Reviewed by Harriet, 7 Jan 2025
When I was young, I spent several summers in Stratford-upon-Avon. My parents were working at the theatre there, so I was fortunate to be allowed to sit quietly at the back of the stalls during rehearsals. This left me with an enduring passion for Shakespeare, so when I went to university to study English Literature, I thought I might end up specialising in his plays. However I soon realised that it would be difficult to find something to say about them that hadn’t been said before, so I moved off in a different direction. I’ve continued to take an interest, and read books from time to time, so I was intrigued to see this one, recently published by Manchester University Press. The book’s subtitle is ‘How early modern playwrights shaped the world’s greatest writer’, and the title itself alludes to a much quoted and much discussed passage from a 1592 publication called Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, which, as Freebury-Jones says, ‘has ruffled the feathers of generations of Shakespeare critics’:
There is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tyger’s heart wrapt in a Player’s Hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Johnannes fan totum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a countrey.
So much ink has been spilled unpicking this quotation, and many critics have fallen over themselves defending Shakespeare from charges of plagiarism. But this is not the approach taken by the present author. On the contrary, the book sets out to explore exactly what Shakespeare took from his contemporaries, and what use he made of it. Of course other scholars have attempted this in the past, but mostly have relied on analysing passages which sound like Shakespeare or sound like one of his contemporaries or predecessors. Nothing wrong with this of course, and it’s the sort of thing I might have done in the past, probably with a fair amount of success. But now technology has stepped in, and the author now claims that his book ‘provides the most systematic account of Shakespeare’s debts to his contemporaries ever provided by using modern databases’. The specific database used here is known as Collocations and N-grams, and it contains the texts of 527 plays written between 1552 and 1657. What it does, put simply, is find phrases and word-sequences in Shakespeare’s plays that echo or reproduce phrases or word-sequences from older plays with which Shakespeare would have been familiar. This, then, is not deliberate copying; rather, it suggests that certain phrases and expressions would have stuck in his mind, which he probably reproduced unconsciously.
The book devotes a chapter to each of the playwrights concerned. So we have John Lyly, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, Robert Greene, and George Peele, all of whose plays Shakespeare would have been familiar with, and possibly or probably acted in. The final three chapters move forward in time, taking in Dekker, Marston and Ben Johnson, Thomas Middleton, and John Fletcher, some of whom were known to have collaborated with Shakespeare on several plays. It has to be said that some of these collocations are very convincing – for example, in Shakespeare’s Richard III we have the line ‘And in good time, here comes the sweating lord’, which bears a strong resemblance to a phrase from Peele’s Troublesome Reign of King John: ‘And in good time, here comes the war men all, That sweat’. Others are rather less so: the phrase ‘with gracious eye’’, which occurs in a play of Kyd’s and also in Richard III seems a bit too commonplace to be significant.
If the book relied solely on computerised data, this would be a very dry work indeed. But Freebury-Jones goes much further, comparing such things as feminine endings, use of language in general, and overall what we could call style, just like used to be done in pre-technological times. He also sheds light on the relationships between the writers themselves, starting with Shakespeare as a young writer learning from or attempting to improve on the work of older, or more experienced, playwrights. This includes Marlowe, who seems to have fascinated Shakespeare, as he acknowledged him and his writing in several plays, most notably As You Like It. By the time we get to Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s friend and contemporary, the echoes start to go in both directions, with Jonson making fun of Shakespeare’s Caliban in Bartholomew Fair and Shakespeare parodying Jonson’s ‘artistic pretensions’ by including a version of the formal masque, which became a speciality of Jonson, in The Tempest. As for Middleton and Fletcher, it is well established that both of them collaborated with Shakespeare on various plays, including Titus Andronicus (Middleton) and All is True (Fletcher).
So Freebury-Jones has managed to do what I once thought would be impossible – to find something new to say about Shakespeare. Whatever we make of it all, this book is a fascinating read which draws attention to a number of playwrights who deserve to be better known, reveals a great deal about the familiarity they all had with each others’ works, and provides a convincing picture of a lively group of creative people together with all their friendships, rivalries, competitions and collaborations. Plenty of useful notes and an impressively full bibliography make this an important addition to the study of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
Harriet is a co-founder and one of the editors of Shiny New Books.
Darren Freebury-Jones, Shakespeare’s Borrowed Feathers (Manchester University Press, 2024). 978-1526177322, 272pp., hardback.
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