“The play’s the thing”

Collaboration’s a wonderful thing. You can’t really work as a writer in the business world without coming to terms with the need for collaboration. The partnership can be with a client, a designer, a strategist, another writer, but the objective (naturally) is to come up with the best result. That’s the tricky bit.

I’ve been reading James Shapiro’s new book Contested Will about ‘who wrote Shakespeare?’ No, of course it wasn’t Bacon, Oxford or Marlowe, it really was Shakespeare, a glover’s son from Stratford. But one of the most compelling arguments, affirming Shakespeare rather than a shadowy aristocrat as the author, is our increasing knowledge of Shakespeare’s collaborations. We now know that, particularly for the late plays, Shakespeare wrote in partnership with Fletcher, Middleton and others.

But it seems clear that Shakespeare wrote the great plays – Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Lear etc - as the sole author. So does that argue against collaboration? Does it lead to weaker writing?

For 26 Treasures, our writers were asked to write solo but given a different form of collaboration. Each of the writers was paired with an object. I got a candle stand. Others were paired with cabinets, doorways, beds, flasks, lockets, mirrors. It’s interesting how the object developed life and character as the writers grew more and more familiar with their objects.

A fascinating process took place, explored at greater length by the individual writers under ‘creation stories’ that you can read in another part of this site. Writers started playing with thoughts and words, bouncing ideas of their object. The object began talking to and through the writer, moving from being an object to a treasure.

- John Simmons