As in a ruin we it call
One thing to be blown up, or fall;
Or to our end like way may have
By a flash of lightning, or a wave;
So Love’s inflamèd shaft or brand
May kill as soon as Death’s cold hand;
Except Love’s fires the virtue have
To fight the frost out of the grave -- Ben Jonson

The heartland is frozen this darkened morn. There may be a few giggles about now in that special place in Hell.

This was an elusive book. Wells attempts to grasp Shakespeare and his contemporaries and situate such into a tight focus, unfortunately without much supporting documentation. What is left is conjecture. I thoroughly enjoyed the sections featuring Marlowe and Jonson. The areas where Wells attempts to divine the collaboration of Fletcher and Middleton into later works from the Bard proved a bit ponderous. This isn't a scholarly analysis but a popular survey larded with some informed guessing. ( )

As a Shakespeare dilettante, I find some of the attributions regarding collaborations slightly worrying. I'm not quite sure why this has been worthy of research. One of the more risible of 'evidence' put forward, I forget where, was that Middleton was co-author of “All's Well That Ends Well” (incidentally Wells also professes this attribution). The argument was: 'As an example, the word "ruttish" appears in the play, meaning lustful - and its only other usage at that time is in a work by Middleton' or something to that effect. So, creative writers are supposed never to have used a word only once in their entire oeuvre? This is quite typical of academics who have no idea how creative writers - and particularly dramatists - work. But the most preposterous of all must surely be their citing of the stage direction 'all': '"All" (preferred by Middleton) only occurs twice in the Folio - both times in All’s Well.' Playwrights were writing their plays on the hoof to impossible deadlines. Stylometric analysis is a method which has been seriously challenged and is evidently flawed because it takes no account of how writers write. Only a few obsessives really care, those of us who can bring ourselves to watch Shakespeare, generally just enjoy and don't really worry about whether he might have had assistance from this or that writer. We know he collaborated as a matter of habit, so one for the historians to mull over, the rest of us will focus on what is best, the often-astounding dialogue...

Statistics is a very dangerous tool for someone to use who is not experienced with the kind of mathematical artifacts which can be produced in complex analyses. It is VERY easy to amend the modelling parameters slightly to produce the answer you are hoping for, and few people will ever delve into the workings of a complex statistical algorithm to see whether the weights put on different variables are justifiable or not. In practice, skilled English professors are not going to have the mathematical experience to challenge the findings.

John von Neumann famously said, of graphical mathematical models: “With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.” By this he meant that one should not be impressed when a complex model fits a data set well. With enough parameters, you can fit any data set, even a requirement to draw an elephant on the output graph. I fear that this authorship assertion may turn out to be an elephant...I struggled with this when I was learning foreign languages. I had some naive hope that by applying mathematical modeling to some issues they could be put on a firmer footing than is usual in linguistics. It didn't take me very long to realize that what I was doing was merely recreating the limited data set available, by turning it into formulas rather than raw data. My formulas, simple as they were, described the data set with great accuracy. But if the data set would have been slightly different (say, by some anthropologist discovering some as-yet undocumented languages spoken in Papua New Guinea or somewhere), my formulas would have been slightly different too, and still be equally accurate. I did get very high marks on a paper I did on the subject, from a professor who clearly didn't know much about statistics (very few linguists do), but thought my approach was highly original, and encouraged me to explore it further. I gave up on linguistics soon after that. At least on that kind of linguistics. Sometimes, even mathematical physics, or anything very deeply mathematical is the same. It takes some years to be able to sort the dross and put it to one side.

But whatever the case, I confess to be a Marlowe admirer (not so much with Kyd, Fletcher or Beaumont):

'Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships,
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.
Her lips suck forth my soul: see where it flies!
Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.'

In “Shakespeare and Co.” by Stanley Wells

Those first two lines rank among the best in the English language.

If Shakespeare is not the author of his plays, it is remarkable that so many of his contemporaries accepted he was - Jonson, Heminges & Condell, even the bilious Greene in his own way accept Shakespeare as the author. Others might have contributed a few bits here and there, but Shakespeare was light years ahead of them. Marlowe was not always an astonishing dramatist himself - Faustus contains lots of rather naff comic scenes, in among the good bits. Barabus is presented as entirely unsympathetic and hateful, whereas Shakespeare makes Shylock human. Jonson was still writing plays about 'humours' when Shakespeare was writing Hamlet. Shakespeare's plays junked the unity of time and space conventions that his contemporaries valued. It's entirely likely that some parts of his plays were written by others - but no more than a passage here or there. There is something different about Shakespeare's plays that suggest they were the work of one, very unique, person. Out of interest, why does no-one question the authorship of Marlowe's plays, Jonson's, Fletcher’s, Beaumont’s? Maybe we should be looking for evidence of Will's handiwork in them, rather than expending so much time and energy trying to diminish the Shakespeare's achievements, just because he didn't go to bloody Oxford and his dad made gloves.

Then there's the actors - you think if Kemp, Burbage or Armin came up with a funny line or a nice plot twist, that Shakespeare would have been in any position to say "no, this work is evidence of my brilliance and none shall interfere!" I think not.

Then there's the editing. For the 12,542nd time, I tell you. Do you really think the plays are three hours long because anyone actually wanted to be on stage that long? No! Shakespeare wrote far more material than was needed because they would have edited every performance, using different scenes and different lines for different shows (especially useful when switching between playhouse and court). Is this not a form of authorship? But this is all detail. The big problem is more cultural - we primitively need to believe that a work of art is a window into a single brilliant artist's mind. It is this old fashioned need to see art almost biographically that holds us back. Put simply, we need to think differently about what literature is. This was a world with no copyright, where audiences would often miss the first half of a play, arriving halfway through with totally different attitudes to so many things. I think also a lot of it is snobbery. People don't want to believe that a man without a university education could write brilliant works. I'm sure in the future many will say a man from a London slum (Chaplin) could never have made such films or an uneducated man like Twain could be so wise. Maybe they didn't. Does it matter? The works are timeless.

Those who don't want to face it are fundamentalist Shakespearean scholars, and the town of Stratford-on-Avon, the livelihoods of both depend on the myths and legend. I thought Anonymous was brilliant by the way. Even if it wasn't true. Which it might have been. And it was good enough for Mark Rylance to appear in the film.

Another non-book, I fear. I'm gutted about this to be honest. It's like Milli Vanilli all over again. I threw out all their LPs, and have just tossed my original copy of First Folio into the recycling. Nah, just kidding; I love Milli Vanilli… Some days when I wake up, I’m sometimes convinced I authored several Acts from Hamlet. But the computer always says, 'No.' Alas. No such luck… ( )

A fascinating and engaging book about Shakespeare's contemporaries. The insight into the artistic world of Renaissance London is wonderful and really gives a sense of the artistic melting pot and the spirit of collaboration which helped create some of the greatest plays and poems in the English language. This is an accessible read, peppered with anecdotes and insights into each individual writer's work and how each writer reflected or influenced Shakespeare. I particularly enjoyed the chapter on Shakespeare and actors, and how Shakespeare, and the other writers, created particular roles for certain actors. Wonderful. ( )

Once you're acquainted with the outline of Shakespeare's life and times, it's worth taking a look at thisi lively review of his contemporaries. Stanley Wells is a highly repected Shakespearian scholar with an impressive command of the original texts relating to theatrical history of the period. He begins with an introductory chapter drawing the reader into the background to the first performance of "Hamlet", followed by a gossipy survey of the acting scene and a series of lengthy chapters profiling Marlowe, Dekker, Johnson, Middleton and Fletcher. Each serves as a useful brief introduction to the dramatist's work, and reminds us that Shakespeare worked in an atmosphere of collaboration, a small, intense world peopled by colourful characters working together in challenging and sometimes dangerous conditions. The reader is likely to be left with the desire to explore further. Although Wells is conscious throughout of his brief, to keep Shakespeare central to the narrative, he also points out the cases where work of high quality has suffered when compared and contrasted to the Bard's output.

I'd recommend this to anybody wanting to delve a little deeper into Shakespeare's professional life, after reading a biography such as Michael Wood's "In Search of Shakespeare", and also to those about to embark on a more general study of Renaissance Drama. My only regret is that the final chapter on John Webster is truncated and leaves us wanting more.

An appendix containing contemporary documents is surprisingly interesting - particularly a contemporary list of costumes and properties.

This is a wonderful book. Not only does Wells apparently know everything about the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage, he can get it on the page concisely, amusingly, and with rather good prose.

This book is full of fascinating tidbits--the usual anecdotes, of course--but lesser-known stories as well.