An attempt to portray Shakespeare as a dramatist developing his craft by learning from, collaborating with, and sometimes borrowing from other dramatists of his time.
The title refers to the 'Upstart Crow' gibe by Robert Greene in which someone called 'Shake-scene' is described as "an upstart crow beautified with our feathers".
There sometimes seems to be a belief that Shakespeare was a genius so unique that he, unlike every other great writer, never had to learn from others. This does a disservice to other great playwrights of the time who have been so overshadowed that they stand in danger of being forgotten. Maybe, it is conceded, Christopher Marlowe wrote some interesting stuff as Shakespeare was just getting going perhaps Ben Jonson penned some amusing plays. But Shakespeare ...
There is no doubt that Shakespeare was a box office draw and he is one of the very few writers of the time who escaped an early death in poverty. But he was not the only writer of best-sellers. The crowds flocked to see not only Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus but also Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy and Robert Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. This book even suggests that Shakespeare wrote The Contention between York and Lancaster’ and ‘The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York’ (now known as Henry VI parts 2 and 3) in response to the smash hit 'Harey the vi' and that later. when his company got its hands on the rights for that play, he revised it, adding a few scenes, and presented it as the first part of his Henry VI trilogy.
This book uses textual similarities to establish whether and to what extent Shakespeare was influenced by earlier writers. It suggests that his bombastic characters such as Don Armado in Love's Labour's Lost and Falstaff in Henry IV (1 and 2) and Merry Wives were inspired by the style in which John Lyly wrote his best-selling prose romances 'Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit' (1578) and 'Euphues and His England' (1580). There are echoes of Marlowe's 'The Jew of Malta' and 'Edward II' in Shakespeare's Shylock and Richard II. George Peele worked with Shakespeare on Titus Andronicus and John Fletcher on Henry VIII (All if True) and The Two Noble Gentlemen.
But the biggest influence may be that of Thomas Kyd. Hamlet contains a number of echoes of Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, including a ghost, a character called Horatio, and a play within a play. Kyd might also have been the author of King Leir, the original for Shakespeare's Lear, and for an ur-Hamlet which has now been lost.
The arguments that Freebury-Jones use make extensive use of similar words and phrases that occur in different plays, the suggestion being that Shakespeare the actor remembered these when writing. I didn't find this evidence especially convincing. More interesting was the percentages of things such as 'feminine' endings (iambic pentameter lines that have an extra, eleventh, syllable added, as in "To be or not to be, that is the question"): Shakespeare's used a far higher percentage of such lines than most dramatists of the time, especially Marlowe. Other stylistic differences included the percentage of lines that rhyme and the amount of 'end-stopping' (rather than enjambment).
I would have liked to learn more about these but this information wasn't presented in a consistent way which made it hard for a general reader like myself to decide whether the case had been made for influence, or collaboration, or sole authorship.
It was a fascinating introduction to a group of playwrights whose work deserves better recognition. I have seen and enjoyed both The Spanish Tragedy and Thomas Middleton's The Changeling but there are lots of other plays that need performing.
April 2025; 205 pages
Published by Manchester University Press in 2024
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