Shakespeare and His Contemporaries?

From Algernon Charles Swinburne’s The Age of Shakespeare (1908) and Contemporaries of Shakespeare (1919) to more recent studies like Jonathan Hart’s Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (2011), Warren Cherniak’s The Myth of Rome in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (2011), and Kevin Quarmby’s The Disguised Ruler in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (2012), “Shakespeare and his contemporaries” has been a persistent phrase in scholarly examinations of early modern dramaturgy.¹ It also permeates the modern academy: at the time of writing, “Shakespeare’s contemporaries” forms the title of or is conspicuously mentioned in the rubric of available classes at a number of universities and colleges across the world, most conspicuously in the UK.² Furthermore, the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), arguably the most substantial disseminator of performed early modern plays in the twenty-first century, includes a section on Shakespeare contemporaries on its website.³

The formation “Shakespeare and his contemporaries” implies a certain hierarchy: the Bard first, and other playwrights defined in relation to their contemporaneousness with him. Its persistence over centuries is primarily due to the predominance of the Shakespearean canon in Western theatre and culture more generally. As Shakespeare biographer Peter Holland writes:

For if Shakespeare has often seemed to some to be the prerogative of English high culture, then throughout the world Shakespeare, his image, and his works have been appropriated for every kind of popular cultural usage, signs both of his cultural authority and of the cultural contestation his works provoke. . . . There are no figures available for the value of the global Shakespeare economy, but it must run to many billions of pounds per annum. . . . Its mere existence testifies eloquently to the overwhelming presence of Shakespeare, both the man and his works, throughout almost every aspect of the world’s culture, in almost every language, in ways often so familiar as hardly to be noticed.⁴

Principally, the exaltation of Shakespeare over others and the concomitant reduction of the complex, multivalent, and multifaceted early modern English theatrical milieu (a milieu that included the prodigious theatrical talents of Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, John Webster, Thomas Middleton, and John Ford, to name but a handful) to his contemporaries establish a fairly useless assertion of relative literary value and worth. Its attendant understanding of early modern drama has, however, been slowly replaced by a more nuanced view of the theatrical industry in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Scholars have become increasingly attuned to the authorial interaction, collaboration, and competition that permeated the English stage. The publication of Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino’s epic Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works (2007)—an anthology that boldly exhorts the reader to consider Middleton as “our other Shakespeare”—has pointed to the fecundity of non-Shakespearean early modern drama.⁵ But other projects, such as Ashgate Publishing’s recuperation of the work of the group of late-sixteenth-century playwrights known as the “University Wits” (including John Lyly, Thomas Lodge, George Peele, Robert Greene, Marlowe, and Thomas Nash) and the ongoing publication of the complete works of Thomas Ford by Oxford University Press (2010–), gesture toward modern scholarship’s iteration and increasing sensitivity to the depth, quality, and range of dramatic literature that coexisted with the Bard’s.

This movement, not away from Shakespeare, but to a more rounded awareness of...