The authors summarise the collaborative work of Benjamin Britten (1913–76) and, in turn, artist John Piper (1903–92) and choreographer John Cranko (1927–73). Britten relied on having an early visual conception of whatever dramatic work he was undertaking. Piper’s work as a stage designer was therefore a crucial part of Britten’s creative process, as specific examples in this essay demonstrate. Britten’s inexperience with dance meant that in his largest collaboration with Cranko, the full-length ballet The Prince of the Pagodas (1957), he leaned to an unusual extent on the choreographer for the overall conception and even for the character and length of individual numbers. Both working relationships reveal the extent to which Britten’s creative process was fuelled by collaboration.

Benjamin Britten did more than any other composer since Henry Purcell to promote the genre of English opera and its use of the English language. There is less consensus on the contribution made by Myfanwy Piper as Britten’s librettist for The Turn of the Screw, Owen Wingrave, and Death in Venice. Even a limited degree of familiarity with her libretti for Britten induces admiration owing to the precision behind her choice of word and phrase and the way they it can enhance immediacy. She herself has observed that all three libretti that she wrote for Britten were based on sophisticated texts. In his librettist, Britten trusted his closest concerns: someone who could translate the drama in the literary texts into taut succinct scenes; manage abrupt changes of mood; dovetail each scene neatly into the next so that narrative suspense is was sustained; and who could also manage pace, climax, and dramatic development with tact and sensibility. In all this Myfanwy Piper excelled, and she remains unsurpassed in the economy with which she handled words.

This essay summarises the working relationship between composer Benjamin Britten (1913–76) and writer William Plomer (1903–73). After listing their completed collaborations – Gloriana (1953), Curlew River (1964), The Burning Fiery Furnace (1966), The Prodigal Son (1968) – and abandoned projects, the essay turns to broader points of comparison and particularly to Britten and Plomer’s shared sense of ‘exile’, which the author argues informs their independent and collaborative work. Plomer’s shift away from the novel as a genre parallels Britten’s away from full-length opera. Their choice of subject, particularly in their work together, shows a movement away from realism. They cultivate a sense of humour marked by irony, and they increasingly pursue an economy of artistic material. These shared traits may point to the artists’ sense of ‘estrangement’ and may also be indicators of ‘late style’.

This chapter focuses on romans à clef of the Harlem Renaissance. It argues that Wallace Thurman’s Infants of the Spring (1932) and Richard Bruce Nugent’s Gentleman Jigger (2008), read together, foreground the tensions between originality and derivativeness, individual “genius” and collaboration that were being negotiated more broadly in the modernist art of the period. On the one hand, both Infants of the Spring and Jigger are invested in models of artistry that valorize “individuality” and “genius” over “standardization” and derivativeness. On the other hand, the texts themselves – which explicitly address the question of plagiarism through differently inflected scenes describing the same event – suggest that a model of authorship or artistry that does not accommodate collaboration, borrowing, and even outright theft is gravely deficient.