ACADEMIA Letters

Shakespeare’s Principal Collaborator — Himself?

Hugh Richmond

For centuries commentators have regarded Shakespeare’s late plays uneasily - with the
exception of The Tempest, favorably judged as memorable for supposedly marking his retire-
ment from full involvement with the professional theatre, though he is certainly associated
with several later scripts, such as All Is True and The Two Noble Kinsmen. Yet many of the
other late plays have also been interpreted biographically. Edmund Dowden suggested Shake-
speare suffered from depression while writing the tragedies, but progressed towards recovery
in creating the erratic texture of romances in progressing from melodrama to reconciliation.
Edmund Chambers thought he had a nervous breakdown while writing Timon of Athens, but
that the romances implied a mental convalescence transcending potential disasters. More
broadly some scholars such as E. M. W. Tillyard and G. Wilson Knight have asserted that the
late plays reveal a faith in human redemption, and a recovered confidence in the triumph of
virtue over vice. Their view legitimizes marked shifts of tone in these scripts now increas-
ingly ascribed to collaborators, by authors such as Gary Taylor and Brian Vickers, rather than
evolutions of attitude in a developing author.
However, one scholarly view that increasingly recurs extends the idea of Shakespeare’s
co-authorship of late plays such as Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen to Henry VIII, and
even to Cymbeline. The pattern matches recent theories about the multiple authorship of the
lost play Cardenio (traced via Theobald’s supposed rewrite of it as Double Falsehood), a play
now also partly assigned to Shakespeare’s successor as dramatist to the King’s Men, John
Fletcher. He is now usually seen as the co-author of three of these late scripts. Acceptance of
such collaborations usually causes a decline in critical esteem for the scripts, with censure of
their supposed resulting fragmentation of plot and style.
My argument here is that such categorical detachment of many of the late plays from the
high Shakespeare canon is misleading, though their supposed multi-composition matches re-

Academia Letters, June 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Hugh Richmond, hmr@berkeley.edu

Citation: Richmond, H. (2021). Shakespeare’s Principal Collaborator — Himself? Academia Letters, Article
1109. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL1109.

1
cent revived attempts to assign similar co-authorship to many earlier plays such as Henry VI,
Macbeth and Timon, because the later scripts illustrate a deliberate and consistent patterning
of redeployment of earlier material intrinsic to understanding the completion of the Shake-
spearean oeuvre. This pattern displays a systematic rephrasing of earlier themes, providing an
overt continuity with these precedents in what appears to be a coherent authorial ratio. This
consistency over supposedly different co-authorships argues instead for a single controlling
design, no matter whence the details derive. The sequencing of scripts as I have described it
in more detail in my tragedies book is as follows:
Richard III - Henry VIII
Comedy of Errors - Pericles
The Two Gentlemen of Verona - Cardenio
A Midsummer Night’s Dream - The Two Noble Kinsmen
The Merry Wives of Windsor - The Winter’s Tale
Julius Caesar/Antony and Cleopatra - Cymbeline
Shakespeare’s last plays share a kind of evolution already illustrated by the two English
tetralogies of history plays, by falling into a chronological sequence. The Two Noble Kins-
men is a Theseus play with a slightly later starting point than that of A Midsummer Night’s
Dream: the marriage procession of Theseus and Hippolyta. Merry Wives and Winter’s Tale
involve studies of inexplicable manic jealousy. Henry VIII is a political sequel to Richard
III, illuminating the long-term effects of the triumph of the Tudors with which that early play
ended, and sharing a similar episodic structure involving the fates of many recurring family
names from the earlier play’s cast list. Similarly Cymbeline, while echoing many elements of
the earlier British monarchy of Lear with its patriarch alienated from a daughter and her hus-
band, yet also closely follows chronologically from Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra
in presenting a later episode in the administration of Octavius Caesar.
In each case the later play takes up the characteristics of the earlier precedents and con-
sistently modifies their tortuous plots in a recurring path to near mystical resolution. In so far
as the implicit values of this evolution are shared in all six cases, it may be concluded that all
these plays reflect a conscious authorial design governed by a coherent artistic judgment, not
an unpredictable intervention as suggested by the frequent critical uncertainty about exactly
which parts of the scripts may be authenticated as Shakespeare’s. I would argue that the over-
all redeployment of earlier material suggests a controlling artistic identity that I feel should
be assigned principally to Shakespeare himself, whether or not he exploits of collaborators
– for even if they existed they have not intervened in significantly modifying the recurring
modifications and outcomes.
There is a certain irony about the supposed collaboration argued in the current tendency to

Academia Letters, June 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Hugh Richmond, hmr@berkeley.edu

Citation: Richmond, H. (2021). Shakespeare’s Principal Collaborator — Himself? Academia Letters, Article
1109. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL1109.

2
assign parts of Shakespeare to collaborators, such as Gary Taylor’s attempt to endow Middle-
ton with chunks of Macbeth and Measure for Measure. For Gary Taylor also antedates such
collaborations to supposedly pre-Shakespearean scripts like The Spanish Tragedy and Arden of
Feversham. Entertaining such an option might add reinforcement to the argument for adding
rather than diminishing the number of possible Shakespearean scripts. By contrast to such
disintegrators, Eric Sams shares my concern to demonstrate the evolution of Shakespeare’s
creativity in his attempt to add to Shakespeare’s works by crediting to the young Shakespeare
the several earlier, anonymous, more primitive versions of his plays such as The Taming of a
Shrew, The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, The True Chronicle History of King Leir. We
thus have the option of two starkly contrasting approaches to Shakespeare’s scripts, one deny-
ing him the capacity for creative evolution, the other stressing his capacity for creative growth,
throughout his career. Neither option has definitive validation, but one increases the possible
understanding of Shakespeare’s maturation as an artist, the other seemingly diminishes it.

REFERENCES
Chambers, E. K. Shakespeare: A Survey. New York: Hill and Wang, 1958. Print

Knight, G. Wilson. The Crown of Life: Essays in Interpretation of Shakespeare’s Later Plays.
London: Methuen. 1948. Print.

Middleton, Thomas. The Collected Works. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino, gen. eds.
Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2007. Print.

Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture: A Companion to The Collected Works,
Oxford University Press, 2007.. Print.

Richmond, Hugh Macrae. Shakespeare’s Tragedies Reviewed: a Spectator’s Role. New York:
Peter Lang. 2015.

Sams, Eric. The Real Shakespeare: Retrieving the Early Years, 1564–1594. New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1995. Print.

Taylor, Gary. “Shakespeare’s Collaborative Work.” Shakespeare Survey. Volume 67: Octo-
ber 2014. pp. 1-17. Print.

E. M. W. Tillyard. Shakespeare’s Last Plays.London: Chatto and Windus. 1954. Print.

Vickers, Brian. Shakespeare, Co-author: a Historical Study of the Five Collaborative Plays.

Academia Letters, June 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Hugh Richmond, hmr@berkeley.edu

Citation: Richmond, H. (2021). Shakespeare’s Principal Collaborator — Himself? Academia Letters, Article
1109. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL1109.

3
 Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2002. Print.

Academia Letters, June 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Hugh Richmond, hmr@berkeley.edu

Citation: Richmond, H. (2021). Shakespeare’s Principal Collaborator — Himself? Academia Letters, Article
1109. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL1109.