SOURCE: Mooney, Michael E. “‘Framing’ as Collaborative Technique: Two Middleton-Rowley Plays.” Comparative Drama 13, no. 2 (summer 1979): 127-41.

In the following essay, Mooney explores the collaborative effort of Rowley and Thomas Middleton in A Fair Quarrel and The Changeling.

The nature of Renaissance dramatic collaboration remains a blind spot in the study of its dramaturgy. Although many explanations have been offered, we have yet to adequately describe a practice which employed nearly every Renaissance playwright, from Shakespeare and Jonson to Beaumont and Fletcher and a host of others, among them William Rowley and Thomas Middleton. Commentators, sifting among the possible divisions of labor in a collaborative work, project four main theories: (1) the dramatists partitioned their work by acts, with either one playwright writing Acts I, II, and III, another Acts IV and V; or with each playwright alternating in composing Acts I through V; (2) one playwright wrote a play's tragic...