Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages
610. scholarly history: "collaborative work, for a long time a critical and editorial embarrassment, was largely the domain of the new bibliographers, who focused, beginning in the early part of the twentieth century, on deciphering who penned what lines or who set what copy. such efforts depended not only on a notion of authorship and literary activity as a solitary and autonomous endeavor but also on a committment to, or a faith in the value of, the procedure of dividing, labeling, and identifying individual contributors as good in and of itself."; some aspects of this have changed over time & some haven't; "a number of recent monographs look to collaborative activity as a way of critiquing dominant notions of authorship. as bette london notes, studying collaboration works to 'mak[e] authorship visible' and to 'explore how authorship operates' (7)"; there's now a great "number and diversity of studies deploying the term collaboration to discuss not a precise mode or form of composition and publication but the general nature of literary production and consumption. collaboration and collaborative authorship are the terms now used to designate a range of interactions, from the efforts of two writers working closely together to the activities of printers, patrons, and readers in shaping the meaning and significance of a text."
611. in the rennaisance in general "collaborative work was an essential component in extraliterary texts; multiple hands produced some of the period's most essential scientific, historical, and religious works, which represent a wealth of collective activity relatively untouched by explicit discussions of authorship."
614. "it is possible to categorize the activities of members of the book trade, just as it was possible to categorize the activities of scribes, as a brand of collaborative literary endeavor"; "a wide definition of collaboration" can include "any kind of cooperative endeavor behind a literary performance" (<--i like how this makes literature into drama, before she goes into how drama is always collaborative)
616. in a new history of early english drama editors john cox & david kastan write "of all literary forms, drama is least respectful of its author's intentions. plays inevitably register multiple intentions, often conflicting intentions, as actors, annotators, revisers, collaborators, scribes, printers, and proofreaders, in addition to the playwright, all have a hand in shaping the text"; "drama is always radically collaborative, both on stage and in print" (2)
619-20. the point: "if collaboration, and with it the concept of collaborative authorship, appeals as a way of thinking about literary endeavors generally, then future criticism will have to be sensitive to a number of new conditions. it must insist, first, on specification of the precise mode or shape of a collaboration. then it must insist on a recognition of the integrity of individuals participating in collaborative ventures.... but if we are going to use collaboration to refer to the host of activities that support literary production, we will need a new term to designate shared writing."