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Joint Enterprises: Collaborative Drama and the Institutionalization of the English Renaissance Theater.

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Joint Enterprises: Collaborative Drama and the Institutionalization of the English Renaissance Theater By Heather Anne Hirschfeld Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004

It does not go without saying that all scholarship is collaborative, and among the many virtues of Heather Hirschfeld's Joint Enterprises is its own exemplary collegiality: with inexhaustible diligence and expository skill, in its slim bulk it consolidates a vast range of previous theater-historical research together with the author's own original insights to advance, at least methodologically, a fertile new approach to its field. That field has in recent years become synonymous with the work of Jeffrey Masten--an ironic accolade, given his deconstruction of individual "hands"--and Hirschfeld devotes space in the first of two introductory chapters to asserting both the value and the recuperability of the cultural information that gets lost in his model. Rather than abstract collaboration from its institutional setting in order to generalize and extend it as a uniform poetics, that is, Joint Enterprises argues that dramatic collaboration was fundamentally premised on the professional autonomy and individualism of its members--just one of the competitive frictions on which its alchemy could operate--and accordingly that the subjects of our greatest interest are not the Beaumonts and Fletchers, those artificially and retroactively idealized patron saints of the practice, but instead the more numerous and minor writing teams whose very occasionality reveals the material pressures that brought them together and to which their efforts responded. The social metaphor of this bold rethinking is thus not the pair-bond but, by turns, the syndicate, the temporary alliance, the intermittent partnership, the one-night stand: or, more accurately, no normative metaphor at all, since she is primarily eager to analyze "the particular shape or mode of a writing group" within the nonrepeating parameters of its specific historical moment, and, where possible, to locate "a predominant interpersonal affect" for each project (8).

This yields for her a "rationale of the case-study," whose theoretical strengths also prove interpretive handicaps the book as a whole cannot always (nor, in its defense, does not attempt to) overcome. Heterogeneity makes for an unstable, shifting, opportunistic set of investigative procedures, and one senses immediately that the other collaboration on which her thesis rests--the very terms "collaborative drama" and "institutionalization" juxtaposed in her subtitle, seeming to offer a direct, parallel relation between the two--represents something of a paradox, the second term inevitably gesturing toward a more synthetic, developmental narrative, which the genre of the case study by definition resists. This strain is especially felt in the introduction, where Hirschfeld must establish historical and theoretical frameworks for readings that, in their ingenuity and nuance, usually end up exceeding the discursive taxonomies she initially assigns them. (The fault, that is, lies not in the quality of the ideas but in an overly formal deference to academic convention, a mannered tendency toward meta-argumentation that likewise disrupts...

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