Joint Enterprises: Collaborative Drama and the Institutionalization of the English Renaissance Theater (review)

Heather Anne Hirschfeld's Joint Enterprises explores the dynamics of collaborative authorship on the Stuart stages. She is in search of "the implications of combined work" (3), in particular the "professional as well as psychic investments" that authors made in writing together (153). Joint Enterprises begins with two introductory chapters. The first provides an overview of critical work on collaborative playwriting, and Hirschfeld makes the point here that most thought on joint playwriting tends to "rely on a deliberately broad definition of collaboration" (2), a tendency she aims to correct through a more particularized scrutiny of the material and psychological conditions that enable such collaborations and are unleashed by them. In the second chapter, Hirschfeld sets a cultural context for her book by pointing to a rhetoric of style in the period through which playwrights sought to differentiate themselves from each other, a move toward individuation that will of course come under stress in acts of joint authorship.

In four subsequent chapters, Hirschfeld provides the case studies from which she hopes to establish some new principles for approaches to collaborative authorship. In a chapter on Westward Hoe, Eastward Hoe, and Northward Hoe, she provides an ingenious reading of the complicated authorial dynamics at work in these plays, in particular in Eastward Hoe. Her reading of the play has two main components: first, she argues that Chapman, Jonson, and Marston were threatened by Webster and Dekker bringing a collaboratively authored play (Westward Hoe) into the private theater milieu, which, the book claims, had traditionally been a site dedicated to sole authorship. Second, Hirschfeld suggests that at the same time as the Eastward Hoe authors responded to this threat by satirizing Westward Hoe, they also sought to submerge their own signature styles in composing this play in order to prevent any one of them from have their own style stolen, or otherwise losing control over their own voice. This second argument is bolstered by a nice reading of the play as persistently concerned with various forms of loss. A chapter on Fletcher and Shakespeare's Two Noble Kinsmen and Beaumont and Fletcher's The Maid's Tragedy follows, in which Hirschfeld argues that these dramatists were suspicious of emerging forms of "court revelry" (53), and thus incorporate masque elements into their joint compositions as a means of expressing skepticism toward the masque form and the kinds of privileged "identification and distinction" (77) it involves.

Hirschfeld's chapter on Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling provides a compelling reading of the aggressive appropriation of language in the play, by which characters betray one another through a perversion of each other's speech. Hirschfeld in this chapter sketches out a theory of Renaissance friendship in which Middleton and Rowley's own relationship might fit. The close readings here are adept and convincing, but her suggestion that the play's themes of perverted communication should "be understood as the precise opposite of Middleton and Rowley's friendly joint work" (117), which itself stands against the false fellowship of courtly relationships, falls flat. The connections Hirschfeld claims between the play, period discourses on friendship, and Middleton and Rowley's professional partnership feel strained, and the result is some good commentary on The Changeling that is adrift in the waves of a tenuous larger argument.

This trend continues somewhat in a chapter on Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome's The Late Lancashire Witches. Even more so than in her work with The Changeling, Hirschfeld here delivers a masterly close reading of this play, full of fine insights about its indeterminate stance toward witchcraft. This chapter will be valuable to anyone interested in these authors, discourses and representations of magic and witchcraft in the period, as well as those concerned with so called "journalistic" plays. However, the larger implications of joint authorship that Hirschfeld sees here — she claims...