Episode 68: Interview with Eric Rasmussen on Shakespeare's Collaborations

While Shakespeare is name is the most well known of the playwrights from Renaissance England, he was hardly the only famous artist working during that time period. Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, John Fletcher, and John Lyly are just a few of the names we can mention of excellent theater practitioners working alongside the bard, and it turns out, William Shakespeare apparently had at least a high professional respect for these gentlemen personally, as he is known to have collaborated with several of them on plays like Pericles, Henry VIII, and Timon of Athens. 

But knowing that Shakespeare collaborated with fellow playwrights, even with members of rival playing companies, brings up some questions about the practicality of collaborating in the Renaissance. Who owned the plays that they wrote? Why weren’t the collaborative plays published with all of the contributing authors? There are so many questions about what collaboration looked like for William Shakespeare, and this week we have the man who literally wrote the book on Shakespeare’s Collaborative Works, Dr. Eric Rasmussen, here to walk us through 16th century playhouses and the world of collaborative Renaissance theater.