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Writing The Plays
A majority of the approximately 3,000 plays staged in Renaissance England were written collaboratively by two or more playwrights. It is thought that Shakespeare collaborated on Titus Andronicus, Pericles, The Two Noble Kinsmen, Henry VIII and Sir Thomas More.
Although it is difficult to pinpoint exactly how plays made their way from the page to the stage, there are some general ideas about how a playwright like Shakespeare may have worked.
There were no standardised copyright laws in the period, so playwrights didn’t own their own plays. In fact, once a company of actors had bought a play from a writer, it belonged solely to them.
A playwright might have met at the playhouse or in a tavern with the principal actors from a company and read them parts of his play or a scenario or plot. If the actors liked it, they’d commission the writer to finish the play.
The first draft was known as the ‘foul papers’, which may have been copied out cleanly by a scribe who created the ‘fair copy’. This copy would have been sent to the Royal censor, known as the Master of the Revels, who had been given the authority to approve all plays’ ‘playbooks’ before they reached the stage. He would have forced the writer to cut all blasphemy and politically offensive material.
Once approved with the Master’s signature, the playbook would be ready to be recopied by the company ‘book holder’ into actors’ parts known as ‘cue scripts’.
The actors would rehearse, and if the playwright worked closely with the actors, more revisions may have taken place at this stage.
Finally, the play would be performed, but many changes might still occur after the first performances.
Once the company or playwright decided to publish a copy, the printer could edit the play further, adding or subtracting punctuation marks, or making errors because the printing process was so complex.
Modern editions of Shakespeare, such as the Arden Shakespeare, are edited by scholars who have studied various versions of the same play and who have had to make decisions based on their knowledge and understanding of Shakespeare.
The First Folio of Shakespeare’s works, published in 1623 by two of Shakespeare’s fellow actors, is not only a monument to Shakespeare himself and his literary brilliance, but also to the dynamically collaborative process of producing the plays for the stage.