The Oxford Middleton

I. Sven and Leif

Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works and Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture: A Companion to the Collected Works present reviewers with a complex task. This review comes well after the long-deferred launch of the edition and thus can hope to offer narrative commentary on how the books are being used, along with evaluative commentary on how they ought to be regarded. The edition itself is internally diverse, produced on what Gary Taylor calls "federal" principles, which do not aim at the level of formal regularity usually found in one-volume editions that are the product of an editorial hierarchy. The process by which the edition came to be is itself of considerable interest, as a somewhat unusual paradigm for editing and as a bold attempt to raise professional and public awareness of a major underedited author. The authors of this review found that neither of us could pursue a clear evaluative line without being interrupted by the other (and to some extent by himself) with qualifications, caveats, or contradictions. As a result, we have chosen to present this review as a conversation about the edition between two scholars named Sven and Leif, each expressing views that derive from one or both, in order to get an appropriately rich set of reactions to the edition before the readers of Shakespeare Quarterly. A federal edition deserves a response that does not repress its dialogic tendencies. As we begin we hope, but by no means guarantee, that Sven and Leif will converge on the kind of verdict reviewers aim for, sometimes achieve, and often fudge.

II. The Conversation

sven

Let's begin by saying some obvious good things. Not only is this the first twenty-first-century Middleton, it is the first attempt ever at a comprehensive Middleton edition, and the first major edition since the nineteenth century. It combines a sophisticated view of the complexities of authorship with a large-scale attempt to democratize the process of editing. It is, in effect, an innovative social project, as well as an innovative textual project. It provides convenient (if weighty) access to all work currently ascribed to Middleton. The Companion provides important general essays, with substantive discussion of the textual issues in each work. While it is not the case with any recent one-or two-volume edition of the other comparably important English Renaissance dramatists—Shakespeare, Jonson, Marlowe—that the biographical and scholarly materials included in the edition will form the basis of scholarly work on their authors, this is likely to be so with Middleton, and the materials provided do form a helpful basis for such work. It is now possible to teach a graduate seminar or undergraduate lecture course on Middleton far more conveniently than ever before. Moreover, the general reader can feel that some parts of the edition—Gary Taylor's introduction, for example—encourage and provide a basis for nonexpert interest in Middleton.

leif

Okay. But wouldn't most of these interests—those of students and teachers of Renaissance drama, and those of general readers—have been better served by an edition that was more conventional, more uniform, and less weighed down (literally) with such oddities as an unannotated, original-spelling, virtually unpunctuated Macbeth? Or The Old Law with the notes sometimes on the top of the page? And could you expand a bit about authorship and about democratic editing?

sven

Let me put the claim as strongly as I can, so that we can then worry...