William Shakespeare may well have worked with contemporary playwright Thomas Middleton when creating All’s Well That Ends Well, Oxford academics believe, adding to evidence that the Bard collaborated frequently throughout his career.
But rather than detract from Shakespeare’s reputation as an unrivalled genius, such partnerships should enhance our appreciation of the titan of theatre, they argued.
“The important thing to stress when writers write collaboratively is that there is a harmonic vision,” said Prof. Laurie Maguire of Oxford University’s English faculty. “In that sense, Shakespeare is in all five acts of his plays. He’s talking with his collaborators. So don’t worry, we’re not losing Shakespeare. It’s our gain, not loss.”
Maguire and Emma Smith, from the same department, recently stumbled across similarities between All’s Well and Middleton’s writing style that could help explain many of the play’s “stylistic, textual and narrative quirks”.
They said they had been “steeped” in the works of Middleton, which can be read in a single volume produced by the university’s publishing arm. “We went back to All’s Well That Ends Well by coincidence, and the connections just dumbfounded us,” she said.
On one level, the researchers’ theory, which they admit is not yet proven, makes sense. Shakespeare is known to have collaborated with Middleton on Timon of Athens, written around 1606, at about the same time as All’s Well. Maguire also noted that the proportion of All’s Well written in rhyme was much higher than normal for a Jacobean Shakespeare.