![]() ![]() The modern equivalent for the making of plays in the Renaissance is not a solitary George Bernard Shaw turning out Man and Superman but a team of writers and company of actors turning out skits for Saturday Night Live. Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher collaborated so often that “Beaumont” goes with “Fletcher” like “Rodgers” goes with “Hammerstein.”īeyond the collaboration of writer and writer was the input of the actors, whose rehearsal process (as we are discovering through our Actors’ Renaissance Season) made it unlikely that the play on stage entirely matched the script. At least five of Shakespeare’s plays were collaborations with other playwrights. (After his co-writers had been arrested, Jonson apparently turned himself in, either as act of unselfish comradeship or of prideful authorship.) Collaboration in the writing of plays, however, was nearer the rule than the exception to the way plays were made. The play is famously a joint project because its three writers ended up in prison for a scene in Act Three that the new King James thought disrespectful. George Chapman’s Bussy D’Amboise was one of the most celebrated plays of the miraculous heyday of English drama, and John Marston authored a number of other famous plays, among them The Malcontent, which was almost as popular as Hamlet. The most famous of these is Ben Jonson, who went on to write Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair. The play is a collaboration of three playwrights: George Chapman (1559-1634), Ben Jonson (1573-1637), and John Marston (1576-1634). Notes from the Executive Director go east to virginiaĮastward Ho! (1605) tells us a lot about the business of writing plays during Shakespeare’s heyday.
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