'As this new book expertly shows, [Shakespeare] did not write alone. Shakespeare's borrowed feathers is less about the "upstart crow" who upset the gossipy, close-knit world of Elizabethan theatre, and more about those other writers whose influence, rivalry and collaboration shaped the canon we attribute to Shakespeare solo.'
Emma Smith, The Telegraph
'Persuasive and precise, this exceptionally well-researched book is an invaluable addition to scholarship that examines how literary collaborations shaped the modern Shakespeare canon.'
Kirkus Reviews
'Freebury-Jones’s detailed evidence builds towards an argument that the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatrical world was a community of writers who were acquaintances, rivals and hired journeymen, and that they freely borrowed “feathers” from each other in openly intertextual fashion [...] Freebury-Jones provides at the beginning of each chapter entertaining pen-portraits of a motley range of personalities.'
Robert White, Inside Story
‘Once in a generation a book comes along that sends a shockwave through the literary world, dramatically rewriting our understanding of Shakespeare. This masterpiece of scholarly detective-work allows us to see how the Bard we know was shaped by very human impulses: admiration, envy, the hunger for success, the spirit of cooperation or simply the inability to get a phrase from a rival’s play out of his head. To read this game-changing book is to see Shakespeare and his milieu with new eyes. A stunning contribution to the field that I cannot recommend highly enough!’
Chris Laoutaris, author of Shakespeare's Book: The Intertwined Lives behind the First Folio
‘Shakespeare's borrowed feathers tackles the most polarising questions of early modern drama with authority, dexterity and style. This intimate portrait of Shakespeare's creative community gives the most familiar plays, players and playwrights new life.’
M. L. Rio, author of If We Were Villains
‘Solitary genius? Thieving magpie? We live in copyright times, obsessed with Best. Freebury-Jones explores Shakespeare’s world, where playwrights collaborated with, borrowed from and were influenced by each other. How exciting for actors nowadays to be reminded that “The play’s the thing”. Not authorship or provenance but Story-Power.’
Bruce Alexander, actor
‘A marvellous guide that provides a window into the dramatic culture that Shakespeare inherited, absorbed and shaped, showing how his experience as an actor determined the course of his writing career.’
Andrew Hadfield, author of Thomas Nashe and Late Elizabethan Writing
‘Darren Freebury-Jones attempts the impossible and pulls off the necessary. Both summative and innovative, this book accounts for where Shakespeare attribution studies are today while showing us where they are going tomorrow. It turns out that Shakespeare feathered his nest with borrowed plumes and, in so doing, became a full-fledged playwright.’
Paul Menzer, author of Shakespeare without Print
‘Darren Freebury-Jones has written a lively and refreshingly good-tempered account of a notoriously complex subject which, like everything to do with Shakespeare, has become something of a scholarly minefield. No reader will agree with all of it, but it is good to have the facts and arguments laid out in a clear and comprehensible way.’
Lois Potter, author of The Life of William Shakespeare: A Critical Biography
‘A weighty study, rich with insight, that helps us see Shakespeare not as a sacred solitary genius but as a powerfully responsive writer among other writers. Darren Freebury-Jones draws hitherto unrelated plays into striking new relationship with one another. You won’t look at early modern drama in the same way again.’
Will Tosh, author of Straight Acting: The Many Queer Lives of William Shakespeare
‘Shakespeare's borrowed feathers provides a lively, accessible reassessment of Shakespeare's authorship, using new tools to intervene in long-standing debates. The book contributes to the growing evidence in support of seeing Shakespeare as a borrower and not just a lender, part of an intricate and well-balanced ecosystem of writers collaborating with and learning from one another.’
Pascale Aebischer, author of Viral Shakespeare: Performance in the Time of Pandemic
‘A remarkable achievement, placing Shakespeare fairly and squarely in the context of his time. His preeminence means that we tend to view him in splendid isolation, but this highly readable survey skilfully shows that he was in fact at the centre of a dizzying nexus of theatrical talents.’
Christopher Luscombe, theatre director
2024-08-13
A British scholar shows how the Bard’s works are embedded in a network within the English early modern dramatic scene.
Shakespeare scholars have long perpetuated the idea—first set forth by Shakespeare’s First Folio editors—that the Bard was sui generis: a literary unicorn. In this book, Freebury-Jones posits that, while Shakespeare was a supremely gifted writer, he also engaged in various acts of literary “borrowing” that go beyond the occasional lifting of phrases from the works of his contemporaries. He arrives at his conclusion not only by considering relationships Shakespeare had with fellow actors, playwrights, and theater company managers, but also by using a textual database called Collocations and N-grams, which contains over 527 plays from 1552 to 1657. As he discusses Shakespeare’s connection to well-known contemporaries like Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe and lesser-known ones like George Peele, Freebury-Jones mines this database—which allows users to track continuous word sequences (collocations) between plays—to uncover phrases that connect various playwrights, but also to speculate on the true extent of Shakespeare’s indebtedness to his peers. For example, the author suggests that the playwright made liberal use of such Kydian dramatic devices as the play-within-a-play and also drew far more heavily on Kydian language in plays likeRichard III than most scholars have believed. This evidence, combined with such historical “knowns” as the way Elizabethan playwrights imitated and collaborated with each other, adds to Freebury-Jones’ compelling theory that Shakespeare’s plays are the dialogic artifacts of a greater artistic community, rather than the brilliant “soliloquies” of an isolated genius. Persuasive and precise, this exceptionally well-researched book is an invaluable addition to scholarship that examines how literary collaborations shaped the modern Shakespeare canon.
Digital scholarship at its best.
