Joint Enterprises

by Hirschfeld, Heather Anne

• ISBN13: 9781558494343
• ISBN10: 1558494340
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-02-01
• Publisher: Univ of Massachusetts Pr

Summary

Explores the phenomenon of joint authorship among playwrights in seventeenth-century England Over half of the plays of the English Renaissance were written collaboratively --by multiple dramatists working together. Joint Enterprises examines this kind of dramatic production, charting its social and professional significance as a historically embedded but personally inflected creative phenomenon. By situating individual joint works such as Eastward Hoe, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and The Changeling in specific institutional contexts, Heather Hirschfeld explores the diverse motivations driving dramatic collaborations, traces the distinct writerly relationships that developed from such energies, and analyzes their rhetorical effects in individual plays. Drawing on a range of documentary and literary sources as well as recent methodological advances in theater history, the book presents a sequence of case studies designed to accommodate both the larger cultural setting of the early modern theater and the localized, idiosyncratic factors influencing discrete literary pr

Author Biography

Heather Anne Hirschfeld is assistant professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
INTRODUCTION Cases of Collaborative Production	1	(15)
CHAPTER ONE Scenes of Collaborative Production	16	(13)
CHAPTER TWO "Work upon that now"	29	(23)
Collaborative Labor and Loss in the Hoe Plays
CHAPTER THREE Beaumont, Fletcher, and Shakespeare	52	(37)
Collaborative Drama, the Stuart Masque, and the Politics of Identification
CHAPTER FOUR The Changeling and the Perversion of Fellowship	89	(29)
CHAPTER FIVE The Late Lancashire Witches and Joint Work across Generations	118	(27)
CONCLUSION Companies in Collaboration	145	(10)
Notes	155	(22)
Selected Bibliography	177	(20)
Index	197