Biography: The Bard is placed in the context of the collective theatrical enterprise in which he was taking part.
There is clearly a continuing market for popular books on Shakespeare, all the more if they are written by distinguished academic authorities: Harold Bloom, Frank Kermode and Stephen Greenblatt have all had their go, though Bloom's gigantically ambitious Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human is very different from Greenblatt's hypothetical biography Will in the World or Kermode's modestly introductory The Age of Shakespeare. Now it is the turn of Stanley Wells, another veteran Shakespearean, retired director of the Shakespeare Institute at Stratford, author and editor of literally dozens of Shakespeare publications.
The aim of his wittily titled Shakespeare & Co is to restore the sense of the collective theatrical enterprise of which Shakespeare was the star. An extended subtitle lists the "Co" in question: "Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, John Fletcher and the other players in his story". Shakespeare is to be rescued from the artificiality of single author study, re-located in the habitat out of which his plays emerged.
As in all things academic, there is here a history of changes in fashion. In the Victorian era of Bardolatry, Shakespeare was a figure apart: Edward Dowden's immensely influential Shakespeare: His Mind and Art would then have been a representative title. In the first half of the 20th century TS Eliot did much to rehabilitate the reputation of Shakespeare's contemporary playwrights and a whole generation of scholars researched the theatrical conditions of his time. After the war, in the time of New Criticism with its high valuation of the organically integrated work of art, Shakespeare tended once again to be sovereign. But in the last 35 deconstructive years, with the death of the author widely reported, attention has swung back to Shakespearean contexts. It is to be expected that Wells, co-editor of the Oxford Complete Works, the text that more radically deconstructed the traditional canon than any other modern edition, would not privilege a conventional stand-alone view of Shakespeare.
IN FACT, HIS book is, in many ways, a relatively old-fashioned one. It offers a brief overview of the theatrical conditions of Shakespeare's times, followed by lucid and compact accounts of the life and work of his best-known contemporaries: the scandalously subversive Marlowe, his exact coeval; Jonson, his cantankerous younger friend and rival; the prolific Middleton, with whom Shakespeare may have collaborated; and Fletcher, with whom he certainly did. Wells offers the non-specialist reader a succinct synthesis of the most up-to-date scholarship on the theatre of the period, with a bonus appendix of some original documents - letters, ballads, diary entries - giving inside glimpses of Elizabethan theatrical life. Special attention is devoted to plays Shakespeare may have co-authored. George Peele, scholars now believe, might have had a hand in Titus Andronicus; Thomas Nashe in Henry VI; the very obscure George Wilkins seems to have worked with Shakespeare on Pericles; the better known Middleton on Timon of Athens; and Fletcher, who was to succeed Shakespeare as the resident dramatist of the King's Men at the Globe, part-wrote The Two Noble Kinsmen and All is True, aka Henry VIII. Shakespeare, like most of the playwrights of his time, was quite prepared to write in partnership -but less so. Even Wells is prepared to admit that Shakespeare wrote an uncommonly large proportion of his plays on his own, including all his major ones. And the book throughout illustrates the difficulty of trying to integrate Shakespeare back into his theatrical environment. We have evidence of what Shakespeare learned from Marlowe - a great deal - and even more of what other playwrights learned from him: there are echoes of his work everywhere. But the concentration on the "Co" throughout the book is achieved largely by keeping Shakespeare himself as a shadowy presence in the wings.
Yes, of course, he did work with others, his fellow actors and shareholders in the Globe; yes, he was prepared to collaborate with other playwrights; yes, there were other gifted writers working at the time whose plays deserve recognition. Yet who is going to be convinced by Wells's comparative evaluation? "To see Shakespeare's overall output in relation to Jonson's is to realise that, although Shakespeare's range within his plays exceeds that of any of his contemporaries, he is far less versatile than some of them, including Jonson, in the overall scope of his output."
The inescapable fact remains that Shakespeare's drama is of a different order of things and no amount of re-situating him among his colleagues and companions will change that. The trouble with Shakespeare the superstar is that, if you let him on the scene at all, however talented the supporting cast, he acts everybody else off the stage.
Nicholas Grene is Professor of English Literature at Trinity College, Dublin and the author of Shakespeare's Serial History Plays, published by Cambridge University Press
Shakespeare & Co By Stanley Wells Penguin Allen Lane, 286pp. £25