William Shakespeare & Others: Collaborative Plays. Edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen.

Oh the apocrypha, the elusive teasing Shakespeare apocrypha, plays which somewhere along the line, either because a publisher ambiguously slapped some initials on a title page or wedged new texts into a reprint of the Folio edition and may, or is most often the case, may not contain the words of one of literature’s great geniuses. Or the anonymous plays which critical and theatrical tradition has been suggested to have a glancing connection with him. Or the works, solidly attributed to someone else, but which may still contain his hand in later additions. It’s got to the point where you can’t definitely say how many plays are in Shakespeare’s canon any more.

Which is the point of the multiple authored William Shakespeare & Others: Collaborative Plays. Having produced their sumptuous “complete works” a few years ago based on the First Folio, the RSC in a companion volume, turns its attention towards everything else, the list of plays that show signs of Shakespeare attention, in a couple of speeches, odd scenes or through later adaptation, once again highlighting that he wasn’t a man who worked alone and utilising centuries of literary criticism attempts an arbitration as to what should be considered canonical and what has been simple wishful thinking and then producing properly edited versions of those considered worthy enough.

Jonathan Bates’s general introduction introduces the concept of Shakespeare’s canon and then offers a brief history of the apocrypha which is in general the result of the good faith of critics desperate to increase Shakespeare’s canon and printers who in bad faith and greed were desperate to do the same. Literary criticism has changed markedly over time. In the past, whole texts would be dismissed as being unworthy of Shakespeare with little regard for outside evidence especially if they were collaborative and only relatively recently has the “problem” been considered more scientifically or dispassionately, with a more evidentiary approach to these works relying heavily on biographical knowledge and textual comparison.

The majority of the volume contains the selected plays and there are a few surprises or at least seem so until Will Sharpe’s section on Authorship and Attribution explains some of their workings out. The proof copy I was sent to review only contains Arden of Faversham, The Spanish Tragedy and Sir Thomas Moore, all of which are now pretty much assumed to have had Shakespeare’s hand in them somehow, however minimally and all are treated with the same care and attention in the complete works with an introduction covering the play’s themes and key facts boxes containing a synopsis, summary of authorship, creation date, sources and publication history followed by textual notes.

But undoubtedly the most compelling section of the volume is Sharpe’s as the methodology of textual analysis is investigated before explanations are given for the inclusion of each of the plays in the volume, with justifications for omissions included as an epilogue. In what must have been a superhuman task, the writer must have read through dozens of volumes, acres of print as forces for an against passages and plays fought with each other across time, usually directly criticising each other’s ignorance about what constitutes Shakespeare and whether a play under consideration fits within their criteria. Speeches, lines, even individual words have been scrutinised to the point where the dramatic elements of these dramas almost becomes beside the point.

Of those chosen, some plays feel like a given: Arden of Faversham, Edward III, Sir Thomas Moore and most lately The Spanish Tragedy 1602 and Double Falsehood. Locrine with its teasing W.S. on its printed title page is included because there simply isn’t enough evidence that those initials don’t mean William Shakespeare. Thomas Lord Cromwell is utilised as an example of the collaborative nature of theatre companies, Shakespeare possibly having been in the room when it was written. The London Prodigal and A Yorkshire Tragedy are both atypical but contain passages of a literary complexity, which might betray his presence. The new outlier is Mucedorus which computer analysis has thrust into the limelight after years of dismissal.

Between the lines, the background theme, and this is especially true of the omitted plays, is that once a work, especially an anonymous work, has been thrown out of Shakespeare’s orbit, there’s little appetite in discovering who the author actually might be, which is another example of the inbuilt snobbery which overhangs Shakespeare’s contemporaries whose work has become eclipsed by Shakespeare across the years. No serious textual analysis has been done on Thomas Lord Cromwell other than to disprove Shakespeare’s involvement and though it’s not widely considered to be a “great” play, it could be an important part of another author’s story, but because the world’s not interested in other author’s stories, we might not ever know.

This is frustrating. If there’s a greatest theme to the book it is that Shakespeare should never be viewed in isolation and that, because he did collaborate with is contemporaries, it’s important to pay attention to the great worth of those contemporaries. The shift in complexity in his plays in the Jacobian period wasn’t some whim but a reaction to the changing tastes of the market with the likes of Measure for Measure his attempt to create his own version of the city dramas being produced by Dekker, Fletcher, Jonson and the rest. But their work is so little produced (because of a self-perpetuating disinterest) that someone approaching these aspects of Shakespeare’s career for the first time will find them someone alien (as I did at school).

The volume ends with Peter Kirwan interviewing theatre professionals about the challenges of producing these plays and the extent to which Shakespeare’s potential authorship effects their work. For the most part the answer is simply that it doesn’t, that it’s about serving the story and characters and themes and that it’s generally left to the marketing department to decide on the extent to which they want to highlight the connection. But there is some recognition that they’re pioneers because most of the audience will be seeing these plays for the first time unaware of the story and characters and themes. Perhaps the best legacy for this volume would be for that to change.

William Shakespeare & Others: Collaborative Plays. Edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen. Published by Palgrave Macmillan. RRP: £25.00. ISBN-13: 978-1137271440. Out now. Review copy supplied.

Sir Thomas More (The Arden Shakespeare). Edited by John Jowett.

The Arden Shakespeare’s rattling of the canonical cage continues with this enthralling publication of Sir Thomas More, the collaborative play for which only a few passages have critically been attributed to the bard and because of which, thanks to its extant manuscript at the British Library, we’re apparently able to see Shakespeare’s handwriting. Editor John Jowett offers sound reasoning for the imprint’s inclusion of what was for quite some time considered to be Apocrypha. That thanks to modern textual analysis, consensus seems to be moving towards the idea that sole authorship of most texts was anathema to Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights and that of Pericles nestles comfortably in most complete works why should this play be excluded just because Shakespeare’s contribution was considerably smaller?

As with similar Arden editions of collaborative texts, much of the introduction and appendices dedicate themselves to the business of attributing passages to particular authors and explaining the impact that has on the presentation of the included text. This play is unusual because unlike any of Shakespeare’s other works the only contemporaneous text available is the manuscript, which means that the analysis has as much basis in following the handwriting as the content of the words. Said manuscript is also a bit of a mongrel, comprising of an “original text”, a first version of the play written out for submission to Edmund Tilney the master of revels for approval, the Elizabethan BBFC, and then a series of later revisions and additions by a series of other hands including, the critical corpus generally agrees, Shakespeare.

As well as Shakespeare, the primary authors as best can be determined were chiefly anti-Catholic spy-hunter Anthony Munday plus Henry Chettle, Thomas Dekker and Thomas Heywood with addition emendations attributable to Edmund Tilney and the mysterious Hand C, an anonymous playwright who prepared the text for performance, if such a performance took place (no evidence exists but circumstantial evidence within the stage directions indicate they must represent a particular staging environment). Jowett offers biographies of varying complexities for them all and its in these passages that we most understand the world within which such a manuscript could be created with various acting groups competing against one another, manuscripts passed about and edited or amended to suite the needs of production.

The process is analogous the rewrite process most major films are subject to and it’s impossible not to think of Shakespeare in these circumstances as a kind of William Goldman or Emma Thompson figure, brought into punch up an important speech within the play. As the title suggests, Sir Thomas More dramatises the rise and fall of the Lord Chancellor to Henry VIII and author of Utopia, the philosophical mediation on society. Shakespeare’s contribution is to a scene in which More persuades a group of apprentices unhappy because foreign workers are taking over their trades from taking violent action, a critical moment in the action of the play and development of More’s character in demonstrating his ability to combine intellectual rigour with an ability to communicate with the masses without patronising them.

In preparing the text, Jowett (who is series editor on Arden's new Early Modern Drama series) has followed the lead of previous editors of the Third Edition in employing extensive punctuation marks, diagrammatic components and multiple fonts to indicate the author of the particular section of text we’re reading with footnotes explaining editorial decisions. It is not complete. Words and lines are missing because they’re illegible in the original manuscript thanks to mistreatment and age and some areas have enough gaps that the action almost becomes incomprehensible. But it’s to Jowett’s credit that though in some cases he’s attempted some educated guesses of a few words (and indicated as such) he has left them blank to demonstrate that this is an organic document that more than any of Shakespeare’s plays needs the eye of a director and the capabilities of actors to make it comprehensible to audiences.

The production and editorial histories of the play are closely intertwined, with the former only really becoming viable when editorial copies of the plays first became available at the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1956 BBC Radio presented the play as part of a series called ‘Shakespeare Apocrypha’ with Michael Horden in the title role and in general, despite prominent productions with Sir Ian McKellan, firstly in a 1964 Nottingham Playhouse production and twenty years later for BBC Radio, that’s generally how its been viewed both on stage and in print. There have been serious attempts recently to rehabilitate the play both at the RSC and the Globe however and this brilliant Arden edition will definitely help. It’ll be interesting to see if plays with even fringier claims to canonicity, like Arden of Faversham, will be championed in the future.

Sir Thomas More (The Arden Shakespeare) edited by John Jowett is published by Methuen Drama. £65.00 hardback, £16.99 paperback. ISBN: 978-1904271482. Review copy supplied.