Thomas
Middleton(1580-1627) —‘our other
Shakespeare’—is the only other Renaissance playwright
who created acknowledged masterpieces of comedy, tragedy,
and history; his revolutionary English history play, A Game
at Chess, was also the greatest box-office hit of early modern
London. His achievements extend beyond these traditional genres
to tragicomedies, masques, pageants, pamphlets ,
pamphlets, epigrams, and Biblical and political commentaries,
written alone or in collaboration with Thomas Dekker, John
Ford, Thomas Heywood, William Rowley, William Shakespeare,
John Webster, and others. Compared by critics to Aristophanes
and Ibsen, Racine and Joe Orton, he has influenced writers
as diverse as Aphra Behn, Anthony Trollope, and T. S. Eliot.
Though repeatedly censored in his own time, Middleton has
since come to be particularly admired for his representations
of the intertwined pursuits of sex, money, power, and God.
The
Oxford Middleton, prepared by seventy-five
scholars from a dozen countries, follows the precedent of
The Oxford Shakespeare in being published in two
volumes, an innovative but accessible Collected Works and
a comprehensive scholarly Companion. Though closely
connected, each volume can be used independently of the other.
The two volume set can be purchased here,
or purchase the Companion
and the Collected
Works individually.
The Collected Works, brings
together for the first time in a single volume all the works
currently attributed to Middleton. The texts are printed in
modern spelling and punctuation, with critical introductions
and foot-of-the-page commentaries; they are arranged in chronological
order, with a special section of Juvenilia. The volume is
introduced by essays on Middleton’s life and reputation,
on early modern London, and on the varied theatres of the
English Renaissance. Extensively illustrated, it incorporates
much new information on Middleton’s life, canon, texts,
and contexts; twenty per cent of the works included have never
before been annotated. A self-consciously ‘federal edition’,
The Collected Works applies contemporary theories
about the nature of literature and the history of the book
to editorial practice; its unusual features are described
and explained in ‘How to Use This Book’ (p. 000).
Thomas
Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture: A Companion to
The Collected Works. Because Middleton is
more representative than any of his contemporaries of the
full range of textual practices in early modern England, his
works provide an ideal focus for understanding the history
of the book, and its relation to the larger history of culture,
in this pivotal period. The Companion begins, accordingly,
with eleven original essays placing Middleton’s career
in the context of larger cultural patterns governing the creation,
reproduction, regulation, circulation, and reception of texts.
These essays are followed by a textual introduction and full
editorial apparatus for each work, including an account of
evidence for its authorship and date of composition. This
combination of detail and context provides a foundation for
future studies both of Middleton and of early modern culture. |
