The genre of urban-located and urban-conscious drama that came to be known as city comedy is fascinated with the particular spatial signifier of the workshop. In plays such Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday and Middleton's A Chaste Maid in Cheapside the hybrid spaces of family workshops provide, as we have seen (see Chapter 5), sites for stage business with props and hands, for cultural reflection on the artisanal population of London, and function as mechanisms for plot as characters of different provenance and rank visit the shoemaker's or the goldsmith's workshop in search of all manner of objects of desire. But the workshop had another very real application in the context of the early modern theatre as both a literal and a conceptual space in which the practice of collaborative authorship took place. As sociologist Richard Sennett has detailed in his wide-ranging study The Craftsman, the atelier or workshop was a significant creative space in this period, one that can tell us much about group activity and the collaborative production of art and culture.

Even in the case of Shakespeare, it is now widely accepted that the early modern theatre was a commercially driven, collaborative enterprise, not just between writers and the wider personnel of any theatre company or printshop (players, seamstresses, tirewomen, feathermakers, scribes, booksellers, to name just a few) – what Ton Hoenselaars has described of late in memorable terms as making the playwright's ‘creativity…inseparable from his interaction with colleagues on the workfloor’ – but also frequently between the writers themselves who produced plays both with and in competition with each other in the hothouse environment of the public theatres. The title page of Eastward Ho! when it was first issued in print described it as being ‘Made by Geo. Chapman, Ben: Iohnson, Iohn Marston’. This 1605 play appears to have been an example of the first category of what James Bednarz describes by the umbrella label of ‘literary coactivity’, namely ‘collaborative writing’, which is to say when a playtext was scripted by more than one dramatist, sometimes with particular sections of the plot (main plot and subplot for example) being parcelled out to particular individuals or perhaps different acts apportioned to different writers to ensure a speedy, efficient and therefore economically favourable production line.