Contrary to the Romantic image of him as a solitary scribbler in a garret, William Shakespeare was a deeply collaborative artist. He wrote his plays for a particular theatre company, tailoring each part to the actor he knew would perform it. He began his career patching up old plays in the existing repertoire and ended it working in partnership with John Fletcher, his chosen successor as company playwright for the King’s Men. Never mind the Keatsian genius with fevered brow; a better comparison for early and late Shakespeare would be the team player banging out scripts in the golden age of Hollywood or, for that matter, in the quick forge and working-house of television sitcom or soap opera.
It is clear from the surviving account books of the theatre impresario Philip Henslowe that collaboration was the norm, solo authorship — which Shakespeare practised in the middle period of his career — the exception. Frequently we find Henslowe paying a few pounds to Master Dekker for the first and last acts, and a guinea apiece to Masters Chettle and Heywood for the middle sequence and the subplot.
In the case of our Will’s final two surviving plays, Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen, an array of sophisticated tests have shown conclusively which scenes were by Shakespeare and which by Fletcher. We all have little stylistic fingerprints, DNA patterns of linguistic behaviour. In solo-authored plays by Fletcher, the word ‘them’ is regularly abbreviated to ‘ ’em.’ In solo-authored plays by Shakespeare it is not. In the two collaborative plays, some scenes have ‘them’ and others have ‘ ’em.’ The distribution coincides with that of other differences, such as a Fletcherian preference for so-called feminine endings (iambic pentameter verse lines with an extra redundant syllable at the end).
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