SHAKESPEARE'S BORROWED FEATHERS

A British scholar shows how the Bard’s works are embedded in a network within the English early modern dramatic scene.

Shakespeare scholars have long perpetuated the idea—first set forth by Shakespeare’s First Folio editors—that the Bard was sui generis: a literary unicorn. In this book, Freebury-Jones posits that, while Shakespeare was a supremely gifted writer, he also engaged in various acts of literary “borrowing” that go beyond the occasional lifting of phrases from the works of his contemporaries. He arrives at his conclusion not only by considering relationships Shakespeare had with fellow actors, playwrights, and theater company managers, but also by using a textual database called Collocations and N-grams, which contains over 527 plays from 1552 to 1657. As he discusses Shakespeare’s connection to well-known contemporaries like Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe and lesser-known ones like George Peele, Freebury-Jones mines this database—which allows users to track continuous word sequences (collocations) between plays—to uncover phrases that connect various playwrights, but also to speculate on the true extent of Shakespeare’s indebtedness to his peers. For example, the author suggests that the playwright made liberal use of such Kydian dramatic devices as the play-within-a-play and also drew far more heavily on Kydian language in plays like Richard III than most scholars have believed. This evidence, combined with such historical “knowns” as the way Elizabethan playwrights imitated and collaborated with each other, adds to Freebury-Jones’ compelling theory that Shakespeare’s plays are the dialogic artifacts of a greater artistic community, rather than the brilliant “soliloquies” of an isolated genius. Persuasive and precise, this exceptionally well-researched book is an invaluable addition to scholarship that examines how literary collaborations shaped the modern Shakespeare canon.

Digital scholarship at its best.