“Framing” as Collaborative Technique: Two Middleton-Rowley Plays

“Framing” as Collaborative Technique: Two Middleton-Rowley Plays Michael E. Mooney The nature of Renaissance dramatic collaboration remains a blind spot in the study of its dramaturgy. Although many explanations have been offered, we have yet to adequately des­ cribe a practice which employed nearly every Renaissance play­ wright, from Shakespeare and Jonson to Beaumont and Fletcher and a host of others, among them William Rowley and Thomas Middleton. Commentators, sifting among the possible divisions of labor in a collaborative work, project four main theories: (1) the dramatists partitioned their work by acts, with either one playwright writing Acts I, II, and III, another Acts IV and V; or with each playwright alternating in composing Acts I through V; (2) one playwright wrote a play’s tragic scenes, his joint author the comic or satiric ones; (3) the dramatists divided shares along plot lines, with one writer responsible for the main plot, his collaborator for the subplot(s); and (4) one playwright added to or emended another’s work, that is, certain plays are the products of revision.1 But while each theory (or combination of theories) would seem to describe certain plays, it may be shown to be false in other cases; investigations into dramatic collaboration seem only to prove that we cannot, des­ criptively or prescriptively, account for this process.2 As a result, the whole issue has become a critical quicksand where few dare to venture, the sheer number of explanations, in effect, explaining away the question. An implicit premise underlies this investigation: I do not believe one can safely make a judgment about the collaborative process without considering each play individually, as a separate work. Given the possible permutations in dramatic form, it is conceivable that each play, in even so large a corpus as Beau­ mont and Fletcher’s,3 was written according to a different plan. 127 128 Comparative Drama However, I do believe that from the evidence of two MiddletonRowley plays, A Faire Quarrel (1617) and The Changeling (1622), emerge several generalizations, each of which sheds fresh light on the protean nature of dramatic collaboration. What I would suggest is that, in writing these two plays, Middleton and Rowley employed a technique we may call “framing”—a collaborative procedure implying a division of labor by which William Rowley wrote, solely, Acts I and V and the plays’ subplots, Thomas Middleton the main plot scenes in Acts II, III, and IV. I think these two plays provide instruc­ tive cases, not only because the Middleton-Rowley plays repre­ sent a successful collaborative partnership and because the playwriting shares in each case have been convincingly dem­ onstrated^ but especially because Rowley’s ability as a writer of bawdy subplots balances precisely the psychologically-ori­ ented, tragic interests of Thomas Middleton. The following analysis of the process by which A Faire Quarrel and The Changeling were written subsumes the first three of the four collaborative theories we have outlined. I assume that as a last step a final, joint revision of certain scenes was necessary to mold these plays into their final shapes, into forms where their verbal resonances might be finely heard. The effect that “framing” has on two plays, however, bears additional implications for the whole of Renaissance drama by illuminat­ ing the most elusive of literary practices. With our critical eyes trained on product, our efforts designed to measure plays by the Procrustean bed of prescriptive forms, we often neglect the very process by which language is captured in the mold of form. In describing the way plays were composed to affect their audiences, then, rather than the relative effectiveness of the forms which result, “framing” asserts the primacy of process over product. I Although both tragic and comic elements appear in Middleton and Rowley’s first collaboration, The Old Law (c.16151618 ), providing a basis for allocating the playwrights’ shares,5 a clear collaborative pattern does not emerge until A Faire Quarrel. In writing The Old Law, however, the playwrights de­ signed the tragicomedy according to a plan that would help determine the process by which subsequent plays would be written. As even a cursory reading reveals, Middleton’s main Michael E...