‘Fabricated Lives’: Shakespearean Collaboration in Fictional Forms

Abstract

The essay examines fictionalized accounts of the collaboration between Shakespeare and his contemporaries, focusing on those that portray Christopher Marlowe as occasionally Shakespeare’s co-author. Beginning with two novels by Anthony Burgess, Nothing Like the Sun: A Story of Shakespeare’s Love-life (1964) and A Dead Man in Deptford (1994), I then look at Peter Whelan’s play, The School of Night (1992), before concluding with the film Shakespeare in Love (1998). By looking at these popularized renditions of collaboration and biography, I conclude that the more collaborative that the fictionalized work is in origin, the more positively it portrays such relationships in Shakespeare’s time.