30 Great Myths About Shakespeare - Plot & Excerpts
Shakespeare in Love shows Shakespeare at various stages of writer's block—practicing his signature, speaking to his therapist, making a false start (Romeo and Ethel the Pirate's Daughter)—before covering page after page in a love-inspired white-hot creative frenzy. Whether in success or in failure, the writer writes (or fails to write) alone. The paradigm certainly holds true in other art forms such as music. We cannot imagine Beethoven's Ninth Symphony as composed by “Beethoven and his collaborator and his revisers.” (Our phrasing comes from the Revels edition of Dr Faustus, edited by David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen, whose title page advertises the multiple hands in “Marlowe”'s play.) Mozart's Requiem is still so called despite our knowledge that it was unfinished at Mozart's death and that much—perhaps the larger part—was contributed by Franz Xaver Süssmayr. But if genius is solitary, theater is by definition collaborative. It requires the input and coordination of many groups of people: actors, costume designers, and musicians (to name but three).
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