Thinking about Collaboration

Abstract

When Henry VIII, or All Is True was staged at Shakespeare's Globe in London in May 2022, the production elicited a lukewarm review from Arifa Akbar in the Guardian. The theatre critic stated that "the play itself feels slightly disjointed, perhaps because it was not the Bard's work alone but a collaboration with John Fletcher. There is now the added authorial hand of Hannah Khalil, who edits the text to accentuate women's roles and adds some well-known lines from Shakespeare's other works. Where this should enrich the drama, it exposes its faultlines." Akbar's comment is revealing, and particularly so in the context of this issue's engagement with the varieties of early modern dramatic collaboration. It not only mentions several collaborative practices used in early modern theatre which are explored in the articles brought together for this special issue – co-authorship, adaptation and quotation, to name but three – but also reflects a profound unease towards collaboration in twenty-first-century culture. Henry VIII, Akbar infers, is an imbalanced play because Shakespeare wrote it with somebody else rather than by himself. Akbar also implies that the relationship between these two authors has to be hierarchical, with Shakespeare (aka the inevitably capitalised, solitary ‘Bard’) as the better and Fletcher as the lesser playwright, who is responsible for the play's alleged shortcomings. A similarly dismissive attitude towards Fletcher is reflected in the review's title, which refers to Henry VIII as ‘little-seen Shakespeare’ as a form of skewed advertisement (this is Shakespeare, but not as we know him),2 thus erasing Fletcher's co-authorship completely, only to eventually present his name by way of explaining the play's mediocrity. The review also suggests that the play's merit has been further reduced by Hannah Khalil's contemporary adaptation, which adds too much ‘wokeness’ (the accentuation of women's roles) as well as too much middle-class Shakespeare (the well-known lines recognisable for those who know their Shakespeare inside out). In short, the review relies on a hierarchy well established in (traditional) literary criticism: Shakespeare is the epitome of playwrighting, and his solo-authored plays are the gold standard of early modern English drama; his co-authored plays are diminished by the lesser dramatic ability of his collaborators (where Shakespeare is sprezzatura, Fletcher is learned rhetoric); adapters have even more limited authorial skills and, therefore, an adapted play is a ‘lesser’ play because of the adapter's ‘interference’. As Akbar's review showcases, the notion of dramatic co-authorship, especially Shakespeare's, is still routinely met with scepticism and disdain in public discourse. Rather than enriching a play, three cooks (Shakespeare, Fletcher, Khalil) have spoiled the broth.