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== //Writing in Early Modern England//  ==

In Early Modern England, playwrights, among them [|Shakespeare], [|Jonson], and [|Marlowe], often wrote their plays in collaboration with each other. The closest thing to methods of collaborative writing in Early Modern England is electronic publication in the 21st century. We, the people of the 21st century, share more with the people of the 16th century when it comes to writing than anyone ever has! Just think, you approach writing more like Shakespeare and his contemporaries than Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, or Jane Austen ever could have! You were made for writing incredible pieces!! You see, in 16th century England, writers were accustomed to exchanging their writing amongst their friends, allowing their friends to edit their work, add to it, and copy it into their own journals, called commonplace books. Often, writers, particularly poets such as John Donne, would form small groups, called coteries. These friends would often meet to read their poetry aloud to each other and exchange their work amongst friends. Within a coterie, friends would exchange work, copy others' work into their commonplace books, add on to each other's work, and, even, circulate an edited version of a friend's poem as their own! And all this was accepted as a norm of Early Modern Writing.

When it came to theatre, playwrights were faced with a series of limiting factors that shaped the way they wrote plays: playwrights often wrote in collaboration with each other, they wrote for a specific company, they were limited by the number of actors they had in their company, they were limited to the particular skills and abilities of the actors in their company, and they often listened to actors' thoughts on their scripts and, possibly, changed these scripts accordingly.

Playwrights wrote for the stage. They made more money from producing a show at a theatre than by circulating their scripts in print. Therefore, acting companies closely guarded the scripts their playwrights wrote. In Early Modern England there were no copyright laws since the first printing press in England, William Caxton's press, first printed in 1485. So, if someone stole and printed a script, playwrights and the companies for which they wrote could potentially lose a great deal of money.

Further Reading:

Lowenstein, Joseph. [|The Author's Due: Printing and the Prehistory of Copyright]. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Lowenstein, Joseph. [|Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship]. New York, NY: Cambridge UP, 2002. Masten, Jeffrey. [|Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama]. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997.