Lecture: Paul Brown on “It’s not what you know, but whom . . . and where you live: Collaborative playwriting in early modern London”

Title: It’s not what you know, but whom . . . and where you live: Collaborative playwriting in early modern London

Abstract: Early modern playwrights frequently wrote plays in collaboration with one another. Recent advances in empirical methods of authorship attribution have given scholars a greater canon of collaborative plays. But this increase in canon size has not been followed by a greater understanding of the mechanics of dramatic collaboration. Instead, scholarship has focussed on these attributions, deciding just who wrote what. This talk will address this by asking who wrote collaboratively? Why do it? And, just how much collaborative playwriting was there? In so doing, it will consider the role of physical geography – just who lived, worked, prayed, and drank near whom – in collaborative playwriting.

Bio: Paul Brown is Lecturer in English at De Montfort University, where he teaches letterpress printing, xml encoding, and computer programming to literature students. His research focusses on digital humanities, literary biography, and collaborative playwriting.