It is axiomatic that all writing - and reading - is intertextual: ‘etymologically, the text is a tissue, a woven fabric’, formed out of materials used elsewhere and reworked. The composition of a text, and its interpretations, calls up numerous other texts in a potentially endless chain of association. This is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the early modern theatre, whose owners, censors, writers, actors, playgoers, printers, patrons, readers, attackers, defenders, all contributed to a rich palimpsest of signification that continues to excite their modern counterparts. To take the three most obvious players in this list: writer, actor and playgoer all collaborate in bringing plays to life. All three, that is, call up myriad texts in the writing, performing and witnessing of a play. This study examines the career of a playwright whose name is almost synonymous with ‘collaboration’, and explores how the term might be usefully applied, locally and more generally, to early modern playmaking.

A book about collaboration is also, most obviously in this case, a collaborative enterprise. It would be inappropriate, but also inaccurate, to assign portions or shares of this book to either contributor. At numerous points in its making we collaboratively reworked and refashioned our material, to produce a text that, not unlike many early modern texts, associates two or more names. During the course of the project we have benefited from the knowledge and advice of a number of scholars. We would like to thank Gary Taylor (University of Alabama) and John Jowett (Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham), editors of the Oxford Middleton project, Richard Dutton (University of Ohio), Andrew Gurr (University of Reading), Michela Calore, Sue Wiseman (Birkbeck College, London) and Edel Lamb (Queen's University, Belfast). We are grateful to Sam Walters, Artistic Director of The Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond-upon-Thames, for information about his 1992 production of John Marston's The Dutch Courtesan.

In writing about collaboration we have become acutely aware of the difficulty of laying sole claim to the authorship of anything one writes, and of the extent to which it has been influenced and shaped by so many people.