I make my living collaborating with debt
people mostly I collaborate with the
dead man named Shakespeare
now you might reasonably ask what’s the
point of collaborating with somebody
who’s already dead sooner or later all
of us learn the answer to that question
because sooner or later all of us know
and love and grieve for somebody dead
our grandparents our parents usually die
before we do sometimes even our children
die before we do Shakespeare’s King Lear
has to carry on to the stage the body of
his murdered youngest daughter I know
when one is dead and when one lives
she’s dead as Earth he says and then
even though he knows she’s dead he talks
to her that would come no more never
never never never never my grandfather
who loved me like the son he never had
died when I was in high school my
youngest sister died from medical
malpractice when she was only 17 they
will come no more our ability to love
people who are dead can extend to loving
people who died before we even met them
chimpanzees and whales can love can
grieve but as far as we know we are the
only animals who can love a member of
our species who died before we were even
born in fact our relationships with the
dead can be as powerful as our
relationships with the living
Jesus and Mohammed died many centuries
ago but those two dead men still
profoundly shaped the identities and
actions of billions of living human
beings how is that possible
the dead are the most disempowered the
most disadvantaged of all human
ethnicities communities minorities what
I call human genres genres of human
identity and possibility the dead have
no power at all unless we the living
decide to give them power for 40 years
I’ve been collaborating with dead mr.
Shakespeare but in that time I’ve also
collaborated with a lot of living people
I’m a member of the global Shakespeare
community we collaborate with him by
proofreading his tax correcting them
explaining the meanings of obsolete
words memorizing his lines singing his
songs performing his plays directing
them designing them filming them
illustrating them teaching them
translating them transmitting them to
new readers and audiences so from a lot
of personal activity collaborating with
those living shakespeareans I can tell
you that working with dead people has
one huge advantage over working with
living people when you collaborate with
the dead you can win every argument
they can’t raise their hands and object
they can’t storm out of the room which
means it’s very very easy to persuade
yourself that the dead agree with you
about everything
the advantage of collaborating with the
dead is you can always get your own way
the disadvantage of collaborating with
the dead is you can always get your own
way unless you’re super scrupulous the
dead become your silent partner becomes
just an echo just a mirror but you don’t
want to actually learn something from
the dad if the dead are going to be
actually useful to the living we have to
preserve their independence I have to
listen especially carefully I have to
watch especially closely for any sign of
dissent I must become skeptical of my
own assumptions I must entertain the
possibility that this great dead genius
that I love and admire might have seen
things radically differently than I do
if we’re going to protect the
independence of the dead if we’re going
to ensure that a dead genius doesn’t
become just another you know useless
yes-man then we have to find empirical
objective impersonal ways to study what
the dead did you might think of those in
Puritan people research as a kind of
autopsy what remains of Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s remains or a few dozen
printed and manuscript texts texts make
it possible for us to know and love the
dead the history of texts are
knowledge ease from cave paintings to
21st century multimedia digital files
enable have enabled thousands of
generations to record their experiences
observations thoughts feelings dreams
identities our job is to decipher those
texts shakespeare’s remains are
inanimate material objects when we
autopsy a body we’re looking for
evidence of past agency what killed this
person a bullet a virus a blood clot
when we look at Shakespeare’s remains
we’re also looking for past agency who
printed this book who copied this
manuscript did Shakespeare write this
poem or that play and when exactly did
all of this happen and one of the things
we find out when we use our increasingly
comprehensive databases and our
increasingly sophisticated linguistic
and statistical tools is that
Shakespeare collaborated a lot anywhere
from a quarter to a third of his plays
contained big chunks of writing by other
playwrights his most important and most
frequent collaborators were themselves
amazing writers Thomas Middleton and
Christopher Marlowe I call Middleton our
other Shakespeare because he writes as
brilliantly as Shakespeare but he writes
about different things mostly urban life
middle class people work money debts the
modern economy including the modern
sexual economy political religious
ideological conflict Marlow was like
Shakespeare and Middleton an amazing
artistic innovator but he led a very
different life and a much shorter one
University educated probably a Ches
we employed as a government spy
certainly murdered when he was only 27
29 probably assassinated allegedly an
atheist and a homosexual that man
Marlowe wrote many scenes in three of
Shakespeare’s early history plays and
maybe four so when we’re collaborating
with dead Shakespeare were also
collaborating with dead Marlowe and Ed
Middleton and several other dead
interesting writers and this isn’t just
something peculiar about Shakespeare if
you fall in love with any particular
dead guy and want to know everything
about them you soon discover that you
need to learn a lot about the other dead
people who surrounded him and worked
with him so you start out as a
collaborator with one dead individual
but you soon find yourself collaborating
with an entire dead community and why
should we do this because Marlowe
differed from Shakespeare and both of
them differed from us and they both
inhabited a world that to us would be an
alien environment they interacted with
it and interpreted it each in a
different way and when you get two great
visionaries looking at their world what
we get is a stereoscopic vision of that
alien environment that unfamiliar
manscape woman scape past scape we talk
about the past as if it was one thing
but there are millions of paths there
were millions of people living in
Elizabethan England each of them as
distinct as Marlowe or Shakespeare or
Queen Elizabeth the first and all of
them now dead and even if we could time
travel back to shake
Speirs Marloes Elizabeth’s world we
wouldn’t see it the way they did because
they’re dead physical brains and their
loss personal experiences are different
from ours the dead are all immigrants
from another time and that’s why we need
them
temporal immigrants people from another
historical time zone demonstrate for us
the khalaqtu cranes of human
possibilities they are the deep gene
pool of humanity and that deep diverse
human gene pool is especially vital now
when our culture is becoming
increasingly globalized homogenized
flattened our cultural variety the
idiosyncratic variety of lots of local
cultural experiments islands of
eccentricity Shakespeare lived on an
island he never left it as far as we
know those Galapagos Islands of human
experiment used to be the insurance
policy for our species to protect us
from the unpredictable uncontrollable
world
Shakespeare’s Miranda growing up on an
isolated island almost uninhabited is
astounded when she first encounters a
brave new world that has such people in
it but will our brave new future have
any people in it what kind of people
what kind of culture what humans onerous
will be best suited to that
unpredictable brave and scary new future
the millions of human pasts are our
safety net our seed store of human
possibility but there’s many many pasts
Shakespeare writes of millions of
strange shadows they can’t preserve
themselves they’re already dead they
will only be protected and transmitted
by the actions of living collaborators
we will determine the future of the past
so each of us needs to find our own
personal dead partner pick one that you
love that inspires you or puzzles you or
talks back to you discover what is
humanly possible when you collaborate
with at least one dead person we can’t
bring the dead back to life but we can
bring the dead back to the living give a
future give a past a future yours
you
people mostly I collaborate with the
dead man named Shakespeare
now you might reasonably ask what’s the
point of collaborating with somebody
who’s already dead sooner or later all
of us learn the answer to that question
because sooner or later all of us know
and love and grieve for somebody dead
our grandparents our parents usually die
before we do sometimes even our children
die before we do Shakespeare’s King Lear
has to carry on to the stage the body of
his murdered youngest daughter I know
when one is dead and when one lives
she’s dead as Earth he says and then
even though he knows she’s dead he talks
to her that would come no more never
never never never never my grandfather
who loved me like the son he never had
died when I was in high school my
youngest sister died from medical
malpractice when she was only 17 they
will come no more our ability to love
people who are dead can extend to loving
people who died before we even met them
chimpanzees and whales can love can
grieve but as far as we know we are the
only animals who can love a member of
our species who died before we were even
born in fact our relationships with the
dead can be as powerful as our
relationships with the living
Jesus and Mohammed died many centuries
ago but those two dead men still
profoundly shaped the identities and
actions of billions of living human
beings how is that possible
the dead are the most disempowered the
most disadvantaged of all human
ethnicities communities minorities what
I call human genres genres of human
identity and possibility the dead have
no power at all unless we the living
decide to give them power for 40 years
I’ve been collaborating with dead mr.
Shakespeare but in that time I’ve also
collaborated with a lot of living people
I’m a member of the global Shakespeare
community we collaborate with him by
proofreading his tax correcting them
explaining the meanings of obsolete
words memorizing his lines singing his
songs performing his plays directing
them designing them filming them
illustrating them teaching them
translating them transmitting them to
new readers and audiences so from a lot
of personal activity collaborating with
those living shakespeareans I can tell
you that working with dead people has
one huge advantage over working with
living people when you collaborate with
the dead you can win every argument
they can’t raise their hands and object
they can’t storm out of the room which
means it’s very very easy to persuade
yourself that the dead agree with you
about everything
the advantage of collaborating with the
dead is you can always get your own way
the disadvantage of collaborating with
the dead is you can always get your own
way unless you’re super scrupulous the
dead become your silent partner becomes
just an echo just a mirror but you don’t
want to actually learn something from
the dad if the dead are going to be
actually useful to the living we have to
preserve their independence I have to
listen especially carefully I have to
watch especially closely for any sign of
dissent I must become skeptical of my
own assumptions I must entertain the
possibility that this great dead genius
that I love and admire might have seen
things radically differently than I do
if we’re going to protect the
independence of the dead if we’re going
to ensure that a dead genius doesn’t
become just another you know useless
yes-man then we have to find empirical
objective impersonal ways to study what
the dead did you might think of those in
Puritan people research as a kind of
autopsy what remains of Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s remains or a few dozen
printed and manuscript texts texts make
it possible for us to know and love the
dead the history of texts are
knowledge ease from cave paintings to
21st century multimedia digital files
enable have enabled thousands of
generations to record their experiences
observations thoughts feelings dreams
identities our job is to decipher those
texts shakespeare’s remains are
inanimate material objects when we
autopsy a body we’re looking for
evidence of past agency what killed this
person a bullet a virus a blood clot
when we look at Shakespeare’s remains
we’re also looking for past agency who
printed this book who copied this
manuscript did Shakespeare write this
poem or that play and when exactly did
all of this happen and one of the things
we find out when we use our increasingly
comprehensive databases and our
increasingly sophisticated linguistic
and statistical tools is that
Shakespeare collaborated a lot anywhere
from a quarter to a third of his plays
contained big chunks of writing by other
playwrights his most important and most
frequent collaborators were themselves
amazing writers Thomas Middleton and
Christopher Marlowe I call Middleton our
other Shakespeare because he writes as
brilliantly as Shakespeare but he writes
about different things mostly urban life
middle class people work money debts the
modern economy including the modern
sexual economy political religious
ideological conflict Marlow was like
Shakespeare and Middleton an amazing
artistic innovator but he led a very
different life and a much shorter one
University educated probably a Ches
we employed as a government spy
certainly murdered when he was only 27
29 probably assassinated allegedly an
atheist and a homosexual that man
Marlowe wrote many scenes in three of
Shakespeare’s early history plays and
maybe four so when we’re collaborating
with dead Shakespeare were also
collaborating with dead Marlowe and Ed
Middleton and several other dead
interesting writers and this isn’t just
something peculiar about Shakespeare if
you fall in love with any particular
dead guy and want to know everything
about them you soon discover that you
need to learn a lot about the other dead
people who surrounded him and worked
with him so you start out as a
collaborator with one dead individual
but you soon find yourself collaborating
with an entire dead community and why
should we do this because Marlowe
differed from Shakespeare and both of
them differed from us and they both
inhabited a world that to us would be an
alien environment they interacted with
it and interpreted it each in a
different way and when you get two great
visionaries looking at their world what
we get is a stereoscopic vision of that
alien environment that unfamiliar
manscape woman scape past scape we talk
about the past as if it was one thing
but there are millions of paths there
were millions of people living in
Elizabethan England each of them as
distinct as Marlowe or Shakespeare or
Queen Elizabeth the first and all of
them now dead and even if we could time
travel back to shake
Speirs Marloes Elizabeth’s world we
wouldn’t see it the way they did because
they’re dead physical brains and their
loss personal experiences are different
from ours the dead are all immigrants
from another time and that’s why we need
them
temporal immigrants people from another
historical time zone demonstrate for us
the khalaqtu cranes of human
possibilities they are the deep gene
pool of humanity and that deep diverse
human gene pool is especially vital now
when our culture is becoming
increasingly globalized homogenized
flattened our cultural variety the
idiosyncratic variety of lots of local
cultural experiments islands of
eccentricity Shakespeare lived on an
island he never left it as far as we
know those Galapagos Islands of human
experiment used to be the insurance
policy for our species to protect us
from the unpredictable uncontrollable
world
Shakespeare’s Miranda growing up on an
isolated island almost uninhabited is
astounded when she first encounters a
brave new world that has such people in
it but will our brave new future have
any people in it what kind of people
what kind of culture what humans onerous
will be best suited to that
unpredictable brave and scary new future
the millions of human pasts are our
safety net our seed store of human
possibility but there’s many many pasts
Shakespeare writes of millions of
strange shadows they can’t preserve
themselves they’re already dead they
will only be protected and transmitted
by the actions of living collaborators
we will determine the future of the past
so each of us needs to find our own
personal dead partner pick one that you
love that inspires you or puzzles you or
talks back to you discover what is
humanly possible when you collaborate
with at least one dead person we can’t
bring the dead back to life but we can
bring the dead back to the living give a
future give a past a future yours
you
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