Shakespeare at work: an interview with Darren Freebury-Jones

How innovative research techniques reveal new insights into Shakespeare's working life among his fellow players and playwrights

This interview first appeared on the Broken Compass towards the end of 2024, when it accompanied the original publication of Darren’s fascinating and revelatory book Shakespeare’s Borrowed Feathers. I’m reposting it now to coincide with the publication of the paperback edition. Given the recent news coverage indulging the fantasy that Shakespeare’s work was written by Emilia Bassano, it’s always good to read serious research that reveals the writer as he was: a professional man of the theatre through and through.

Darren is a Shakespeare lecturer in Stratford-upon-Avon. His previous books include Reading Robert Greene: Recovering Shakespeare’s Rival and Shakespeare’s Tutor: The Influence of Thomas Kyd. He is general editor for The Collected Plays of Robert Greene, and associate editor for The Collected Works of Thomas Kyd, the first such edition of Kyd’s works in over a century. Aside from his academic work, Darren is also a poet. His first collection, Rambling, was published by Broken Sleep Books earlier in 2024. He is on both Twitter/X and BlueSky.

Shakespeare’s Borrowed Feathers: How Early-Modern Playwrights Shaped the World’s Greatest Writer was published in autumn 2024 by Manchester University Press.

The book explores in extraordinary textual detail the way that Shakespeare and his contemporaries reacted - consciously and unconsciously - to one another’s work. Among other things, it is testament to how closely they listened to one another – although they certainly read one another too – and how they absorbed each other’s words and phrases into their own memories and made them their own.

The bulk of the book is a chapter-by-chapter analysis of the echoes and correspondences between Shakespeare’s work and that of ten other great dramatists of the period, from John Lyly through to John Fletcher. The structure therefore also allows us to follow Shakespeare’s career in the theatre in loosely chronological order, from his early days as an actor to his last plays and reveals just how deeply a man of the living, working, competitive theatre he was. It’s a fascinating book which I’m sure I will return to again.

I wasn’t able to review the book unfortunately, but Darren kindly agreed to answer a few questions on email so we could explore how he has approached the project, and what it reveals to us both about Shakespeare himself and about the world of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage.

Mathew: Shakespeare’s Borrowed Feathers mixes traditional literary analysis and scholarship with computer-aided textual analysis. Could you explain briefly how that technology works, and how it has expanded the possibilities for analysis, while complementing old-fashioned techniques and approaches?

Darren: Shakespeare’s Borrowed Feathers is concerned with both influence and authorship, and similarities between early modern dramas can be charted in various ways, such as authors’ engagements with their source materials, characterisation, stage business, all elements we can approach through traditional literary-critical means.

I discovered that plays noted as being connected by older scholars also tended to share large numbers of phrases, perhaps recycled consciously or unconsciously by authors. My analysis, which takes account of all the traditional approaches noted above, also incorporates a database of 527 plays developed by Pervez Rizvi called Collocations and N-grams. This database automatically highlights all shared phrases between 527 plays written during the period 1552 and 1657 and ranks each of them according to the number of unique phrases they share, i.e. occurring in only two plays in that corpus.

Moreover, users can read the phrases according to their dramatic context. An example of a unique phrase (or ‘n-gram’) would be “from the purpose of”, which Shakespeare repeats in Julius Caesar and Hamlet, while an example of a so-called ‘collocation’, a matching phrase broken up by intervening words, is Shakespeare’s association of “hounds”, “greyhounds”, “mongrel”, and “spaniel”, which are separated by the words “grim” and “or” when Edgar rants in the guise of Poor Tom in King Lear and “and” in Macbeth when the tyrant orders Banquo’s assassination.

To what extent has this technology rejuvenated the field of attribution study?

The database supports both quantitative and qualitative analysis. The cold, hard numbers offer fascinating insights into connections between texts. Lest readers become “ill at these numbers” (2.2), to quote Hamlet, the book identifies similarities and differences in their contexts of use by delving into the plays themselves.

Collocations and N-grams is revolutionary for attribution study, supporting but also challenging long-held authorship theories and staying true to the verbal fabric of these works, meaning readers can check findings by leafing through the plays themselves. That isn’t feasible with studies that merely compute the frequencies of single words such as “and” or “of” and present findings in dazzling graphs that few readers are equipped to query.

With Shakespeare’s Borrowed Feathers I wanted to present the sometimes-dizzying range of competing methods to non-specialist readers in a way that was accessible and even entertaining. I also wanted to anchor these plays in their theatrical and historical context. These aren’t just texts to be number crunched; they are important performative and historical artefacts.

Navigating the blurry lines between authorship and influence remains the biggest obstacle in attribution studies, particularly in the case of shared language. It isn’t insurmountable though: when it comes to authors repeating their favourite phrases or images, the surrounding text tends to be the same in terms of vocabulary, poetic rhythm, and other features of style. In the case of verbal borrowings, the surrounding text is often quite different, and these phrases are repeated in later plays. It is crucial to apply as many different analytical approaches as possible, not least of all taking the time to read these plays closely.

What, for you, has been the greatest revelation generally? (I’m thinking here in terms of the wider field of attribution study.)

One finding that really stands out to me concerns The Revenger’s Tragedy. That play was attributed to English soldier and playwright Cyril Tourneur by the publishers Edward Archer in 1656 and Francis Kirkman in 1661 and 1671. However, scholars have long noted that its vocabulary, verse style, and overall dramaturgy closely parallel Thomas Middleton.

If we look at the spreadsheet in Collocations and N-grams ranking The Revenger’s Tragedy against all other surviving plays of the period for unique phrases, we find that Middleton’s The Phoenix, A Mad World, My Masters, and the Middleton collaboration with William Rowley and Thomas Heywood, An Old Law, make up the top three plays. On the other hand, Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy is in the lowly position of 219.

This is one of several revelations in the book concerning the wider field of attribution study and demonstrates the power of this resource for validating but also challenging existing theories. This also demonstrates that we cannot always rely on documentary evidence, much of which is slight when it comes to identifying authors, especially as playing companies were often more concerned with advertising themselves than their playwrights on title pages.

And what has been the greatest revelation with regard to Shakespeare?

The influence of Christopher Marlowe on Shakespeare’s style has been well documented. However, the book reveals that Shakespeare’s early style is closer to Marlowe’s roommate Thomas Kyd, most famous for writing the blockbusting The Spanish Tragedy. Kyd, like Shakespeare, doesn’t appear to have gone to university, and these writers’ styles differ in several respects from university-educated playwrights such as Marlowe, Robert Greene, and George Peele.

Shakespeare, like Kyd but unlike Marlowe, delights in compound forms in his dramas, such as “muddy-mettled”. Also like Kyd, but unlike Marlowe, Shakespeare frequently incorporates an extra, unstressed syllable at the end of verse lines right from the beginning of his career. The most famous example in literature of the so-called “feminine ending” would be the eleventh syllable –ion in the line from Hamlet: “To be, or not to be; that is the question” (3.1).

Moreover, Shakespeare frequently recycled phrases from Kyd’s plays, and was influenced by his distinct mixture of tragic materials and black comedy, his vengeful female characters, and his overall craftsmanship. I see this as a significant shift for the scholarly narrative on Shakespeare’s dramatic influences.

How do you respond to the criticism that this kind of data-led approach ends up focusing less on what is distinctive about a writer’s style or thought and more on unremarkable, conventional everyday phrases and cliches?

I analyze phrases that are rare or unique in the theatrical vernacular of the period, so I would disagree with claims that they are not distinctive or are clichéd. It is a statistical fact, observed by scholars such as Martin Mueller, Brian Vickers, MacDonald Jackson, and Pervez Rizvi, that plays by the same author tend to share more unique phrases than do plays by other authors in the surviving corpus of early modern drama. Some of those phrases might seem unremarkable, but that means they are less likely to be appropriated by other dramatists and can give us insights into an author’s idiolect.

As I mentioned earlier, the real value of phrasal analysis (as one of just several approaches I take in the book) is that it is both quantitative and qualitative. I’ll offer a couple of phrases highlighted in Shakespeare’s Borrowed Feathers that might seem especially mundane to some readers. The speech fragment “cause I cannot” can be found both in a scene of the collaborative play Henry VI Part One that I attribute to Thomas Kyd and in Kyd’s closet tragedy Cornelia. If we take the time to read the phrase according to dramatic context, we find it occurs in York’s speech, “But curse the cause I cannot aid the man”. York is claiming here that he’s unable to help the warrior Lord Talbot fend off a French assault, and as a result “Mad ire and wrathful fury makes me weep” (4.3). Kyd often amplifies lamentations with references to weeping, and we see this in his heroine Cornelia: “O eyes, and will ye (’cause I cannot dry / Your ceaseless springs), not suffer me to die?” (2.1). So, although the phrase “cause I cannot” seems to tell us little about a writer’s thought process on the surface, it actually offers interesting dramaturgical parallels when read according to its situational context.

Another phrase that might be dismissed as commonplace is “Heaven bless thee”, which can be found in a scene of Shakespeare and John Fletcher’s Henry VIII, or All is True, which I attribute to Fletcher. Taken by itself, this could be dismissed as trivial, a response to a sneeze perhaps. However, reading the passages in which it occurs, we find that it is delivered by a Gentleman in All is True: “Heaven bless thee! / Thou hast the sweetest face I ever looked on” (4.1). This speech looks forward to Fletcher’s action-packed comedy The Chances, in which a landlady, holding a child mysteriously thrust into her lodger’s arms, says: “Heaven bless thee, / Thou hadst a hasty making” (1.8). The phrase embraces additional words (“Thou hadst”) placed in a similar semantic and syntactic context, occupying the same metrical positions in corresponding iambic lines, and to my eyes gives us insights into the very timbre of Fletcher’s verse and thus serves as a useful authorial signature.

Is it possible to say how Shakespeare and his contemporaries thought about these kinds of appropriations and reworkings? The famous quote from Robert Greene from which the book takes its title suggests they cared deeply, but the depth of borrowing that the book reveals suggests in practice it was endemic. Is it analogous to how they thought about originality of story, for instance? Does the book challenge us to think differently about what we call plagiarism?

It’s understandable that many readers project twenty-first century notions of plagiarism onto these works. But imitation, parody, and translation formed the bedrocks of the Elizabethan education system, and students were encouraged by the likes of Erasmus to read as many authors as possible to fill up their storehouses.

Shakespeare’s Borrowed Feathers challenges readers to think differently about borrowing during the period by anchoring these plays in their original context. Theatre-making was an entertainment industry, a commercial operation with a large literary turnover. Actors might have just a few weeks to rehearse plays and they’d be putting on multiple dramas six days a week. There was a lot of duplication going on: if a hit on the subject of Henry VI’s reign occurs in one theatre, don’t be surprised to encounter a similar play springing up soon after by a rival company for instance.

The reality was that the early modern dramatic community was a veritable magpie nest. Shakespeare is neither more nor less imitative than his contemporaries, but he tends to do something different with his borrowed material, be it diluting the moralistic messages of his sources or switching up the context of a purloined phrase. It’s difficult to determine what authors felt about such appropriations and reworkings: it was after all a unique period of flourishing theatre companies, stunning developments in language, genre, and what it was possible to achieve in playing spaces, accompanied by innovations in the print industry and consequent disputes about literary proprietorship.

In any case, I don’t see the “upstart crow” passage in the pamphlet attributed to Robert Greene, Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, Bought with a Million of Repentance, as an accusation of plagiarism per se. Rather, I see it as the product of tensions between university-educated playwrights and the actors who delivered their lines on stage.

Here and elsewhere Greene criticises actors because they are beautified with the feathers of dramatists who went to the likes of Oxford and Cambridge, they speak from their mouths, the wit for which they are applauded stems from their pens. And yet the actors are getting all the credit. Maybe things haven’t changed all that much today. We’re more likely to name a famous actor who delivers dialogue written by a screenwriter than name the screenwriters themselves.

I don’t think Greene (or Henry Chettle, who copied out the pamphlet and has been considered, on tenuous grounds in my view, to have written the attack), is necessarily calling Shakespeare out as a plagiarist. It’s a somewhat snobby attack on a non-university educated actor who has turned his hand to writing plays and, as he would have been taught to do at school, is attempting to better his influences.

The book is in part about conscious and unconscious textual echoes, but it is also about collaboration. On a practical level, how did playwrights collaborate with one another in the period? Can we say why they chose to collaborate?

The first thing to point out is that dramatists might not have had much say when it came to their collaborators. That would have been down to the theatre managers, although Shakespeare does seem to have recognised the benefits of collaborating with ­– guiding, but also learning – from up-and-coming contemporaries such as Thomas Middleton and John Fletcher. It’s been estimated that a play took approximately six weeks to write, so collaboration means they can be produced more quickly. It could also be broadening, with play portions divvied up between writers to cater to each individual’s strengths. Who is the best writer for a tragic speech, or to pen the comic roles? Who would be the best fit for an account of a battle, or a love scene, or a moment bristling with courtly satire?

In the first instance, a theatre manager might commission an author to write a plot. Other dramatists could base a play on these scenarios. Practically every public dramatist of the period appears to have co-authored plays and Shakespeare was no different, although most of his dramas are sole-authored. Co-authors sometimes divided their labour according to acts and scenes, but they could also contribute individual speeches. When a play was finished, dramatists were expected to transcribe the drafts into “perfect” or “fair copies”, or at least commission professional scribes themselves.

For co-authored plays one of the dramatists might take responsibility for compiling sections, perhaps touching up their co-authors’ writing in the process. This seems to be the case with Philip Massinger, who could rarely resist tinkering with John Fletcher’s passages in their collaborations. Alongside ‘simultaneous’ collaboration, with authors drawing from a plot and writing their respective stints separately (or possibly in the same room at times), there was revision. This was commonplace during the period, with plays being altered and enlarged to accommodate shifting audience tastes, advances in stage technology, and changes in playing spaces and company personnel.

Obviously the book is also about how all the playwrights borrowed from one another. You write, for instance, that “From the beginning to the end of Greene’s career, Marlowe’s influence infected him like a disease”. Could you talk about the extent to which writers’ borrowings might have been conscious or unconscious – and what that says about what they took?

Robert Greene provides a great example. He was obsessed with Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine in particular; a play so nice Marlowe was commissioned to do it twice! Greene grapples with Marlowe’s Scythian shepherd, these bombastic, scenically strutting plays about military conquest, set in exotic locations, in Alphonsus, King of Aragon and Selimus. But the connections between these plays should be considered in repertorial as well as authorial terms. Rival playing companies were very keen to emulate the success of Marlowe’s two-parter Tamburlaine the Great Part One and Two. Playwrights like Greene therefore attempted to replicate Marlowe’s “mighty line”, with varying degrees of success. The figure of Tamburlaine was often consciously parodied, but in engaging so closely with Marlovian language it seems inevitable that authors would also duplicate Marlowe’s phraseology below the level of conscious thought.

The culture was both aural and memorial in ways that it’s hard for us to imagine: people were used to listening intently and to recalling what was said. To what extent, therefore, would playwrights have wanted or expected the audience to recognise some of their references?

In some cases, authors clearly desired that audiences recognise their references. For instance, the framing device of The Taming of the Shrew draws from the superstructure of Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, to the extent that all events in both dramas can be considered plays-within-plays. Moreover, in both plays the onstage audience members fall asleep: the figure of Revenge in The Spanish Tragedy and Christopher Sly in The Taming of the Shrew. Sly’s line, “Go by, Saint Jeronimy” (Induction 1), is a barefaced allusion to Hieronimo’s much-parodied line in Kyd’s play, “Hieronimo beware, go by, go by” (4.6). On the page this speech in The Spanish Tragedy seems ordinary, suggesting it caught attention through some kind of spectacular, potentially lunatic gesture by the actor playing Kyd’s protagonist. This strikes me as a very winky-winky-nudgy-nudgy moment that depended on audience recognition.

Heminges and Condell (and Jonson) worked hard in the First Folio to present Shakespeare as a unique genius and as the sole author of his works. To what extent was that a sleight of hand and why was the work of collaborators in his canon erased from the record?

This seems to come down in large part to the print industry. There are approximately 500 plays of the period acknowledging sole authors on their title pages, in comparison to around just thirty announcing collaborative authorship. Take for example the 1616 folio collection, The Works of Benjamin Jonson. That title gives primacy to Ben Jonson even though we know through documentary evidence that he was a deeply collaborative dramatist.

The 1647 and 1679 folio editions of Comedies and Tragedies Written by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher Gentlemen acknowledge collaboration. Yet those editions contain the hands of numerous writers, including Philip Massinger’s, which was far more extensive than Francis Beaumont’s.

Similarly, Shakespeare’s 1623 First Folio is presented as a shrine to his genius, “an office”, as John Heminges and Henry Condell put it, “to the dead”, for they have “procured his” works to preserve his memory. The emphasis in the prefatory material is placed on singular pronouns, “he”, “his”, the reader entreated to “Read him, therefore, and again, and again”. There’s no hint of other dramatists’ contributions to these works and my sense is that single-authored plays were considered by printers and publishers to be easier to market. Nevertheless, several plays in the First Folio, including Henry VI Part One, Titus Andronicus, Timon of Athens, and Henry VIII, are widely held to contain the hands of dramatists other than Shakespeare.

Shakespeare’s Borrowed Feathers very firmly puts Shakespeare back in the working theatre among a community of actors and writers that is both collaborative and, sometimes, laced with rivalry. But you also argue against attempts to “de-centre” Shakespeare or deny his literary and cultural importance. At first sight, those positions seem in tension – if not opposition – with each other. Is it possible to reconcile them?

Shakespeare has so often been detached from the community in which he wrote, so often privileged at the expense of other writers with whom he worked, that it’s hardly surprising the discourse should shift towards supplanting his canonical status, to overturning the hierarchy.

There have been interesting movements pushing for writers such as John Lyly to be seen as more progressive than Shakespeare or in attempts to position Thomas Middleton as “our other Shakespeare”. But Shakespeare provides a crucial conduit for the appreciation of these other writers. For me, denigrating Shakespeare while privileging the output of any of his contemporaries runs the risk of eroding the appreciation of early modern drama in general, just as the opposite is true.

This seems especially wrongheaded in the current climate: the difficulties faced in higher education and the humanities especially. Shakespeare’s Borrowed Feathers places Shakespeare within his network of fellow writers and actors to enhance our appreciation of his creative genius, but the book also highlights the work of other electrifying playwrights of the period.

How much was Shakespeare’s writing informed by his experience as an actor? What can be inferred about the roles he played from the textual borrowings you have identified?

Shakespeare’s background as an actor was fundamental to the evolution of his artistry. He would deliver his own words, as well as the words of contemporary playwrights, on stage, gaining first-hand experience of what worked for audiences in terms of language, verse cadence and registers, and dramatic devices. To succeed as an Elizabethan player, you’d need a fabulous aural memory: you are putting on multiple plays per week; sometimes plays are revived so you might need to go back to an old big hitter like The Spanish Tragedy or The Jew of Malta; and you’d likely be doubling roles. I’m reminded of the moment in Hamlet when the travelling players arrive in Elsinore and Hamlet is able to recall a thirteen-line speech with “good accent and good discretion”, even though he’s only heard the “speech once” (2.2). It’s conceivable that Shakespeare, like Hamlet, had fabulous skills in memorisation.

Shakespeare is quite idiosyncratic in that he often writes of hearing, rather than seeing, a play. I reckon he’d be listening to other men’s plays attentively throughout rehearsal and in the tiring areas during performance, and the necessity of doubling roles makes it hard to pin down which parts Shakespeare took. We know that he acted in Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour and Sejanus, because he features in surviving cast lists for those plays. As I reveal in the book, he does seem especially conscious of the lines and cues for the jealous merchant Thorello in the former play, and the emperor Tiberius in the latter.

Perhaps paradoxically, while the book largely examines texts in great detail, its wide frame of reference serves to remind us of just what an extraordinary outpouring of art English Renaissance drama represented. Did your work on this book lead you to any lesser-known works that really surprised you?

The works of John Lyly surprised me in particular. I made the mistake of regarding him as an author of sparkling comedies, but in reality he was a daring, occasionally transgressive, dramatist who is very difficult to pigeonhole. In the Prologue to his play Endymion he states that it is “neither comedy, nor tragedy, nor story, nor any thing”. Lyly interrogated comic resolutions, sometimes concluding his plays with parted lovers.

We could be forgiven for suspecting that plays were distinct generically in the 1580s and then evolved into more hybrid forms such as tragicomedy in later years. However, earlier dramatists were experimenting with and conflating genres, and the theatre scene when Shakespeare arrived was abuzz with tragedies, chronicle history plays, comedies, the so-called “Turk play”, the morality play, biblical dramas, even the domestic tragedy. Lyly stands out as a remarkable dramatist who sliced away at generic distinctions, but other playwrights, such as Robert Greene, raise a lot of questions in the conclusions of their ostensibly comic dramas and anticipate problematic plays such as Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure.

Relatedly, perhaps, which lost plays do you most regret us not having?

I would love to get my hands on the so-called Ur-Hamlet, so if your readers could check their attics and basements, I’d be very grateful! You’d be making a significant contribution to scholarship and you’d also likely, to quote Romeo and Juliet, “have the chinks” (1.5). This lost Hamlet play preceded Shakespeare’s version by around a decade and I make a case for Thomas Kyd’s authorship in the book. It was referenced by contemporaries such as Thomas Nashe and Thomas Lodge, and we know it was performed at Newington Butts playhouse in June 1594. One thing we learn from accounts of this lost play is that it featured a ghost, an important innovation, unique in the context of the Hamlet or Amleth tale, which had a major impact on Shakespeare’s tragedy.

You write in your conclusion that “Shakespeare often seems to gaze wistfully at past dramas for inspiration”. Is it possible to say how Shakespeare’s frame of reference changed – or not – as he aged?

Shakespeare’s early dramas often read like patchworks of phrases found in the likes of Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, and George Peele. But even at the start of his career Shakespeare weaves threads of these authors’ plays into a dramatic tapestry that is distinctly his own. He becomes less imitative of contemporary playwrights, such as Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker, and John Marston, as his career progresses, at least on a verbal level. He recognises innovations in genres such as city comedies and courtly masques, but even late into his career Shakespeare seems especially keen to grapple with his formative theatre experiences. He revisits older plays and genres to subvert audience expectations. In Othello, he's harking back to the so-called “Turk play” navigated by Marlowe, Greene, and Peele, in which Turkish villains take centre stage. There is the threat of Turkish violence in Othello but then the fleet disperses and this play dealing with state affairs zones in on the domestic sphere. Shakespeare is wrongfooting his audience with reference to past dramas.

I like to think audience members seeing King Lear for the first time would recall the Elizabethan comedy, The True Chronicle History of King Leir, which, like all of Shakespeare’s sources, concludes happily with the King and his daughter Cordella restored to the throne. Instead, Shakespeare gives audiences arguably the most devastating conclusion to any theatrical or literary work, when Lear enters the stage holding the corpse of Cordelia in his arms. Shakespeare evokes memories to pull the rug from under audience members’ feet. We know that King Lear was performed before King James on Stephen’s Day, or Boxing Day, 1606, which is quite the Christmas present, I think!

Finally, on another note, has such granular attention to language and borrowing changed the way you think about your own poetry?

I’ve always enjoyed creative writing and the challenge with Shakespeare’s Borrowed Feathers was to take a book exploring some of the most complex and controversial aspects of early modern textual scholarship and make it accessible, and indeed fun, for a wider readership. I enjoyed leaning more heavily on my creative writing background to paint vivid pictures of the early modern dramatic community.

I’m fascinated by intertextuality as well as the idea of self-borrowing. Applying digital techniques to my own creative writing reveals that I have certain images and phrases I repeat unconsciously, such as “splashes of colour” or, an exceptionally lengthy word combination, “like something from a beautiful dream or nightmare”. These phrases crop up in several works I’ve written, and yet I wasn’t even aware I’d repeated them!

Certain lines and images in my poetry grapple both knowingly and unknowingly with other writers, unsurprisingly Shakespeare, but also with certain pitches and tones of transient conversations I’ve had with friends and family members over the years. There are ghostly traces of so many figures in my writing. For me, that helps resurrect cherished memories, while also dealing with grief when it comes to loved ones I’ve lost over the years.

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