The weird Conspiracy Theory
of an endless succession of Shakespeare's secret collaborators
 |
| Prof. Gary Taylor |
In Nov.5th 2016 Gary Taylor, General Editor of The New Oxford Shakespeare, English Professor at Florida State University, printed an extract
„Who were Shakespeare’s collaborators?“
from the General Introduction to the „New Oxford Shakespeare“, looking at the many different playwrights, actors, and poets that collaborated with Shakespeare.
There he pointed out, that all Shakespeare’s „ plays were written to be co-created by a team. But that team also changed over time, as actors like the star comedian William Kemp left, and new talents like Robert Armin and John Lowin arrived. Even if the actors remained the same, the spectators did not, in part because they were being influenced by other playwrights. Early in his career Shakespeare was competing with better-educated playwrights, most of them older than him, (…): Watson, Kyd, Greene, Peele, Lodge and Marlowe.
According to Taylor
Shakespeare „outlived them all, but by the late 1590s he was challenged, and new audience tastes were being shaped, by fashionable younger playwrights, beginning with Ben Jonson, George Chapman, and John Marston, soon followed by Thomas Middleton (our second Shakespeare), then by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher.Shakespeare’s plays have continued to do for centuries what they did in his own lifetime: adapt to connect to an endless succession of new collaborators, new venues, and new audiences.
The implausible weird situation of Shakespeare's collaboration in a team is that beyond computerized textual coherence there are neither historical or biographical evidences of any personal encounter between Shakespeare and so many authors nor is there a consistent motiv for the absolute concealment of that collaboration.
Myth which are believed intend to become true.
George Orwell
