Shakespeare In Company author Bart van Es argues that the Bard owes a good deal of his success to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, which allowed him unprecedented dramatic and financial freedom:
[O]ne 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 10 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.
The Dish 