Did Shakespeare write his plays alone?

Posted March 27th, 2010 by admin

When I began teaching in the early 1980s, I was only dimly aware that a revolution was taking place in how Shakespeare’s world and works were understood.

A decade earlier, as an undergraduate at Columbia University, I had been introduced to Shakespeare’s England through The Elizabethan World Picture (1943), EMW Tillyard’s slim and influential volume. We learned from Tillyard that English Renaissance culture was conservative in nature and defined by rigid hierarchy, a view confirmed by Ulysses’ famous speech in Troilus and Cressida on the importance of everyone knowing his place (“Take but degree away, untune that string, / And hark, what discord follows”). Years passed before I registered how desperate Tillyard’s book was, how much it represented a futile effort to bind on to Shakespeare’s England what was fast unravelling in his own. Read more…