Imagining Shakespeare

Abstract

Ihave described Shakespeare’s drama, in its essence and throughout its history, as collaborative. The collaboration was between author and actor, script or text and performance or realization; and it was, for the most part, not an equal partnership. In most cases in Shakespeare’s time, the playwright was not at all at the center of this collaboration; he was an employee of the company, and once he delivered the script his interest in it, and his authority over it, was ended. Shakespeare is one of a small number of exceptions, in that he was both a shareholder and principal actor in the company he wrote for, and thus was literally his own boss; but all this means is that he would have been involved in more parts of the collaboration than other playwrights were.