By Jordan Ho

We were very fortunate to have three undergraduate interns join our team in Galway this summer. We’ll be sharing some of their work on the blog over the next few weeks. First up: a reflection on coauthorship and collaboration by Jordan Ho, an English and Philosophy student at Lehigh University. – Erin

Co-authorship and collaboration are cornerstones of contemporary academic practice and literary history; understanding how individuals in the Early Modern period shared ideas and the social factors at play in the transmission of those ideas is core to both the mission of STEMMA and to all scholars of the Early Modern period. However, while most Early Modern manuscript compilers created space for co-authorship by only occasionally concerning themselves with authorship attribution, the hierarchies inherent in contemporary academic authoring practices and data entry systems tend to assign certain ideas to individual authors of shared documents. While this is often useful, especially in cases of crediting underrepresented authors, this practice frequently assigns a contemporary understanding of idea-sharing as fit to notions of individual capital rather than the mutualism that many of these works seem to represent on their own. 

Julia Heim and Sole Anatrone make a mission of breaking down this academic “credit” hierarchy. They introduce collaboration in twenty-first century academic writing as a practice that challenges “the notion of individual idea-ownership as base currency for stability in the academic sphere, pushing back against pre-established normative, patriarchal lines of legitimacy that privilege certain modes of resource access and work production” (Heim and Anatrone 1). These “patriarchal lines of legitimacy” range from Shakespeare to Dickens to Fitzgerald– men of the canon hailed for their individual genius. Our overreliance on proving individual or primary authorship often effectively produces an incorrect image of early literature as white, male, and overwhelmingly solitary.  Even when applied to the “men of the canon,” this view obscures the truth: these men still actively participated in co-authorship. Christopher Marlowe’s contributions to some of Shakespeare’s most popular works, including the three Henry VI plays, have increasingly become more recognized, with Oxford University Press officially adding Christopher Marlowe as an author to their editions in 2016. Dickens co-wrote with many of his close friends, including the mystery novella A House to Let written collaboratively between Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Wilkie Collins, and Adelaide Anne Proctor. The nuanced relationship of Zelda Fitzgerald to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most popular novels is still being discovered in a case that toes the line between collaboration and plagiarism.  By connecting authors, poems, and their circulation in manuscript, STEMMA works in part to reassess this selective view of literary history through demonstrating the collaborative nature of literary production. Scholars might use the data that STEMMA offers to push  back against the idea of “individual idea-ownership”  and highlight formerly unseen or undervalued voices. This approach also allows us to critically examine our own positions in “idea-capitalism,” helping us understand why exactly we are so hesitant towards co-authorship in the contemporary era. 

The Devonshire Manuscript (MS 18316) offers us a view into collaboration and co-authorship culture; it was created by a rough estimate of twenty hands, including three female attendants to the court of Anne Boleyn: Mary Shelton, Mary Fitzroy, and Lady Magaret Douglas, between 1525 and 1559.

Famously, the manuscript contains some 120 poems by Sir Thomas Wyatt, making it an important contributor to Wyatt’s body of work, but further, it serves to highlight its female contributors. Collin Burrows calls the manuscript “the richest surviving record of early Tudor poetry and of the literary activities of 16th century women,” (Burrow, 3, 5) accentuating women’s “agile performances of identity within the Henrician court” (Shirley 35). The Devonshire Manuscript seems to have been intended for use among friends, containing extensive scribal interaction that makes author attribution difficult (Siemens 4). Women often made their voices heard literally in the margins, offering comments and annotations on pre-existing male-authored poems from the female perspective. For example, when one of the scribes entered Sir Thomas Wyatt’s “Patiens for my demise,” (71r)  a poem about infidelity, she offers the comment “to her that saide this patiens was not for her but that the contrarye of myne was most metise for her porposse” (71r) (Siemens 5). The impression of the poem on the reader then at once contains both the original intent of the author and the woman’s interpretation, blending lines of authorship and anonymity that cannot be easily rectified by a single authorship-attribution model. Further, the manuscript contains a number of anonymous poems which are alleged to be the work of female manuscript authors; these works, alongside the co-creation inherent to the manuscript structure, have allowed the Devonshire Manuscript to become one of the preeminent examples of effective collaboration and contribution between men and women. The blended lines of authorship and collaborative writing resists the (perhaps anachronistic) impulse to separate each scribe’s writing, allowing them to act both as individual contributors and as a combined voice. 

Scholars have noted that the emphasis on collaboration over co-authorship operates within the same individuality framework that we rely on today; while collaboration allows for the sharing of ideas, it still often emphasizes one author as the ultimate “owner,” effectively reproducing the thought that ideas themselves are academic capital (or at least emphasizing individual ownership as a way to “legitimize” the work). The Devonshire Manuscript inherently defies this framework by virtue of its poems’ anonymity and stark contrast to the copied male giants of the period. Manuscript compilations that act as editions of single male authors, as opposed to anonymously transcribed and co-authored manuscripts, are sometimes viewed as “more legitimate,” despite the transcription process of a manuscript arguably being a form of often anonymous co-authorship itself. An example of a giant of “canonical” male scholarship  is the Egerton Manuscript, a significant Sir Thomas Wyatt manuscript notable because it had been transcribed primarily by Wyatt himself (although, the inclusion of other hands, as I mentioned, brings the question of co-authorship again to mind).  The Devonshire

Manuscript’s anonymous poems’  inclusion among poets such as Sir Thomas Wyatt and Chaucer allow an alternative view of female literary contribution beyond annotation or anonymous compilation of more famous works. It allows them to thrive in the spotlight, rather than the shadows. This is not to say that these women did not operate as individual authors nor that their intellectual work was more effective in collaboration than not; it is simply an example that reasserts the power of collective authorship in resistance to assumptions of individual writing and manuscript compilation.

Some contemporary authors (the first of which being Jeffrey Masten) argue that the rise of the concept of the “singular” or primary author rose in reaction to a rising anxiety about homosocial collaboration between male authors (Radel 525). A core example of this phenomenon was the co-authorship of Beaumont and Fletcher (ex. MS 203231), English dramatists whose mutual works bled together to the point that incredible amounts of scholarship  have been dedicated to attempting, and often failing, to sort the two voices from each other (Masten 341). Beaumont and Fletcher’s works  simmer with tensions of gender and sexuality (see Peter Berek and Rachele S. Bassen’s analysis of the instability of gendered social roles in Love’s Cure), only further emphasizing an authorial relationship that threatened, at the time, the emerging ideal of “companionate marriage” (Radel 525) (heterosexual marriage based on companionship rather than finances) and currently threatens, in the twenty-first century, the capitalist impulse to make everything, especially our own ideas, into individual products to own and sell. While some have written extensively on Beaumont and Fletcher’s personal lives as further “proof” of homosociality or reasoning of their co-writing, their mutual authorship combined with the themes of their shared plays inherently defy a framework that privileges canonical “great” singular authors. While Beaumont and Fletcher each have extensive bodies of work in their own rights, their mutual authorship, when their ideas and voice blend together, become a unique type of literary contribution.  The Devonshire Manuscript and Beaumont and Fletcher’s collaborative authorship reasserts that, in our search to identify marginalized or otherwise underrepresented voices and themes, we must consider mutual authorship to be its own kind of creation. In approaching Early Modern texts through this framework – and perhaps experimenting with its application to our own academic writing – we might offer a space for texts to reveal contemporary expectations of understanding and sharing the world. 

Bibliography 

Bassan, Rachel S. ““All this is but forgery”. Gender and Performative Concerns in Fletcher and Massinger’s Love’s Cure.” LEA – Lingue e letterature d’Oriente e d’Occidente, vol. 12, 2023, pp. 15-33. Firenze University Press, doi: https://doi.org/10.36253/lea1824-484x-14469.

Berek, Peter. “Cross-Dressing, Gender, and Absolutism in the Beaumont and Fletcher Plays.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, vol. 44, no. 2, 2004, pp. 359–77. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3844635. 

Siemens, Raymond G. “Introduction: The First Sustained Example of Men and Women Writing Together in the English Tradition.” A Social Edition of the Devonshire Manuscript (BL MS Add 17,492), edited  by Julia Armstrong, Raymond G. Siemens, and William R. Bowen, Iter Press, 2015. 

Heim, Julia, and Sole Anatrone. “Working in the Shadows: Collaboration as Queer Praxis.” Gender/Sexuality/Italy, no. 7, 2021, https://www.gendersexualityitaly.com/2-working-in-the-shadows/.

Masten, Jeffrey A. “Beaumont and/or Fletcher: Collaboration and the Interpretation of Renaissance Drama.” ELH, vol. 59, no. 2, 1992, pp. 337–56. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2873346. 

Shirely, Christopher. “The Devonshire Manuscript: Reading Gender in the Henrician Court.” English Literary Renaissance, vol. 45, no. 1, 2015, pp. 32–59. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/48635123. 

Siemens (Editor), R., Paquette, J., Armstrong, K., Leitch, C., Hirsch, B. D., Haswell, E., & Newton, G. “Drawing Networks in the Devonshire Manuscript (BL Add 17492): Toward Visualizing a Writing Community’s Shared Apprenticeship, Social Valuation, and Self-Validation.” Digital Studies/le Champ Numérique, vol. 1, no. 1, 2009. http://doi.org/10.16995/dscn.142

Radel, Nicholas F. Review of Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama. Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 52 no. 4, 2001, p. 524-527. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/shq.2001.0065 

Shelley, Allison, and Rebecca Hersher. “Shakespeare’s ‘Henry VI’: Christopher Marlowe Officially Credited As Co-Author : The Two-Way.” NPR, 24 October 2016, https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/10/24/499144368/christopher-marlowe-officia lly-credited-as-co-author-of-3-shakespeare-plays.

Zarevich, Emily. “The Devonshire Manuscript.” JSTOR Daily, 18 November 2022,  https://daily.jstor.org/the-devonshire-manuscript/.