Output details
29 - English Language and Literature
University of Reading
Thomas Middleton, Renaissance dramatist
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.