WHAT made Shakespeare so successful? And when did he start to outstrip his contemporaries? According to Bart van Es in his new book, “Shakespeare In Company”, the turning-point was 1594. In this year Shakespeare became one of eight founding actor-investors, or “sharers”, in a new theatre company called the Chamberlain’s Men. It was a move that made him rich. But more significantly it meant that he no longer had to work for whichever company would buy his plays. Being able to write for a regular group of actors "changed the way he wrote forever", according to Mr van Es, a lecturer at the University of Oxford. He spoke to The Economist about how Shakespeare’s decision to join a close-knit company shaped his creative vision and made his reputation.

How did investing in the Chamberlain’s Men change Shakespeare’s writing?

Before 1594, Shakespeare was a writer like any other. He was brilliant, but then so was Christopher Marlowe, and competitors like Robert Greene and Thomas Nashe. But once be became a sharer in the Chamberlain’s Men he knew his actors personally, so he could tailor the parts for all eight of the leading players. This allowed him to create physically distinct characters in a way that hadn’t been done before. Sometimes he even uses the names of actors instead of the characters in the text. In “Much Ado About Nothing”, for example, he uses the names Cowley and Kemp for Verges and Dogberry. There’s a specificity that could only have worked if someone knew the actors.

In other early modern drama characters sometimes change completely between acts. They don’t seem to remember offences that happened to them earlier in the play. But in Shakespeare’s plays the characters are distinctive and consistent, and that’s one of the things we still treasure about him today—the believability and complexity of character.

But weren’t other playwrights already writing for specific actors?

That’s something I spent a lot of time working out. I read all of the drama by Shakespeare’s contemporaries [around 200 plays], and I found that famous actors like Robert Armin certainly had other writers who tailored parts for him. But it was always a one-to-one relationship—a writer would write stuff for a specific leading actor. But Shakespeare could do something different. He wasn’t just writing for a single player, he could think about his whole body of actors and so his writing becomes what I call “relational”.

What do you mean by “relational”? I mean that for the first time the drama wasn’t about one person, but about the interaction of a group of individuals. Shakespeare’s contemporaries weren’t doing that. If you look at “Henry IV Part 1”, for example, you’ve got this whole set of characters—Hal, Falstaff, Doll Tearsheet and so on. They have a world they inhabit, they’ve got a shared history, money they owe each other, a whole set of relationships, all tailored to the actors playing them. And then Shakespeare does a second play based around those same characters. That was unheard of. So no other writers create groups of characters in that way? No. If you compare Shakespeare’s “Richard II” to Marlowe’s “Edward II”, which is also about the fall of a king and the transition of power, it’s full of great speeches but Edward doesn’t have a network of characters around him. The death scene is packed with characters that haven’t been in the play before. Marlowe keeps introducing more and more new names, whereas Shakespeare will shoehorn in the same characters all through a play. He wants to make use of the eight sharers in the company. That’s what makes him special.

Wouldn’t Shakespeare have been special anyway, even if he’d been a jobbing writer?

I’m not claiming he wouldn’t have been great, anyway. He was already a great poet. But something changes in 1594. And you can see how it changes again, very late in his career, when a number of things disconnect him from the company. Some of them have died, they’ve brought in new actors, Shakespeare is not always in London. A lot has changed, and the plays he was writing then—“Cymbeline”, “Pericles”, “The Winter’s Tale”—these are less “relational”. He’s no longer working with that very close group of actors, so you don’t get that same interaction between the characters.

Investing in the Chamberlain’s Men also worked out well for him from a business point of view.

Well, one of the things that really separates Shakespeare from his contemporaries is that his plays are all owned by the company. That was a big change from how it was for him at the start of his career. The first of his plays to be published, “Titus Andronicus”, didn’t even mention his name on it, just the three acting companies who had performed it. But after he joined the Chamberlain’s Men, he was an asset holder. He would get paid for plays which were performed ten years after he’d written them. No one else was doing that.

Before that, plays were often put together by a team of writers, and then rewritten and rewritten, a bit like the Hollywood model of having screenwriters and script doctors all chipping in. But Shakespeare became an auteur, in film terms. He was a sort of Woody Allen figure. He wrote the plays, he had control over them, the same actors came back again and again. And he was clearly much more famous than any other playwright of his time. Printers repeatedly tried to pass off plays written by other people as if they were Shakespeare’s. You don’t get his contemporaries being thought of as bankable, knowable commodities in that way.

So was he the richest writer in that period?

We don’t know much about Shakespeare as an individual, but it’s clear that he was incredibly financially savvy. By 1597 he buys the second largest house in Stratford. By 1598 he’s known as someone who lends money to people. He’s doing astoundingly well by this point. Far better than any other writers. And he gets richer and richer as time goes on.

Shakespeare In Company. By Bart van Es. Oxford University Press; 384 pages; $45 and £25