COLLABORATION

A study of the politics of the reign of Elizabeth I, the creation of Her Majesty's Secret Service and the Department of Propaganda, reveals that the English history plays, based on a revised version of Holinshed's chronicles (commissioned by secretary of state William Cecil, principal minister to the queen) were written and produced for the purpose of disseminating pro-Tudor propaganda and rallying the tax-paying public to support an expected war with Spain. It is important to note that these plays were granted licenses to be performed throughout all of Her Majesty's realm.

Were a group of dramatists brought together for the express purpose of creating these history plays?

Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, ran a literary academy at her estate in Wiltshire where the highly-educated commoners known as The University Wits came to perfect their writing skills. The work produced by these writers is a testament to the brilliance of the English Renaissance:  Abraham Fraunce, Nicholas Breton, Henry Constable, Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, Edward Dyer, Fulke Greville, Gabriel Harvey, Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, Walter Ralegh, Hugh Sanford, Edmund Spenser, and Thomas Watson. (Ben Jonson was also present. Although he lacked a university education, Jonson became one of the most learned men of Elizabethan England.)

At Court
In The Arte of English Poesie, Puttenham wrote: "And in her Majesties time that now are sprong up another crew of her Majesties owne servauntes, who have written excellently well as it would appeare if their doings could be found out and made publicke with the rest, of which number is first that noble Gentleman Edward Earle of Oxford, Thomas Lord Buckhurst, when he was young, Henry Lord Paget, Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Walter Rawleigh [Ralegh], Master Edward Dyar[Dyer], Master Fulke Grevell [Greville], Gascon [George Gascoigne], Britton [Nicholas Breton], [George] Turberville and a great many other learned Gentlemen..." (As was the custom of the time, Puttenham listed these men by order of their social rank.)

. . .and Others
Arguments can be made for the contribution to the canon of others as well. There are more writers--many of considerable literary talents--not mentioned above: Richard Barnfield, George Chapman, Thomas Dekker, John (Giovanni) Florio, Robert Greene, Thomas Heywood, Thomas Lodge, George Peele, the Countess of Pembroke (Mary Sidney Herbert), John Lyly, Thomas Nashe, the Earl of Rutland (Roger Manners), John Marston, and John Webster.

Was the work of a number of Elizabethan poet-dramatists--some writing alone, others writing in collaboration (as in a contemporary theatre workshop)--collected and subsequently published under the name William Shakespeare?

The poet Michael Drayton, who we are told (anecdotally) dined with Shakespeare and Ben Jonson shortly before Jonson's death, furnishes us with an intimate literary discourse upon the poets and dramatists of his time. He devotes a separate stanza to each of them. While he lauds Marlowe highly:

. . . Marlowe bathed in the Thespian springs,
Had in him those brave translunary things
That the first poets had: his raptures were
All air, and fire, and made his verses dear
For that fine madness still he did retain
Which rightly should possess a poet’s brain.
Of Shakespeare he had faint praise:
. . . And be it said of thee,
Shakespeare, thou had as smooth a comic vein
Fitting the sock, and in thy natural brain
As strong conception, and as clear a rage,
As anyone that trafficked with the stage.
He closes his verse by telling us that there were other poets of merit who in secret chambers wrote for the stage and sent their plays forth only by transcription.
. . . But if you shall
Say in your knowledge: that these be not all
Here writ in numbers, be informed that I
Only myself to these few men do tie
Whose works oft pointed at, set on every post,
To public censures have been most.
For such poems, be they ne’er so rare,
In private chambers that encloister’d are,
And by transcriptions daintly must go,
As though the world unworthy were to know
Their rich composures, let those men that keep
These wondrous relics in their judgement deep
And cry them up so . . . let such pieces be
Spoke of by those that shall come after me.
I pass not for them, nor do mean to run
In quest of these, that them applause have won
Upon our stage in these latter days.

FORUM AND BIBLIOGRAPHY