Two years ago, Declan Donnellan, director of the theatre company Cheek by Jowl, had the inspired idea of staging a double bill of Twelfth Night and The Changeling. A steward in love with the lady of the house: play it as comedy and you have Shakespeare, as tragedy you have Thomas Middleton and William Rowley. “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you”, says Malvolio: and he is when he returns as De Flores. Donnellan and his actors brilliantly showed that the potential for De Flores’s seduction/rape and murder (performed during the act of sex) of Beatrice-Joanna is already there in Malvolio when he breaks the seal, impressed with the symbolic figure of Lucrece, of Olivia’s letter and gets a view of “her very C’s, her U’s ’n her T’s”.

For more than a generation, The Changeling has been regarded as the finest collaborative drama of the Jacobean era. Donnellan’s revelatory pairing showed that its power comes not least from Middleton and Rowley’s ability to take a Shakespearean theme and twist it in new and startling ways. Together with the long-acknowledged role of Middleton in developing the witchcraft scenes of Macbeth, the more recent discovery of his apparent hand in the surviving text of Measure for Measure, and the decisive demonstration of his co-authorship of Timon of Athens, this suggests that Middleton had claims to be Shakespeare’s true successor in the theatre. Why, then, did Shakespeare end his career writing three collaborations with another dramatist, John Fletcher? Why didn’t the King’s Men turn to Middleton when they needed a new principal dramatist after Shakespeare’s departure? And why were Middleton’s plays so conspicuously absent from the theatrical repertoire between the 1660s and the 1960s, notwithstanding the advocacy on his behalf of such great critic-poets as A. C. Swinburne and T. S. Eliot?

In the summer of 1984, having co-edited the complete works of Shakespeare before reaching the age of thirty, Gary Taylor sat in the Bodleian Library, read all of Middleton and had an epiphany:

"Sometimes quietly moved to tears, sometimes unable to contain my laughter . . . I thought, again and again, why was I never told to read this? . . . Why have I never seen this performed? . . . why have I never been introduced to this Dickensian, Dostoevskian riot of life? Vindice, DeFlores, and Beatrice Joanna I’d encountered in college, but what about Allwit and all the rest? Lucifer, Candido, Quomodo, Sir Bounteous Progress, Dampit, Pieboard, Tailby, Weatherwise, Pompey Doodle, Captain Ager, Plumporridge, Simplicity, Simon, George, Lepet, the Yorkshire Husband, the Black Knight and Fat Bishop and White Queen’s Pawn, the Tyrant, the Lady, the Young Queen, the Duchess of Milan, Mistress Low-water, Mill, Valeria, Hecate and Madge Owl, Livia and Bianca and Isabella – where have you people been all my life?"

He vowed to right the wrong of the centuries’ neglect, to give Middleton the Collected Works he deserved, serving him as John Heminge and Henry Condell had served Shakespeare in the First Folio. He set about assembling a team of nearly seventy scholars and parcelling out Middleton’s sixty surviving works. We have had to wait more than two decades, but the labour has now come to fruition with a Collected Works of over 2,000 double-column pages and a Companion of 1,000 more (also double-column).

The design is based on that of the Oxford Shakespeare, with the welcome difference that glossarial and explanatory notes are included at the foot of each page. The introductions to each work are also fuller than the perfunctory statements in the Oxford Shakespeare, making The Collected Works a much more usable volume for students. Or at least those few wealthy and conscientious students who can afford the £85 price. For scholars, though, there is the same disadvantage as with the Oxford Shakespeare: to find out in which lines and with what justification the texts are amended, to read the evidence for decisions regarding dating, authorship and so forth, one has to pay another £100 for the Companion.

The first page of Taylor’s general introduction has four paragraphs, in which four claims are made for Middleton’s greatness. First, that he and Shakespeare are the only two dramatists of the English Renaissance to have created acknowledged masterpieces in all four genres of comedy, tragedy, history and tragicomedy. Thomas Heywood, Philip Massinger and John Marston are judged not to have succeeded. Second, that Middleton is “the Hogarth of the pen”, a phrase taken from a review of the first collected edition of his works, which was published in 1840. This is a graphic way of saying that he was the age’s great sketcher of early modern London low life, a challenge to the two Thomases, Nashe and Dekker.

Third claim: that he “sexed language, and languaged sex, more comprehensively than any other writer in English”. Middleton must be acknowledged as our great bard of incest, pimping, transvestism, stalking, sexual blackmail, castration, priestly sexual abuse, marital rape, impotence, masochism, necrophilia, paedophilia, fornication, masturbation and “lesbianation”. I still have not quite grasped exactly how the latter is distinct from mere lesbianism. “He invoked ‘back door’ sex, male and female, more often than any of his contemporaries”, writes Taylor, straight-faced.

After this, it is a relief to move on to the fourth claim: that Middleton’s baroque, chiaroscuro dramatic world is the literary equivalent of Caravaggio, whose “torn, furrow-browed Doubting Thomas, caught red-handed in that electric moment when scepticism thrusts its finger into faith, could be doubting Thomas Middleton’s Captain Ager or Vindice or Timon”. There are problems with the late Margot Heinemann’s argument that Middleton wrote from the point of view of an anti-court civic sensibility with strong Puritan leanings, but that is hardly sufficient to align him with a Roman painter who reeks of the Counter-Reformation. Probably Taylor’s association is merely rhetorical: the name Caravaggio is shorthand for daring proto-modernity and intense individualization of character, and it is with these qualities that Taylor wishes to associate Middleton.

Having spent the past few months working slowly through The Collected Works, I am not so sure. For one thing, the edition includes a huge and neglected body of occasional work – masques, civic entertainments, triumphs, satirical pamphlets, moral tales in verse, mock-almanacs and more. This Middleton is so deeply grounded in his historical moment and social context that he cannot speak across the centuries with the directness of a stage play, a lyric poem, or a Caravaggio canvas. A dip into, say, The Black Book will reveal that Middleton could indeed write prose of a vitality to match that of Nashe and Dekker:

"I thumped downstairs with my cow-heel, embraced Mistress Silver-pin and betook me to my bill-men, when, in a twinkling before them all, I leapt out of master constable’s nightgown into an usurer’s fusty furred jacket, whereat the watchmen staggered and all their bills fell down in a swoon, when I walked close by them, laughing and coughing like a rotten-lunged usurer to see what Italian faces they all made when they missed their constable and saw the black gown of his office lie full in a puddle."

There are riches here for cultural and social historians, chroniclers of the profession of writing and the early modern book trade, but it is not enough to prise modern readers away from the anatomy of desire in the sonnets of Shakespeare or the elegies of Donne. As city comedy (Middleton’s forte) is the one conspicuous absence from the Shakespearean dramatic oeuvre, so lyric poetry and romantic comedy (Shakespeare’s signatures) are the two conspicuous absences from Middleton’s more varied body of work. Of the ephemeral verse gathered here for the first time, the only outstanding poem is a touching four-line epitaph “On the death of that great master in his art and quality, painting and playing: Richard Burbage”:

Astronomers and star-gazers this year
Write but of four eclipses; five appear,
Death interposing Burbage – and their staying
Hath made a visible eclipse of playing.

The claim as to Middleton’s modernity must stand or fall on the quality of his twenty-seven or so surviving plays. There are, however, immediate problems with both the use of the word “his” and the pinning down of the number of plays. Middleton’s career was very different from Shakespeare’s. Between the formation of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in 1594 and the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, Shakespeare wrote nearly twenty plays for his company, without any collaboration. Middleton, by contrast, was a freelancer throughout his twenty-year career in the theatre, from The Phoenix, a “disguised duke” play comparable to Measure for Measure, performed before the new King early in 1604, to A Game at Chess, the political drama of 1624 that proved the era’s greatest succès de scandale, landed him in prison and brought the curtain down on his theatre writing. He was also a collaborator throughout his career, beginning under the tutelage of Thomas Dekker, then, following Dekker’s imprisonment for debt in 1612, writing in partnership with the comic actor William Rowley. At different times, he co-wrote with, or adapted existing plays by, several other dramatists, including Shakespeare and Webster.

The scholarly tour de force in this edition is Taylor’s account of the manuscripts and printed texts of A Game at Chess, “the most complicated editorial problem in the entire corpus of early modern English drama, and one of the most complicated in English literature”. This could have formed a 500-page monograph in itself. As a broader contribution to scholarship, the greatest achievement of the edition is its stabilization of the Middleton canon, its consummation of more than thirty years’ work on the attribution of early modern plays. In the 1970s, the Australian David Lake and the New Zealander Macdonald P. Jackson independently published books on the question of Middletonian authorship. They came by different, but equally persuasive, methods to remarkably similar conclusions, many of which have, thanks to confirmatory studies by Taylor’s team and others, come as close to settled facts as we are likely to get in this contentious field. There were two main conclusions. First, that Middleton was unquestionably the author of two of the greatest tragedies of the age: The Revenger’s Tragedy (long associated with Cyril Tourneur, solely on the grounds of the similarity of its title to his Atheist’s Tragedy) and the play with “no name inscribed” that the Master of the Revels called “This second Maiden’s tragedy”. The other big story was that Middleton wrote about one-third of “Shakespeare’s” Timon of Athens.

Persuasive stylometric studies and an array of other evidence gathered in the Middleton Companion, notably in a magisterial essay by Jackson, “Early Modern Authorship: Canons and chronologies”, now provide a number of other conclusions, the implications of which should keep graduate students busy for a generation: Middleton was Dekker’s junior partner in The Honest Whore Part One, but Dekker wrote Part Two alone; The Bloody Banquet is mostly Dekker’s, but they were equal partners in The Roaring Girl; Middleton was sole author of The Puritan, which was falsely attributed to “W. S.” when first printed (and on that basis included in the Shakespeare Third Folio); The Spanish Gypsy seems to be a revision by John Ford of an earlier script by Middleton and Rowley with some input by Dekker; The Family of Love, an intriguing satire on the “familist” sect, long attributed to Middleton, is in fact by the pirate-poet Lording Barry; and so on.

Taylor wants to have it both ways. On the one hand, Middleton is lauded as “our other Shakespeare”, the only dramatist to excel in every genre – a claim that elevates his only surviving historical drama, Hengist King of Kent; or, The Mayor of Queenborough, to a status that it cannot really carry, despite the best endeavours of Grace Ioppolo in the exceptionally well-edited text that she contributes to the edition. On the other hand, Middleton is the great collaborative genius, the counterweight to Shakespeare. In terms of theatrical excellence, his best solo-written city comedies seem to me to be Michaelmas Term, A Trick To Catch the Old One (given especially sympathetic treatment by Valerie Wayne), the well-known Chaste Maid in Cheapside and the underrated Your Five Gallants. But there is little to put between them and his best comic collaborations with Rowley, A Fair Quarrel and The Old Law; or, a new way to please you (the euthanasia comedy which was played so effectively at the RSC a few years ago). The evidence of the new edition suggests that “Middleton and Rowley” ought to replace “Beaumont and Fletcher” as the most celebrated collaborative team of the age, but it is not clear to me how the “and Rowley” part of the equation fits with the image of Middleton as “our other Shakespeare”.

Middleton was a great accommodator. Shakespeare, one suspects, was a difficult writing partner, and his emergence into solo authorship seems to have been bound up with the animosity he provoked in the “university wits” such as Robert Greene and Thomas Nashe, whose plays he may have worked over.

The idea of a partnership with Middleton seems to have emerged in the early Jacobean era, when Shakespeare was slowly retreating from the London theatre world, spending more and more time at home in Stratford, perhaps because of the plague outbreaks in the city, perhaps because of some scandal or disappointment that may be alluded to in the Sonnets. But, for whatever reason, the partnership didn’t work out: Timon of Athens was a one-off and there is no evidence of it having achieved any success on stage. Only after Shakespeare’s departure was Middleton allowed to reshape Macbeth and (to a more debatable degree) Measure for Measure.

In the early Jacobean years, Shakespeare also worked with George Wilkins. Taylor’s team lack their usual confidence in this case. A Yorkshire Tragedy: one of the four-plays-in-one called All’s One was entered in the Stationers Register in May 1608 and published soon after as having been written by “William Shakespeare”. Lake and Jackson both ascribed it to Middleton, though the long opening scene is in a different, and perhaps more Shakespearean, style. The murder of two young children and wounding of his wife by Walter Calverley, the heir to the manor of Pudsey in Yorkshire, inspired not only this taut domestic tragedy, but also George Wilkins’s best play, The Miseries of Enforced Marriage. Stanley Wells provides a characteristically theatre-friendly text of A Yorkshire Tragedy – which deserves to be high on the RSC revival list – but he is unable to unravel its complicated relationship with Wilkins’s play, or to provide new evidence about who wrote the three lost (presumably one-act) plays that made up All’s One (Shakespeare, Wilkins and another?).

Taylor proposes two main reasons why Middleton’s plays have not had the continuous theatrical afterlife of Shakespeare’s. One is that they were considered too salacious. Reading the new Collected Works certainly opens your eyes to colourful sexual practices and more-than-Shakespeareanly inventive bawdy wordplay – though Taylor’s team of editors are distinctly patchy in the degree to which they plunder Gordon Williams’s magnificent three-volume compendium of filth, A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature. But Middleton’s plays could have been adapted to the more refined taste of later ages, as Shakespeare’s were, so this cannot be the true explanation.

There is more weight in Taylor’s second hypothesis: that Middleton suffered because his plays were not collected in his lifetime or soon after his death in 1627. The existence of Folio collected works gave a peculiar advantage to Ben Jonson, Shakespeare and the Beaumont and Fletcher team. The counter argument to this would be that the plays of John Lyly and John Marston did appear in collected editions in the early 1630s, but they have been just as neglected as Middleton’s. Conversely, Philip Massinger’s plays were not collected, but A New Way To Pay Old Debts was revived in the Restoration and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries more frequently than most of Shakespeare’s comedies.

That play was actually Massinger’s reworking – indeed, displacement – of Middleton’s best comedy, A Trick To Catch the Old One. A New Way remained in the repertoire because Massinger’s monstrous comic invention Sir Giles Overreach was almost as funny as Sir John Falstaff, a part that every star actor wanted to play. And this must be the true explanation: just as Middleton was a collaborative author and a writer of prodigious variety, just as his main purpose was to animate panoramic worlds, bustling cities, competitive law courts, corrupt royal courts, so his scripts tend to be ensemble pieces. Learning from Jonson and Marston, he created comedies that were beautifully oiled theatrical machines. He did not specialize in star vehicles, characters that take on a life of their own in the manner of Sir John and Sir Giles. His most rewarding parts are Iagos rather than Othellos: not poets who soar beyond their worlds, but entrenched master plotters such as De Flores in The Changeling and the Lady Livia in Women Beware Women. Taylor asks of Middleton’s characters “Where have you people been all my life?”. The answer to the question of why they have not been alive on the English stage throughout the centuries is apparent from the names in that list of his: Dampit and Plumporridge and Simplicity and Weatherwise are more in the mould of Jonsonian humours than Shakespearean individuals. They are not “people” in quite the same sense as Shakespeare’s characters.

Consider the young women of comedy. Middleton offers wonderful scenarios: there is Moll Yellowhammer, the Chaste Maid in Cheapside, in love with a poor gallant but betrothed by paternal will to Sir Walter Whorehound, a philandering knight eager for her dowry; there is Jane Russell in A Fair Quarrel, courted by another young gallant whom her father deems insufficiently wealthy and getting herself pregnant following a clandestine handfasting; or another Jane, a courtesan passed off as a wealthy widow in A Trick To Catch the Old One; or Mistress Harebrain, who disguises herself as a succubus in order to torment her sexually possessive husband in A Mad World, My Masters. All would be a delight to watch on stage, and one fervently hopes that the new edition will prompt many a revival; but what these creations lack are those moments of self-discovery that characterize the Shakespearean romantic heroines that have rewarded actresses for three-and-a-half centuries. Thus Jane in A Trick To Catch the Old One:

Why, what would you wish me do, sir?
I must not overthrow my state for love.
We have too many precedents for that.
From thousands of our wealthy, undone
widows
One may derive some wit. I do confess
I loved your nephew. Nay, I did affect him,
Against the mind and liking of my friends,
Believed his promises, lay here in hope
Of flattered living and the boast of lands.
Coming to touch his wealth and state, indeed
It appears dross. I find him not the man:
Imperfect, mean, scarce furnished of his needs.
In words, fair lordships; in performance,
hovels.
Can any woman love the thing that is not?

Beautifully done, but there is never quite enough writing of this sort to fire the actress accustomed to playing Rosalind or Viola or Beatrice or Portia or Isabella.

Where Middleton does offer more than Shakespeare is in his older women’s parts. They were his speciality. “He knew the rage, Madness of women crossed”, observed a fellow dramatist in a dedicatory poem. Women Beware Women was registered for publication along with other female-focused plays attributed to Middleton, such as No Wit, No Help Like a Woman’s; More Dissemblers Besides Women; and the lost Puritan Maid, Modest Wife and Wanton Widow. This last title nicely sums up the conventional image of a woman’s life in the period: before marriage she was expected to be chaste and during it she was supposed to be submissive; once widowed she had more freedom. A widow even had a degree of financial autonomy that set her apart from daughters and wives, who in law were chattels belonging to their fathers and husbands. Widows, by contrast, could carry on their husband’s business. The legal fiction was that they were just minding the shop until they remarried, but the reality was that they often controlled their own affairs for the rest of their lives. So, for instance, it was a woman, a printer’s widow, Elizabeth Allde, who published several of the most popular plays of the age.

The widow, then, was the joker in the pack, the wild card who was not obliged to play by the sexual and social rules. There is a bit of fear and a bit of envy, as well as sneaking admiration, in the male writer’s image of her as both wealthy and wanton. Whereas the conventional female character in the Elizabethan and Jacobean drama is defined by her choice of present or prospective marriage partner, the twice-widowed Livia in Women Beware Women is a free agent. She acts instead of being acted on; she delights in setting a plot. She has the same kind of boldness as Iago or the Edmund of King Lear has. Middleton was unquestionably the great dramatist of widowhood.

His other great female parts, along with Beatrice-Joanna in The Changeling, are the Lady and the Wife in the play that is his Othello. The Master of the Revels, George Buc, referred to it as “this second maiden’s tragedy”, merely because he had recently licensed Beaumont and Fletcher’s Maid’s Tragedy. The late Julia Briggs aptly renames it The Lady’s Tragedy, extols its virtues in an introduction that offers the best piece of writing in the entire two volumes, and edits a fascinating parallel-text edition (though it is a little confusing to read) of the sole surviving manuscript, with and without the cuts and alterations imposed by Buc’s censorship and in the subsequent rehearsal process. This is a tragedy to treasure and to stage.

No one is going to question that the Middleton project is a monumental work of scholarship, but it does betray its times. Given the huge political controversy surrounding the portrayal of the Spanish in A Game at Chess, one of the first essays to which readers of the Companion will want to turn is that on censorship. What they will find is an essay arguing at great length that

"The metaphor of castration foregrounds not the literal status of censorship but its (dis)figurative status; that is, castration figures an originary (and paradoxically productive) lack rather than the loss of an originary plenitude . . . . what looks like defetishism (multiple, small differences constituting a clitoral criticism opposed to the single, big difference of a phallic criticism) from another perspective looks like fetishism masquerading as its opposite."

There is nothing wrong in old-fashioned criticism per se: Swinburne’s writings on Middleton remain well worth reading a hundred years on. But this kind of thing is so old-fashioned, so locked in the critical indulgence of the late twentieth century, that it makes the work seem dated even as it comes fresh from the press.

The late-twentieth-century historical moment is also apparent in the editorial apparatus. That was the age of multiple texts and deconstructive editing, when the pseudonymous bibliographic theorist Random Cloud was arguing that no two copies of any early modern book were the same as each other, that textual instability was the primary condition of early modern print culture, and so forth. Various features of the edition try to give a sense of this: most strikingly, and irritatingly, running-heads are rendered into a state of perpetual flux (thus “THE PVRITAINE WIDDOW” on one page, “THE WIDDOW of Watling-Streete” on the next, “The Puritaine Widdow” the next, ad nauseam). Taylor wants the volume to be the Middleton First Folio, but, whereas Heminge and Condell attempted to impose uniformity on the Shakespeare canon, Taylor and his team attempt to bestow variety on the Middletonian, in accordance with both their amply demonstrated belief in their author’s plenitude and their own postmodern sensibilities.

The decision may, however, prove counter-productive: will this self-consciously postmodern Middleton Folio have the impact it deserves in the absence of a pre-modern, or just a plain modern one? Taylor could, with the assistance of a co-editor and a few graduate students, have dashed out a modern-spelling edition of Middleton’s complete plays in five years, winning his hero a more prominent place both in the college classroom and on the classical stage. He would probably have finished that in about 1993, the year of the World Wide Web. He would then have seen that the internet’s hypertext facility provided the perfect medium for a deconstructive edition with full scholarly bells and whistles. By the mid-1990s, the Arden Shakespeare team had developed an electronic edition that made it possible to move onscreen between modern-spelling texts, facsimiles of original quartos, editorial variants, commentary notes, sources and part-books for individual roles. This is what is now needed for Middleton. It is good news that Gary Taylor’s principal co-editor, John Lavagnino, is a computer expert and that they are even now at work on an electronic edition (the initial website accompanying the print edition is perfunctory in the extreme). Thomas Middleton has been monumentalized in print at the very moment when print is ceasing to be our primary medium of literary immortalization. He might just have missed the boat again.

Thomas Middleton
THE COLLECTED WORKS
Edited by Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino
2,018pp. Oxford University Press. £85 (US $170).
978 0 19 818569 7

Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino, editors
THOMAS MIDDLETON AND EARLY MODERN TEXTUAL CULTURE
A companion to the collected works
1,184pp. Oxford University Press. £100 (US $200).
978 0 19 818570 3.
Two-volume set. £150 (US $299.95).
978 0 19 922588 0

Jonathan Bate is Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature at the University of Warwick. His books include The Genius of Shakespeare, 1997.