In defence of Middleton

Sir, – I’m delighted that Jonathan Bate (April 25) praises my own “scholarly tour de force” and applauds the Oxford Thomas Middleton more generally as “a monumental work of scholarship”. But I wish he had given more credit to my seventy-four (not “nearly seventy”) collaborators. I am named sixteen times, but only six others are named even once. Reviewing the edition’s 3,200 double-column pages, Bate focuses on just five paragraphs of my essay on Middleton’s “Lives and Afterlives” (which is not the “general introduction”, but one of three introductory essays, the other two by the Stanford historian Paul Seaver and the Cornell theatre historian Scott McMillin).

We welcome corrections to the edition (posted on our website thomasmiddleton.org and incorporated in reprints), and I hope Bate will appreciate some amendments to his review. Though one actor presumably played both roles, the character Mistress Harebrain in A Mad World, My Masters does not “disguise herself as” the character identified as “a succubus”, or do so “to torment her . . . husband” (who never sees said succubus). The edition does not conclude that The Spanish Gypsy is “a revision by John Ford of a script originally written by Middleton and [William] Rowley”. The edition compares Middleton to Peter Paul Rubens and Frans Hals (whose art adorns both jackets), not just to “the daring proto-modernity” of Caravaggio. The claim that Middleton wrote history plays does not depend on “his only surviving historical drama, Hengist, King of Kent”. Middleton’s greatest, most revolutionary history play was, as the edition documents, A Game at Chess, which dramatized the conflict between Protestant England and Catholic Spain from the 1588 Armada to the 1623 return of Prince Charles. Old Law and Fair Quarrel are tragicomedies, not “comedies” (a difference relevant to arguments about Middleton’s range).

Bate’s suggestion that Middleton would have been better served if I had simply “dashed out” an edition, exploiting “a co-editor and a few graduate students”, is particularly insulting to my colleagues, many of them leading scholars in their fields. Bate implies that Middleton could have been edited the way he edited Shakespeare. But although Shakespeare editions (like mine, Bate’s, or countless others) can synthesize, cannibalize or extend other people’s work, our “Middleton First Folio” had to build its own foundations. For instance: I agree that Your Five Gallants is one of Middleton’s best comedies, but who realized this before Ralph Cohen and John Jowett re-edited, restaged, and re-evaluated the play?

Bate’s RSC edition works to “impose uniformity” on Shakespeare, and Bate regrets that we do not homogenize Middleton. Textual instability is an inconvenient truth, which Bate finds “irritating”. He’s also irritated by Richard Burt’s prose. Since we include as many different critical perspectives as possible, it’s easy to misrepresent the whole by quoting whichever critic you most dislike. Burt is not to everyone’s taste – but who is?

Bate astutely praises Middleton’s portrayal of widows. However, his survey of Middleton’s career excludes his most famous female character, Moll Cutpurse. Moll demonstrates that widows are merely a subset of the larger, more interesting category “independent women”, which also includes the title character in The Lady’s Tragedy, Hecate in The Witch, Jane in A Trick To Catch the Old One, etc.

Bate made up his mind about “our other Shakespeare” before reading the Oxford Middleton. He has written or edited ten books with “Shakespeare” in the title, but none on Shakespeare’s contemporaries. His review mentions a Shakespeare play before anything by Middleton, and praises Shakespeare in almost every paragraph. Is that necessary? Must we read Middleton by Shakespearean candlelight?

Middleton has not, as Bate worries, “missed the boat”. John Lavagnino’s digital edition (begun sixteen years ago) will soon appear online. The hardback went into its second printing within two months of publication. Paperbacks and critical anthologies are forthcoming; we are already providing actor-friendly printouts for new stage productions. Shakespeare editions may make more money, but the Oxford Middleton will change more minds.

GARY TAYLOR
English Department, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida 32306.

Sir, – Bernard Richards (“Jacobean attributions”, Letters, May 2) is misinformed. The contemporary Cardenio that I have co-authored with Charles L. Mee draws not on The Lady’s Tragedy (aka The Second Maiden’s Tragedy), but on the tragicomic tale that Cervantes intertwines with the story of Don Quixote and on Lewis Theobald’s 1727 play Double Falsehood. Theobald claimed that his play was a reworking of one or more manuscript copies of a play by Shakespeare, presumably the play entitled Cardenna or Cardenno, performed at Court in 1613.

In 1647, the bookseller Humphrey Moseley listed in the Stationers’ Register “The History of Cardenio. By Mr Fletcher. & Shakespeare”, but this text, if it was ever printed, is now lost. Theobald’s claim was immediately called into question and continues to be a subject of debate.

STEPHEN GREENBLATT
Department of English, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138.