Chapter 2 - Collaboration and Shakespeare’s Early Career

Summary

Recent scholarship has shown the increasing likelihood that Shakespeare’s very first work was collaborative, or at least that collaboration as a practice dominates his pre-1594 writing in ways that we are finally beginning to understand, something many chronologies of Shakespeare have failed to acknowledge satisfactorily. While the matter of firm dates for Shakespeare’s early work remains elusive, its collaborative nature must change both our conception of Shakespeare’s working practices in his early career as well as our sense of how collaborative writing may be better understood as part of his development as a literary and dramaturgical craftsman. This essay charts the various arguments for collaboration, canon, and chronology in Shakespeare’s early career, and proposes some ways of understanding how they map onto possible company affiliations in Shakespeare’s beginnings as a dramatist.