's College, London

"A groundbreaking book, as it aligns English playing companies and practices with the activities and organization of the London guilds and shows how collaborative efforts in writing plays drew on many of the growing economic practices in Elizabethan and Jacobean England."—Arthur F. Kinney, University of Massachusetts Amherst

"Moving fluidly between theoretical models, this is rich, sophisticated, and suggestive—Greenblattian cultural poetics interplay with Bourdieusian sociology, which in turn finds common ground with such positivist theatrical history as that of Gurr, Elliot, and Nelson."—Richard Dutton, Studies in English Literature

"This highly recommended book ranges from the contexts of staging to the psychology of collaboration and the personal and professional associations of dramatists."—Chronique

From the Publisher

This highly recommended book ranges from the contexts of staging to the psychology of collaboration and the personal and professional associations of dramatists.

Chronique

Moving fluidly between theoretical models, this is rich, sophisticated, and suggestive—Greenblattian cultural poetics interplay with Bourdieusian sociology, which in turn finds common ground with such positivist theatrical history as that of Gurr, Elliot, and Nelson.

Richard Dutton

The extent of professionalization and piece work if not assembly-line manufacture in the commercial drama of Shakespeare's age is well indicated by Heather Anne Hirschfeld in the admirably original and important study she calls Joint Enterprises.

Bibliotheque d'Humanisme et Ranaissance