Shakespeare's Borrowed Feathers:

How Early Modern Playwrights Shaped the World's Greatest Writer

by Darren Freebury-Jones

Manchester University Press 2024

The borrowed feathers in the title of this new book by Darren Freebury-Jones is a reference of course to an infamous little 1592 pamphlet called Greene's Groatsworth of Wit, purporting to be the posthumous posturings of the hack playwright Robert Greene, in which he takes one of the most famous swipes in literary history: “there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers heart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the only Shake-scene in a countrey.”

Freebury-Jones, a Lecturer in Shakespeare Studies at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, invites readers of Shakespeare's Borrowed Feathers: How Early Modern Playwrighs Shaped the World's Greatest Writer, invites readers to wonder exactly what's going on under the surface of this remarkable bit of vituperation, positing his whole book on the essentially collaborative nature of Elizabethan drama and the resulting complexity of what's known as attribution studies, the parsing of who wrote what and with whom. Shakespeare worked in a theater world boiling over with feral talents, writers like Christopher Marlowe, George Peele, Thomas Middleton, John Lyly, Thomas Dekker, and Thomas Kyd, about whom Freebury-Jones wrote an entire book suggestively titled Shakespeare's Tutor.

As our author notes on, eh, more than one occasion, Stanley Wells, the biggest poo-bah of the Shakespeare studies world, wrote just such a book back in 2006, predictably titled Shakespeare & Co., and this one builds on it, not only rehashing the biographical basics of these Shakespearean rivals but also subjecting their works and others, a database of 527 plays dated between 1552 and 1657, to the kinds of quantitative analysis that tracks the use of favorite words and multi-word phrases in order to suggest both team-ups and plagiarism, conscious and otherwise.

Freebury-Jones deals with ten major Shakespeare contemporaries and indicates these linguistic parallels with bold type, showing when two plays by two different authors contain identical phrasings that defy any notion of coincidence. He's a knowledgeable, energetic writer, but the book's foremost disappointment is how little bold type shows up in these pages. Doubtless there are databases solely dedicated to such comparisons, but it would have been nice to see more of them here.

Luckily, there are other attractions. Freebury-Jones does a wonderfully spirited job with each of his subjects, perhaps predictably Thomas Kyd, whose Spanish Tragedy he describes with breathless dorkishness as “the Gone with the Wind, Titanic, or Avengers: Endgame of the Elizabethan period.” The author's fervid imagination crops up everywhere, always distinctly vivid and almost always distinctly odd, as when he goes on a little aria about the aftermath of Christopher Marlowe's death:

We can imagine Marlowe's parents searching in vain for his unmarked grave in Deptford. Their hair streaked with white, faces lined like maps detailing their history, and enduring love that had known tragedy and comedy in equal measure. Memories propping them up, Remembrances of their little boy surrounded by his sisters, Margaret, Anne, Jane, and Dorothy … Laughing, joking, bickering …

Yeesh. Calm thyself.

Considering the author's cheek-by-cheek relationship to the Shakespeare Trust, and thereby the Shakespeare tourism industry, it's not surprising to see his flights of imagination very much extend to Shakespeare himself. “Shakespeare's thorough immersion in classical rhetoric, the language of persuasion, as learned at school in the writings of Cicero, Quintilian, Erasmus, and later Henry Peacham's treatise, The Garden of Eloquence (1577), would have been of particular use to a budding actor-dramatist,” he writes at one point, for instance, after dutifully noting that there's no evidence that Shakespeare attended school, much less crayoned his initials into a copy of The Garden of Eloquence. And having established this elaborate grammar school experience, why not do a bit more stagecraft? “Shakespeare evidently had a powerful associative memory, which helped him conjure pertinent images or plot points,” he writes, adding, “This prodigious memory is traceable in part to his grammar-school education but, more importantly, also to his background as a player.” So he had a powerful associative memory, see, and he developed it back at grammar school in Stratford, see, and it served him in good stead for the rest of his life. Check.

The result of all this imaginative reconstruction of Shakespeare and company is a wonderfully chummy picture of the working Elizabethan playwright's world. Set against the centuries-long myth of Shakespeare as a solitary sui generis genius, the alternate picture in Shakespeare's Borrowed Feathers is both inarguable (even the line-by-line comparisons given here are enough to end all doubt) and infinitely more attractive.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News