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Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30.2 (2000) 339-374



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Collaborating across Generations:
Thomas Heywood, Richard Brome, and the Production of The Late Lancashire Witches

Heather Hirschfeld


In an oft-cited line from his dedication to The English Traveller (1633), Thomas Heywood announces that his play was "one reserved amongst two hundred and twenty, in which I have had either an entire hand, or at the least a maine finger." 1 Heywood's claim asserts both his individual productivity after nearly forty years of working for the public theater as well as his capacity to work with other writers, and its suggestive richness has been tapped by scholars to support a number of positions on theatrical production for the early modern stage, particulary the ubiquity of collaborative work between dramatists. This ubiquity--G. E. Bentley estimates that between one-half and two-thirds of Renaissance plays were composed by multiple playwrights 2 --has led many scholars to assume that collaboration was an economic expedient or imperative for the dramatists. As Kathleen McLuskie explains, writers were compelled by a "need for speed." "The Jacobean dramatists collaborated for the same reason as Hollywood scriptwriters: they were the employees of a booming entertainment industry which demanded a steady output of actable material." 3

Heywood's brief assertion, however, suggests that there was more at stake in joint work: for him, at least, it involved a validation of cultural legitimacy, a kind of pride in having been able to work with fellow playwrights. Indeed, documents such as Henslowe's Diary as well as title page attributions and printed play dedications demonstrate that different writers worked together at different times, in different numbers, and in different patterns of association. 4 These differences, in turn, suggest that rather than being a catch-all answer to the demand for speedy composition, collaborative work had specific modes, meanings, and motivations as well as determined, if unanticipated, implications and consequences. In an effort to challenge the reigning notion that collaborative work was the result of sheer, or narrowly interpreted, economic necessity, this essay charts the creative and professional [End Page 339] investments of a particular collaborative enterprise: Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome's "docudrama" about a contemporaneous witchcraft trial, The Late Lancashire Witches (performed and published 1634).

This kind of interpretive effort, influenced by contemporary theoretical and literary-critical reconfigurations of early modern authorship, has been undertaken recently by scholars attempting to locate joint work in broader contexts. 5 Jeffrey Masten, for instance, in his important recent study, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama, offers a genealogical framework within which to place collaboration's role in larger cultural rhetorics of sex/gender, thus "denaturalizing authorship and [the] commonsense notions of writing" inherited from the Romantic veneration of the isolated author. 6 Nevertheless his explicitly "discursive argument" tends to homogenize the practice of joint writing, sweeping all dramatic partnerships into the general category of early modern homosociality. And while its theoretical stance is markedly different, Gordon McMullan's explanation of John Fletcher's extensive collaborative enterprises has the same effect: he reads Fletcher's writing practices allegorically, simplifying them to the equivalent of a commitment to consensual country politics. 7 But the material conditions of the early modern stage do not permit such monolithic claims. As a developing industry--what Pierre Bourdieu has called a "cultural field," a system or organization for the production of artistic or textual objects 8 --the simultaneously competitive and communal milieu of the Renaissance theater fostered among the playwrights a variety of specific, evolving models of dramatic authorship. Such models changed and developed, though not necessarily in any teleological way, in concert with the institutionalization of the theater--its steady achievement of organizational status and its recognition by a community of viewers and practitioners who both supported and contributed to it.

Collaborative authorship, as a species of dramatic authorship, thus demands a hermeneutic approach that pays attention to the particular theatrical conditions and writerly personalities involved in a given joint...

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