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Output details

29 - English Language and Literature

University of Reading

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Book title

Thomas Middleton, Renaissance dramatist

Type
A - Authored book
DOI
-
Publisher of book
Edinburgh University Press
ISBN of book
9780748627806
Year of publication
2009
Number of additional authors
0
Additional information

Thomas Middleton, Renaissance Dramatist (Edinburgh University Press, 2009) was the first study to respond to Gary Taylor’s and John Lavagnino’s edition, Thomas Middleton: Collected Works and Companion (Oxford University Press, 2007). I argued that there is ‘an instructive tension between collaborative and individualised models of authorship’(17) which structures the edition and offered a new take on this issue by considering whether it is possible to identify a ‘personal style’ that distinguishes Middleton’s plays. I argued that his near contemporaries did identify the dramatist with a distinctive style when they honoured ‘Facetious Middleton’ and his ‘witty Muse’ and the book analyses the tactical use of wit in his plays. This work drew on my ground-breaking book, The English Wits: Literature and Sociability in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2007), and extended my research into a serio-comic literary tradition to the analysis of the ‘aesthetics of tricks’ in Middleton’s plays to produce an innovative and distinctive study of his oeuvre. Because of the strength of the book and the intervention that it made in Middleton studies, I was commissioned by Ton Hoenselaars to write the essay on Thomas Middleton for The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (2012).Thomas Middleton made an important contribution to the performance history of Middleton’s plays through its analysis of recent stage productions that had not yet received sustained critical attention, including Melly Still’s groundbreaking 2008 production of Revenger’s Tragedy at the National Theatre, and incorporated my extensive research in the archives of the RSC at Stratford. This performance history has since been updated in my essay for Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, which includes a lengthy discussion of Perry Mills’s acclaimed productions of Middleton’s plays with a boys company from King Edward VI’s School, Stratford.

Interdisciplinary
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Cross-referral requested
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Research group
None
Proposed double-weighted
No
Double-weighted statement
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Reserve for a double-weighted output
No
Non-English
No
English abstract
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