‘Changed to another form’

Abstract

Abstract This article demonstrates how dramatic censorship in London's public theatres necessitated a kind of collaborative playwriting with extra-authorial labourers. In the playbook manuscript of Sir John van Olden Barnauelt, the Master of the Revels, Sir George Buc, and the playhouse scribe, Ralph Crane, engaged in a collaborative process that resulted in the most censored extant dramatic document of the early modern English theatres. The censorship is revealing of how political drama was interpreted by its first readers – it was Buc's exegetical interpretation of Barnauelt as anti-monarchical that led to his collaborative revisions and the play's restructuring. This style of censorship also has wider implications. If almost every play was read and revised by the Master of the Revels and perhaps edited by a scribe, then most early modern drama was collaboratively written.