Shakespeare and his contemporaries, with Darren Freebury-Jones

What does it mean to be called an “upstart crow”?

In 1592, a pamphlet titled Greene’s groats-worth of witte described William Shakespeare, in the first allusion to him as a playwright, with this phrase, calling him “an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers.” This phrase sparked centuries of speculation. As Darren Freebury-Jones explores in his book, Shakespeare’s borrowed feathers: How early modern playwrights shaped the world’s greatest writer, Shakespeare’s so-called borrowing was neither unusual for the time nor a weakness—it was ultimately a testament to his genius.

Exploring how Shakespeare navigated a competitive theatrical scene in early modern England, Freebury-Jones reveals the ways in which Shakespeare reshaped the works of contemporaries like John Lyly, Thomas Kyd, and Christopher Marlowe into something distinctly his own. By combining traditional literary analysis with cutting-edge digital tools, he uncovers echoes of Lyly’s witty comedies and gender-bending heroines, Kyd’s tragic revenge dramas, and Marlowe’s powerful verse in Shakespeare’s early plays.

This episode sheds light on Shakespeare’s role as a responsive and innovative playwright deeply embedded in the early modern theatrical community. Listen in to learn more about the influences on the “upstart crow”  as he created a canon of timeless works.

Listen to Shakespeare Unlimited on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Spotify, Soundcloud, or your favorite podcast platform.

Dr Darren Freebury-Jones is author of the monographs: Reading Robert Greene: Recovering Shakespeare’s Rival (Routledge), Shakespeare’s Tutor: The Influence of Thomas Kyd (Manchester University Press), and Shakespeare’s Borrowed Feathers (Manchester University Press). He is Associate Editor for the first critical edition of The Collected Works of Thomas Kyd since 1901 (Boydell and Brewer). He has also investigated the boundaries of John Marston’s dramatic corpus as part of the Oxford Marston project and is General Editor for The Collected Plays of Robert Greene (Edinburgh University Press). His findings on the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries have been discussed in national newspapers such as The Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Observer, and The Independent as well as BBC Radio. His debut poetry collection, Rambling (Broken Sleep Books), was published in 2024. In 2023 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in recognition of his contributions to historical scholarship.

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published December 31, 2024. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had help with web production from Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services are provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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BARBARA BOGAEV: From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I’m Barbara Bogaev.

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It turns out the earliest reference in print to William Shakespeare as a playwright isn’t in a script or a playbill. It comes to us in a pamphlet from 1592 called Greene’s Groats-worth of Witte and it’s allegedly written by fellow playwright Robert Greene, although no one really knows who wrote it, since it came out after Greene’s death.

At any rate, it describes Shakespeare as “an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers.” Which, if you’re not hip to Elizabethan shade, means he was a plagiarist. Or maybe it does. I mean, no one knows for sure what the author of Greene’s Groats-worth really meant.

In fact, the whole concept of plagiarism wouldn’t make much sense to early modern playwrights. They were too busy borrowing plots, characters, and poetry from each other to sell tickets and to get butts into seats.

But all of this cross-pollination has come into sharper focus as the tools of computer analysis have gotten better and better. New technology makes it possible for researchers to find all the shared words and phrases between various texts, even if they’re not exact repetitions.

The scholar Darren Freebury-Jones uses these new tools as well as old-fashioned literary analysis in his book Shakespeare’s borrowed feathers.

Freebury-Jones gives us a view of Shakespeare as a working playwright, within a network of contemporaries and competitors. And far from diminishing Shakespeare’s originality, Freebury-Jones shows us just how brilliantly he refashioned his second- hand materials.

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BOGAEV: Darren, it is wonderful to have you on the podcast.

DARREN FREEBURY-JONES: Barbara, it is fabulous to meet you. I’m a big fan and it’s such a privilege to be invited to be a guest on this paragon of Shakespeare podcasts.

BOGAEV: Oh, get out of here. Listen, I picked up your book and immediately thought of, you know, the Picasso line, “Good artists borrow. Great artists steal.” So, why take a closer look at Shakespeare’s borrowing from his contemporaries if everyone doesn’t?

FREEBURY-JONES: Well, it’s something that’s always interested me, the ways in which Shakespeare interacted with his contemporaries.

I think that interest probably began in my third year as an undergraduate at Cardiff University. So, we were looking at the book of Sir Thomas More and the manuscript of that play—a collaborative play involving five authors, we think Shakespeare is one of them—is kept at the British Library. What I found so fascinating about that collaborative play was the ways in which each dramatist was bringing something distinct to the table in order to produce a play that was unique in the context of their dramatic corpora.

There’s a great passage in Jonathan Bate’s book, How the Classics Made Shakespeare, where he says that, “Imitation is seen as deficient today, but it was actually regarded as a cardinal virtue during Shakespeare’s time.” So, what I really wanted to do with this book was anchor Shakespeare in his original historical and theatrical context.

BOGAEV: I was reading that you have a background in drama, in acting, and that, this is one thing you emphasize in the book, that Shakespeare’s experience as an actor plays a big part in his borrowing from other playwrights. Were you thinking that it plays a big part because Shakespeare as an actor had other writer’s words in his mouth on stage?

FREEBURY-JONES: Yes, I think my own dramatic background probably shapes in part the way I approach Shakespeare. For me, Shakespeare is very much an actor-playwright, and his background as an actor is fundamental to the evolution of his artistry.

So, to be an Elizabethan player, to succeed as an Elizabethan actor, you needed a fabulous aural memory. You’ve only got a few weeks to rehearse these plays. You’ve only got cue scripts, your lines and a couple of words from preceding speeches. I’m reminded of that fabulous moment in Hamlet when the touring players turn up in Elsinore, and Hamlet is able to recall a 13-line speech with good accent and good discretion, despite having only heard the speech once. So, I think a bit like Hamlet, Shakespeare had prodigious skills in memorization.

Using modern digital databases, we can see that Shakespeare’s early plays actually read like patchworks of lines that you find in the works of contemporary dramatists such as Christopher Marlowe, such as Thomas Kyd, and such as George Peele. So, Shakespeare is an actor dramatist. He’s embedded in the theatrical vernacular of the period.

BOGAEV: So, his head is just full of his contemporaries’ work and all of them were editing and revising each other’s work, so their hands are just, as you said, just everywhere. Let’s talk specific writers, and you start with John Lyly. Just remind us who he was and what distinguished his life and his work.

FREEBURY-JONES: Yes, John Lyly was one of the playwrights about whom I knew fairly little when I started this book. He’s chiefly seen as a writer of sparkling comedies, which were often performed before Queen Elizabeth and they were performed by children, by child actors.

In so many respects, John Lyly paves the way for Shakespeare’s comedies. So, we see in his plays: battles of wit, cross-dressing heroines, parallelism between noble characters and lower-class characters. I think without John Lyly, we simply wouldn’t have what we call Shakespearean comic plays today.

BOGAEV: So, what stands out for you in Shakespeare’s borrowing from this particular playwright is these disguised heroines?

FREEBURY-JONES: Yes, I think John Lyly could be quite transgressive. So, you have his Galatea, for instance in which the two heroines, Galatea and Phillida, disguise themselves as boys and fall in love without realizing that they’re both female. At the end of the play, one of those characters gets turned into a boy so that they can marry. But we’re never told which character.

I think the closest Shakespeare gets to John Lyly’s transgressive approach to homosocial and, I guess we could say, homoerotic relationships would be the conclusion to Twelfth Night when Viola is still in boys’ apparel when she’s coupled up with Duke Orsino.

BOGAEV: So, you said you didn’t know Lyly that well when you started looking into this. Were you surprised by just how much Lyly influenced Shakespeare once you started digging?

FREEBURY-JONES: When we think of Lyly’s influence on Shakespeare, we often think of earlier comedies such as The Two Gentlemen of Verona or A Midsummer Night’s Dream but what I found with this book was that Shakespeare seems to have turned back to Lyly in the twilight of his career.

So, from 1608 onward, Shakespeare starts writing plays for the indoor Blackfriars Theatre. That’s the very space where lots of John Lyly plays were performed. He seems to have dug out a quarto edition of Endymion, and we can see the influence of that play on Cymbeline, I think.

Cymbeline is a play that I like to call the “Now that’s what I call Shakespeare,” of the canon. You get the sense Shakespeare’s throwing a lot of paint at the canvas and seeing what sticks. It’s got tragic elements, comic elements, pastoral elements, and you also get theophany

Using modern digital databases, we can see that Shakespeare’s early plays actually read like patchworks of lines that you find in the works of contemporary dramatists such as Christopher Marlowe, such as Thomas Kyd, and such as George Peele. So, Shakespeare is an actor-dramatist. He’s embedded in the theatrical vernacular of the period.

BOGAEV: Okay, so moving on to a playwright that people are more familiar with, Christopher Marlowe. What are Shakespeare’s most famous echoes of that rival’s work? And I’m thinking, is the obvious one the player’s speech in Hamlet?

FREEBURY-JONES: Yes, that really stands out, that player’s speech. I think Shakespeare’s harking back to Marlowe’s play Dido, Queen of Carthage, where Aeneas delivers this stirring speech recounting the fall of Troy.

A lot of scholars, historically, have looked at the first player’s speech in Hamlet and said, “There’s no way Shakespeare could have written this. It’s written in such an archaic style.” I think they’re entirely missing the point there. I think Shakespeare is harking back to earlier tragic plays, such as Dido, Queen of Carthage, in order to show the ways in which he’s fundamentally revolutionizing the tragic genre.

BOGAEV: You also really dig into the big data research on Marlowe and Shakespeare, and it just seems a mess. I mean, I have to say, you’re right that, “At first glance, the new research, seems to confirm that these two rivals co-wrote a number of plays.” But then you say that should be taken with just a huge grain of salt. So, what’s the upshot for you?

FREEBURY-JONES: Yes. It’s a field that is very polemical—authorship attribution studies—and it’s a field that was kick-started in the 19th century, really, when scholars noticed differences in verse styles between Shakespeare and collaborating playwrights such as John Fletcher, for instance.

So, for me, it’s fundamental to take a plurality of approaches. So, we can use these digital techniques, which are really valuable, I think. But I’m also a big fan of those more traditional literary critical approaches. Reading these works closely. Respecting these historical and performative artifacts.

So, the theory that Shakespeare co-wrote the Henry VI plays with Christopher Marlowe was really ignited in 2016 with the publication of the New Oxford Shakespeare. In the book, I actually presents numerous historical and internal reasons as to why I think we should take that with a pinch of salt. I’m not actually convinced by those arguments which tend to rely on the frequencies of single words, which is quite problematic, I think, given that these plays are the result of numerous hands from the authors, from professional scribes, and so on.

BOGAEV: So, wise to be wary of the of the robots.

FREEBURY-JONES: Yes, yes. Wise to be wary, I think.

BOGAEV: So, where does the author of The Spanish Tragedy, Thomas Kyd, fit in? You say that his influence has also been underrated like Lyly’s.

FREEBURY-JONES: Yes, so, first off, The Spanish Tragedy is the play that will be most familiar to listeners when they think of Thomas Kyd—it’s the first revenge tragedy on the public stage, it’s got so many elements that we see in later tragic works, it’s very influenced by the Roman philosopher and tradition, Lucius Annaeus Seneca—so, you’re getting a sense of ghosts bellowing for revenge, bloody violence, also, this sense of providence; so, deific or supernatural forces having a say in a play’s events.

The Spanish Tragedy begins with the allegorical figure of revenge and the ghost of Andrea who recounts his descent into the underworld. At the conclusion of The Spanish Tragedy, you have a play within a play. So,  Hieronimo avenges the murder of his son Horatio by casting those murderers within a play within a play. Conveniently, that play is a tragedy. The courtly audience are clapping along as those murderers get killed on stage for real, and they’re remarking that, “This is very realistic blood spatter,” before realizing that the bloodshed is in fact real.

I think Thomas Kyd was a truly tremendous dramatist. When we think of plays within plays: Hamlet. The Mousetrap would instantly leap to mind, we might think of Pyramus and Thisbe in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but also importantly, all of the events in The Taming of the Shrew take place in the context of a play within a play

BOGAEV: How do you know that Shakespeare knew Kyd’s work so well?

FREEBURY-JONES: Well, I think you’ve got all of those elements of dramaturgy where I think Kyd paves the way in so many respects. The Spanish Tragedy—I don’t think we would have Hamlet, were it not for The Spanish Tragedy, and there are arguments that Kyd was responsible for a lost Hamlet play of the late 1580s as well—but using the Collocations and N-grams database, the database I used for this book, I discovered that Shakespeare echoes lines found in Kyd’s proportionally just as much as he echoes Christopher Marlowe, which is a really striking finding, I think. You do get him echoing uniquely Thomas Kyd all the way through his career.

BOGAEV: But there is debate around this lost Hamlet and also King Lear, whether Shakespeare may have been working off of a Kyd version of Lear, and there’s also, you point out, ongoing debate among scholars about whether Shakespeare co-authored Arden of Faversham, so, where’s the thinking on that and how does it play into your thinking about Shakespeare and his borrowing?

FREEBURY-JONES: Yeah. So, Arden of Faversham, it’s essentially a true-life crime drama, isn’t it? It tells the story of the murder of the mayor of Faversham, Thomas Arden, on Valentine’s Day, 1551, at the hands of some assassins: his own wife and her lover, Mosby.

It might surprise some listeners given that Arden of Faversham is sometimes included in collected works editions of Shakespeare, but it’s a play that’s been attributed to Thomas Kyd since 1891. In the 20th century, there was a consensus of scholars from all over the world who gave the play to Kyd, because in terms of dramaturgy and in terms of language, it so closely parallels what we might call traditionally accepted Kyd works.

There are certainly echoes of Adren of Faversham in Shakespeare plays, but for me, that pattern of borrowing very much fits into Shakespeare’s borrowings from other plays attributed to Kyd’s, such as The Spanish Tragedy, such as his Turkish tragedy Soliman and Perseda. So, I think we’re dealing with the thorny issue of distinguishing imitation from authorship.

Arden of Faversham is very much at the epicenter of scholarly debate about Shakespeare’s early style. But the fact of the matter is that scholars are struggling to distinguish Shakespeare’s early style from Thomas Kyd’s, which I think says a lot for Kyd’s influence on Shakespeare’s dramatic language, as well as his overall dramaturgy.

BOGAEV: Well, yes, and you make this pretty convincing case that Kyd might be the big kahuna influence on Shakespeare, which made me wonder whether his work has been underrated because he wasn’t university educated like Marlowe. I mean, is there a scholarly, kind of, snootiness at work here?

FREEBURY-JONES: Yes, potentially, and I think that’s a really interesting point you bring up there because Shakespeare is more similar to Kyd in terms of that background, in terms of having a grammar school education. But I think you do see some key differences stylistically between the university educated playwrights such as Christopher Marlowe, Robert Greene, and George Peele on the one hand, and Kyd and Shakespeare on the other.

So, Marlowe’s verse style is largely end stopped, ten syllables. Shakespeare, right from the beginning of his career, perhaps because he has an actorly ear, he incorporates the so-called feminine ending, 11 syllables. The most famous example of a feminine ending would be Hamlet’s, “To be or not to be, that is the question.” Kyd very much paves the way for Shakespeare in terms of the rates for feminine endings.

Another thing that distinguishes Kyd from university educated playwrights is his propensity for fusing words for compound forms, such as “Flaxen-haired” or, a particular favorite of mine in the play Soliman and Perseda, “Pinky eyed.” This has often been regarded as a Shakespearean tick—think of King Lear, for example, “oak-cleaving thunderbolts”—but Kyd very much got there first. So, maybe that difference in terms of education enabled Shakespeare and Kyd to distinguish themselves stylistically.

BOGAEV: Interesting. Okay, now you mentioned Robert Greene, so we have to move on to him. He’s the source of the “upstart crow” quip about Shakespeare, and just to remind everyone what the whole context for that is, the passage goes, “There is an upstart crow beautified with our feathers. That with his tiger’s heart wrapped in a player’s hide supposes he’s well able to bombast out a blank verse, as the best of you.”

So, he’s really thrown shade on Shakespeare there maybe, I mean, that’s the reference we all know. But who was Robert Greene? Where did he come from? He sounds like a real raking cat. And we don’t even know if he was talking about Shakespeare there, do we?

FREEBURY-JONES: Yeah, so that passage in the 1592 pamphlet Greene’s Groats-worth of Witte has caused a lot of controversy, really. So, pretty much everything about it has been debated, from its meaning to its target, even its authorship.

A lot of scholars have seen it as an accusation of plagiarism against Shakespeare and that’s something I tackle head-on in the book. I don’t see it necessarily as an accusation of plagiarism. I think it ties into Robert Greene’s general combativeness with actors who he regards as taking a lot more credit than the writers. I think he’s taking issue with Shakespeare as an actor who is beautified with the feathers of other playwrights because Shakespeare has delivered their lines on stage. He has learned what works and what doesn’t necessarily work for audiences. So, I think that’s ruffled Robert Greene’s feathers, that suddenly you’ve got an actor who has had the audacity to turn his hand to writing plays.

BOGAEV: Easy target. Actors are such low hanging fruit, right?

FREEBURY-JONES: Easy target. But I think, in many respects, the passage in Greene’s Groats-worth of Witte is also a big compliment. So, we could see it as a bad review; the first reference to Shakespeare as an active playwright. But my sense is that Robert Greene’s a little bit concerned, actually. Maybe the university-educated playwrights are losing a little bit of control in terms of the playing and playmaking scene. I absolutely—I do feel like Robert Greene was threatened in 1592.

BOGAEV: You make the case that Greene was a better playwright than he’s been given credit for. What was he so great at?

FREEBURY-JONES: I think so. I think his plays are highly entertaining. So, what appears to be his first work, Alphonsus, King of Aragon, is very much riffing off Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine play but it’s a highly entertaining play in its own right.

So, you’ve got the goddess Venus descending at the beginning of the play and then ascending at the conclusion of the drama. You’ve got a wooing scene taking place on a battlefield and you’ve got a brazen head belching forth flames of fire.

A giant brazen head would be quite an expensive prop, I think. So, Robert Greene recycles that for his magus or magician play, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, and that’s a spectacular play in terms of plotting ability. I think Greene was a really great plotter. Some scholars have argued that Greene actually came up with the double plots as opposed to plays with the main plots and a comic subplot.

He’s also tremendous in terms of staging. So, you have split scenes, for instance, there’s one moment in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay where characters in Oxford look into a magical glass and can see events happening miles away in Fressingfield. So, I think Robert Greene is a very innovative playwright

BOGAEV: As far as his influence on Shakespeare, where do you see it most?

FREEBURY-JONES: Well, Robert Greene wrote a prose romance called Pandosto, which Shakespeare uses directly as a source for the Winter’s Tale. It’s interesting, given that you have all of this discourse of plagiarism surrounding the Greene’s Groats-worth of Witte passage but Shakespeare doesn’t seem to have been terribly influenced by Greene’s dramatic language.

One thing Greene does do that is quite interesting, I think, is he produces comic plays that could be considered dramatically unhappy. So, he—

BOGAEV: So, a problem-ish play?

FREEBURY-JONES: Problem-ish plays, yeah. So, he produced a play called The Scottish History of James the Fourth, for instance, where James IV wants his wife Dorothea dead, so he can court another woman, and at the end of that play, James and Dorothea are reunited. So, you’re ticking the boxes in terms of the comic genre. You’ve got union or reunion. But I can’t help but think what might a sequel to that play look like, and it does—

BOGAEV: It’s pretty dark.

FREEBURY-JONES: Exactly, exactly, it’s very dark. It feels very problematic, and it looks forward to plays such as Measure for Measure. So, I think you’re getting an insight into just how experimental a dramatist Robert Greene was and how he delighted in mixed modes and hybrid genres.

BOGAEV: Okay. We have to leave some time for Shakespeare’s acknowledged collaborator, Thomas Middleton. He was the author of Ghost of Lucrece. Is it a general consensus that Shakespeare influenced Middleton more than Middleton influenced Shakespeare?

FREEBURY-JONES: I would say that’s accurate, yes. Because Thomas Middleton’s a younger playwright. He’s born in 1580, Shakespeare born in 1564. You mentioned the Ghost of Lucrece, so, that’s very much riffing off Shakespeare’s narrative poem. And Thomas Middleton’s now widely recognized as author of The Revenger’s Tragedy which is a play that opens with the tragic protagonist staring into the hollow sockets of his murdered lover’s skull, it’s a very “Alas, poor, Yorick,” moment. So, he’s learning a lot from Shakespeare. He’s influenced by him, and he also would have learned a lot from collaborating with Shakespeare on Timon of Athens.

BOGAEV: Do the new computer data methods reveal new insights or theories into the relationship between Thomas Middleton and Shakespeare?

FREEBURY-JONES: I think the database I use validates the attribution of Timon of Athens to Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton, and I think you get the sense that Middleton, potentially, had a more extensive hand in that play than has been credited.

It’s quite interesting with Middleton being a younger contemporary. I do get the sense with Timon of Athens, of Shakespeare guiding his younger contemporary. When it comes to co-authorship, what we might call simultaneous collaboration, my sense is that the authors have their plots and they go off and write their respective stints. But with Timon of Athens, there seems to be some scenes in which they might very well have been in the same room. So, Thomas Middleton’s very much under Shakespeare’s wing for that play.

But I also think Shakespeare needed a younger, bitingly satirical playwright like Thomas Middleton to help out with a play like Timon of Athens. So, you’re getting a sense with Timon of Athens of classical dramaturgy shaking hands with London comedy. I think urban satire really is Thomas Middleton’s forte. He was a bitterly satiric writer and that landed him in a lot of trouble. So, he satirized the monarchy in his play, A Game at Chess, which was a hugely popular drama, but turned out to be the last play Thomas Middleton would ever write.

BOGAEV: And what happened to him? What was the comedown?

FREEBURY-JONES: Well, he simply wasn’t allowed to write plays anymore. It all goes rather quiet for Thomas Middleton after that. So, he never writes for the stage again, and we have the documentary evidence of him being buried in Newington and leaving his widow in poverty.

BOGAEV: It’s so depressing actually.

FREEBURY-JONES: But you see it with so many of these playwrights, the likes of Thomas Dekker and George Peele as well. They’ve produced works that, you know, are still read, still studied, sometimes still performed today, but in terms of their lifetimes, the large majority of them did have tragic endings.

BOGAEV: Well, all said and done, did Shakespeare borrow more or less than his contemporaries?

FREEBURY-JONES: Oh, that’s a great question, and I’m going to give it a rather fence sitting answer on it. I think Shakespeare is neither more nor less imitative than contemporary playwrights.

In the book, I describe the network of playwrights during the period as a “veritable avian community.” They’re servicing a commercial operation with a large literary turnover. Fundamentally, they’re trying to entertain and engage audiences in order to make money. So, there’s a lot of imitation going on. There’s a lot of duplication going on. So, if you have a hit play on the subject of Richard III in one theater, it’s not surprising if you then encounter a play on the same subject by a rival company.

With Shakespeare, you know, you get the sense that sometimes he’s commissioned to provide remakes. So, I think of King John, for example, which Shakespeare writes for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men around 1596. There’s good evidence that he’s got a 1591 quarto of a Queen’s Men play, The Troublesome Reign of King John, at his elbow, on his writing desk, when he’s penning that play. So, he follows it incredibly closely. You could almost think of Shakespeare as a modern screenwriter in that instance, where he’s been commissioned to pen a remake of an older hit by a now defunct studio.

BOGAEV: Oh, I love how you bring him alive that way. This is, like, an adjacent question to that: what does Shakespeare’s borrowing say about him as a writer?

FREEBURY-JONES: Well, this is something I really wanted to convey in the book, by anchoring Shakespeare in his original theatrical and historical context, is that imitatio, translatio, and parodia, these are the very bedrocks of the Elizabethan education system. Imitation was not regarded as deficient during the period.

So, I think we’re getting a sense of Shakespeare’s creative genius, his creative process, through looking at the ways in which he can take elements of other playwrights works. He does something quite different with them, and frequently he turns away from other playwrights, such as Ben Johnson, who’s dabbling in city comedy, to provide just one example.

So, I think we can then recognize Shakespeare as a man who is firmly embedded in the playmaking scene. His plays aren’t soliloquies, they’re dialogic. They’re firmly embedded in a network of affiliation and indebtedness within the early modern writing scene. We can see Shakespeare as a powerfully responsive writer.

For me, writing this book, it’s win-win. We get some insights into Shakespeare’s creative genius, and, for many readers, I’m also introducing them to some quite electrifying dramatists whose careers intersected with Shakespeare’s. We’ve so long detached Shakespeare from the community of writers in which he works, and we have this romantic image of him as sui generis, as a solitary genius. But I think placing Shakespeare in his original theatrical milieu, that’s providing a much more accurate picture. For me, it actually, rather than denigrating Shakespeare, enhances my sense of his creative genius.

BOGAEV: Well, I love the book, and I really enjoyed the conversation too. Thank you so much.

FREEBURY-JONES: Oh, that means so much Barbara. It’s been wonderful to speak to you.

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BOGAEV: Darren Freebury-Jones. His book is called Shakespeare’s borrowed feathers: How early modern playwrights shaped the world’s greatest writer. It’s published by Manchester University Press, and it’s out now.

This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had technical help from Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Our web producer is Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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