Aplicación del software PESUC a la encuesta de satisfacción estudiantil realizada en la

Roslyn Knutson prioritises the importance of commerce and economics in the generation of material within a theatrical company. “Companies repeated the subjects and formulas that had been successful in their own offerings and in the repertories of their competitors” (Repertory40). The plays generated by any one author, particularly one such as Shakespeare who worked within a single company, are thus dictated by a wider theatrical context than his ownoeuvre. To separate the authorial canon from its fellow plays, its material and economic conditions and its moment of production is to prioritise, anachronistically, one paradigm of authorship at the expense of others.

Scholarship has been slow to appreciate the compatibility of the individual author with the commercial and social environment of the playhouse. An early need to protect Shakespeare from any imputations of hackwork extended, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to a denigration of the usefulness of Henslowe’s diary as

a model for the Chamberlain’s-King’s Men, on the assumption that the Shakespeare company would operate on prestige lines: Collier’s assertion that the company “sought to produce plays of lasting interest”, for example (qtd. in Knutson,Repertory17). On the other hand, more recent work – particularly that building on post-structuralist theory – has prioritised the social nature of the playhouse to a point where the individual author is lost as all words become socially produced. Jowett resists this, suggesting that “the initial premise that language is ‘socially produced’ places the writing of a text within the widest cultural environment. It suggests that a text has a fundamentally nonauthorial determination. To the extent that this is true, it must be true of any text, irrespective of the structure of its authorship” (“Pattern of Collaboration” 182). However, attention to the social environment does not necessarily dissolve the author, but redefines the authorial presence. Bednarz argues that “a current heightened awareness of the historical conditions under which Shakespeare’s work was written and disseminated through manuscript, print and performance has prompted a re-examination of how these modes of production have shaped and continue to shape what ‘Shakespeare’ means” (252). Despite this re-evaluation, the “apocryphal” plays belonging to the repertory of the King’s Men – perhaps the most important governing set of historical conditions on Shakespeare’s work – have remained in a steadfastly “unShakespearean” space.

We have some slight evidence that the Chamberlain’s-King’s Men understood its authors as part of a group ensemble. Thomas Dekker’sSatiromastix(c.1601) stages, as its finale, the arraignment of Horace, who stands in for Ben Jonson.75_{Sir Rees ap}

75_{Dekker lifts the analogous characters from Jonson’s ownPoetaster. Harbage suggests that}

“Kemp’s” line in2 Return from Parnassus“our fellowShakespearehath giuen him a purge that made him beray his credit” (1771-73) may be referring toSatiromastix(108).If this is the case, this may be another instance of Shakespeare ideologically “owning” the wider repertory of the Chamberlain’s Men. W. Bernhardi took this a step further in 1856 by ascribingSatiromastixto Shakespeare (see Brooke,Apocryphax). Quotations fromParnassusare taken from Leishman.

Vaughan makes Horace/Jonson swear to several oaths including that “you shall not sit in a Gallery, when your Comedies and Enterludes have entred their Actions, and there make vile and bad faces at euerie lyne, to make Sentlemen haue an eye to you” and “you must forsweare to venter on the stage, when your Play is ended, and to exchange curtezies, and complements with Gallants in the Lordes rooms” (5.2.298-301, 303-05).76

Jonson is usually presented as one of the pre-eminent voices of individual authorial authority on the early modern stage, but here a Chamberlain’s Men’s play resists the prominence that Jonson is accused of according himself. Rather, the Chamberlain’s Men’s staging of “authorship” takes a more subtle form even in one of the plays that most explicitly represents contemporary authors on the stage. WherePoetaster

concludes with an apologetical dialogue where the author (perhaps Jonson playing “Jonson”) is brought on stage to explain his own play, the Epilogue toSatiromastixis delivered by Tucca, who explicitly breaks away from “authorship”: “I recant the opinions which I helde of Courtiers, Ladies, and Cittizens, when once (in an assembly of Friers) I railed vpon them: that Hereticall LibertineHorace[Jonson], taught me so to mouth it” (Epilogus 6-9). While an audience would understand the metatheatrical joke that, of course, Tucca is a fictional character whose lines are written by Dekker (himself personated inPoetasterandSatiromastixas Demetrius Fannius), it also understands that authorship here is represented through authorial proxy. Tucca becomes his own “author” and that of the play, accepting responsibility for it and petitioning the audience for their approval.

Peter Fabell’s isolation from the main plot ofMerry Devilhas a related function. His role as the young man helping his friends to achieve their romantic ends is a

standard one but, unlike analogous figures (such as Rynaldo in Chapman’sAll Fools), Fabell is not related to any other character in the play. His separation from the rest of

the characters, emphasised further in the Induction, renders him detachable, the more so because we see so little of the magic that would integrate him with the main plot. Fabell, in fact, is himself a representation of authorship: the play is not about him, but scripted by him.

In the Induction Fabell is challenged, forced literally to overcome the demons of his own story in order that he might proceed to the matter of comedy, a plot concerning others that Fabell shapes and manipulates. Crucially, the only explicit piece of magic Fabell subsequently performs is also the most explicitly authorial. In 1.2, Fabell arrives at the George and is introduced to Sir Arthur Clare, who makes a single disparaging remark about Raymond, and within twenty lines Fabell is left alone onstage. In soliloquy, he reveals that he is aware of the compact between Clare and Jerningham to thwart Raymond and Millicent’s courtship and their motives. When his three friends re-enter, it is then Fabell who reports to Frank that the match has now (i.e. while he has been alone onstage) been made; that Frank is to marry Millicent; and that Millicent is to be sent to the nunnery. With the young generation armed with the knowledge, Fabell announces that “Age and craft with wit and art have met” (1.2.189), and he is in a position to stage his rewriting of the fathers’ plot.77_{Fabell’s true magic is an authorial privilege; he has an}

entire overview of the narrative, knowing what is and what will happen. The absence of the manifestly supernatural throughout the play allows this power to remain

benevolent: the “merry devil” is not a trickster but a plotter, describing the action and casting players to perform it. Fabell himself is absent for all the key action: the liberation of Millicent, the escape through the forest, the switching of inn signs to confuse the fathers. Instead, as Joseph Horrell points out, his “infrequent appearances do not

77_{Beckerman claims that “the father” ofMerry Devilis the play’s “judge-figure”, the figure}

“sometimes central to the story, sometimes not, [who] usually referees the conflict and, at the conclusion, either passes judgment or grants mercy” (37). This is extrapolated from the fact that Arthur Clare speaks the play’s final line; however, while Clare does accept the outcome of the love plot, it is Fabell who retains most of the characteristics of the authoriser of action.

project him with any of the appurtenances or characteristics of the necromancer” (36).78

Instead, he arrives at the conclusion of episodes, approving the interlude and instructing his players on their next scene. That is, he performs the role of the embedded author, separate from but intrinsically connected to his fellows.

It is perhaps not surprising that the plays of the Chamberlain’s-King’s Men, the first company to employ an embedded playwright, follow a general pattern of

embedding ideas of authorship into the content of their plays rather than into paratextual material. Weimann sees Shakespeare’s manifestation of authority as different to Marlowe’s, with which I opened this chapter, because it “is prepared to share anensemblecommitment,” (58)inscribingmodes of performance into his plays (88). In these plays, representations of authorship are invested – whether through free choice (Fabell), fate (the unseen devil ofYorkshire Tragedy) or politic intervention (Old Flowerdale). These instigators of action ingratiate themselves within the plot structure, becoming inseparable from the “plays” they create. We are accustomed to speaking of authorial self-conception in the terms articulated by more self-consciously classical dramatists such as Jonson or Webster. In these, authoring is an individual activity and the author is separated from the text they create, particularly in print where the authorial voice manifests as prefatory material and addresses to readers. Yet the plays of the Chamberlain’s-King’s Men, especially the “apocryphal” plays whose critical treatment has been defined by these notions of detached and disinterested authorship, also demonstrate a fascination with authorship. In these, however, attention is drawn to the collaborative and integrated processes of authorship that this company, generating plays from within its capitally invested circle of shareholders, was pioneering.

78_{Compare Bacon and Bungay’s interventions in the love triangle of Edward, Lacy and Margaret,}

By resituating the “apocryphal” plays in their original context, this chapter has argued that the plays individually demonstrate a range of authorial influences that can only be understood in a pluralistic sense: the author(s) of the text work within a network of requirements and influences that include sources, genre, political context, company strategy and acting personnel. The plays are generated by a collaborative company in which the author plays an integral role, neither completely socialised nor clearly individual. They are then subject to a further range of interventions as they pass into print. “Shakespeare” on title pages and records recognises the influence of the individual William Shakespeare on the plays discussed in these chapter, and his

“ownership” of them insofar as they are commensurate with the narratives of company ownership, genre experimentation, response and style explored above; but

“Shakespeare” also begins to recognise the beginnings of “Shakespeare” as authenticating agent independent of the historical individual. Shakespeare is both individual and plural, a physical creative agent and a locus for converging collaborative forces. Hitherto the apocryphal plays have only been discussed as Shakespearean or non-Shakespearean with regard to the former; with regard to the latter, however, their “Shakespearean” interest has been obscured by questions of attribution. Only by allowing for the more general participation of “Shakespeare” will the critical

rehabilitation of the apocryphal plays be able to take place unencumbered by a rigid canonical framework based on post-Romantic conceptions of individual authorship.

Chapter Three: Defining “Shakespeare”