Shakespeare and Early Modern Practices of Authorship
Régis Augustus Bars Closel
What sources can confidently say what an author wrote or not? The modern perception of the relationship between the work and the author is very different from that in England in the Early Modern Period, especially in the theatre, where works written by a number of hands was the rule and not the exception. The publication of plays attributed to a definite author took almost three decades to become a common practice after the fixing of the London theatrical spaces. In this process, much of the textual and authorial history of the plays of the period are still open for research to locate and identify one or more authors working together on the same text.
To situate the complexity of this question at the beginning of the Modern Age and contemporary attempts to answer it, this lecture will address the copyright practices related to writing dramatic works in the Elizabethan-Jacobean period, such as individual and collaborative authorship. Both forms are present and can be seen in records of theatre companies in which more than one hand can be detected through research on the attribution of authorship.
Through examples of the works of Shakespeare and other playwrights of the period, the theme of collaboration or collaborative writing will be treated from well-known examples to the latest studies in this area, detailing example of particular texts. The talk will also examine the beginning of collaborative studies, authorship attribution techniques (sociolinguistics and computational stylistics), manuscripts, proofreading, textual transmission, publication and the possible ways of the translator to deal with this issue.
Régis Augustus Bars Closel has a PhD in Literary Theory and Literary History at UNICAMP (2016, FAPESP). He spent one year researching at the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon. He has co-organized two books and translated the collaborative play Sir Thomas More (1600, 1603-4), Anthony Munday and Henry Chettle, with additions of Thomas Dekker, Thomas Heywood and William Shakespeare. Among his research interests are collaboration, translation, Elizabethan-Jacobean drama and Shakespeare.