"Framing" as Collaborative Technique: Two Middleton-Rowley Plays

Authors

Michael E. Mooney, Arizona State University

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, the first paragraph of the essay follows:

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 describe a practice which employed nearly every Renaissance playwright, 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, descriptively 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.

Recommended Citation

Mooney, Michael E. (1979) ""Framing" as Collaborative Technique: Two Middleton-Rowley Plays," Comparative Drama: Vol. 13: Iss. 2, Article 3.
Available at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/compdr/vol13/iss2/3