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"The Oxford Middleton is a monumental achievement...a landmark edition, one that enables us to appreciate afresh an extraordinary literary career." --James Shapiro, author of 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare and Professor of English, Columbia University
"A monumental work of scholarship." - Jonathan Bate, Times Literary Supplement
"Few editorial projects have been as eagerly anticipated as the Oxford Middleton, which will utterly transform how we understand early modern drama, both in the classroom and in our research. As with Shakespeare, Gary Taylor and his team have set a new gold standard for textual editing and interpretive criticism, leaping from the 19th century to the 21st - finally an edition that captures Middleton's tremendous accomplishments." - Henry Turner, Rutgers University, author of The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts, 1580-1630
"All of us who care deeply about the history of English drama welcome with great enthusiasm and excitement the publication of the Collected Works of Thomas Middleton, a major achievement in textual scholarship that represents the collective expertise and critical wisdom of scholars from all over the world. Gary Taylor and his many collaborators have given us a new and remarkably versatile Thomas Middleton--a great tragic playwright, a brilliant creator of sly and cynical urban comedies, a thoroughly gifted man of the theater and citizen of London. With this massive collected edition, the history of English drama is much more complete and we can hope for many more professional productions of these neglected plays." --Gail Paster, Director, Folger Shakespeare Library
Product Description
Thomas Middleton (1580-1627) - 'our other Shakespeare' - is the only other Renaissance playwright who created lasting masterpieces of both comedy and tragedy; he also wrote the greatest box-office hit of early modern London (the unique history play A Game at Chess ). His range extends beyond these traditional genres to tragicomedies, masques, pageants, pamphlets, epigrams, and Biblical and political commentaries, written alone or in collaboration with Shakespeare, Webster, Dekker, Ford, Heywood, Rowley, and others. Compared by critics to Aristophanes and Ibsen, Racine and Joe Orton, he has influenced writers as diverse as Aphra Behn and T. S. Eliot. Though repeatedly censored in his own time, he has since come to be particularly admired for his representations of the intertwined pursuits of sex, money, power, and God. The Oxford Middleton, prepared by more than sixty scholars from a dozen countries, follows the precedent of The Oxford Shakespeare in being published in two volumes, an innovative but accessible Collected Works and a comprehensive scholarly Companion. Though closely connected, each volume can be used independently of the other. The Collected Works brings together for the first time in a single volume all the works currently attributed to Middleton. It is the first edition of Middleton's works since 1886. The texts are printed in modern spelling and punctuation, with critical introductions and foot-of-the-page commentaries; they are arranged in chronological order, with a special section of Juvenilia. The volume is introduced by essays on Middleton's life and reputation, on early modern London, and on the varied theatres of the English Renaissance. Extensively illustrated, it incorporates much new information on Middleton's life, canon, texts, and contexts. A self-consciously 'federal edition', The Collected Works applies contemporary theories about the nature of literature and the history of the book to editorial practice.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Always one to read new plays, I had dipped my toes into Middleton from time to time but this book called out to me (I am a collector at heart) as being the ideal way of finding out more about this fascinating author.
It is, as others have said, a hefty tome. It is not a light bedtime read. But it is an outstanding piece of scholarship - bringing so many unknown and under-appreciated works to a wide audience.
I have already earmarked several plays that I want to direct and have enjoyed reading many others.
Complete Works are an ideal way of exploring a writer who produced so wide a variety of works as Middleton.
Outstanding - a model that should be emulated with many other authors. There is more to this period than Shakespeare.
It is, as others have said, a hefty tome. It is not a light bedtime read. But it is an outstanding piece of scholarship - bringing so many unknown and under-appreciated works to a wide audience.
I have already earmarked several plays that I want to direct and have enjoyed reading many others.
Complete Works are an ideal way of exploring a writer who produced so wide a variety of works as Middleton.
Outstanding - a model that should be emulated with many other authors. There is more to this period than Shakespeare.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
It may be 400 years overdue, but it's here at last. Thomas Middleton is one of the great Jacobean writers - of plays, poems, pamphlets and pageants - and a hugely talented, protean giant. This book equates to Jonson's Works (1616) and Shakespeare's First Folio (1623), for it finally presents his entire known output in a single volume and establishes his canon.
The Collected Works (volume one of the Oxford Middleton) functions independently of the Companion (volume two). Not only is this second volume beyond most people's budgets (at around £120), it is also beyond their needs, being devoted to such things as collations of textual variants. It is intended for serious Middleton scholars, as opposed to students of Renaissance drama and interested readers more generally.
As well as plentiful glosses, each play in The Collected Works features a concise but illuminating essay cum introduction. Notes on the play's performance history are contained in these introductions, together with those facets (sometimes relating to religion, sometimes economic history or feminist criticism) that are considered by the individual editor to be of particular interest.
Even by Jacobean standards, Middleton was an unusually prolific writer. Five titled works of his are known to have been lost and Taylor estimates that had all of his writing survived The Collected Works would have been double or even treble the size - difficult to conceive let alone handle, since the current volume extends to over 2000 pages as it is!
Some 75 scholars contributed to this book. Among them is a former personal tutor of mine, Julia Briggs, who edited and introduced The Lady's Tragedy (more widely known as The Second Maiden's Tragedy). She records that the first performance of the play for nearly 400 years took place in 1984 at the Upstream Theatre, London (I was lucky enough to be there). Briggs cogently alerts readers to the 'gendered symbolism of poisoned lips and sword' and the play's close structural and linguistic affinities with The Changeling - features that I, for one, had missed. Her work is typical of the high level of original scholarship that characterises this astonishing megalith of a volume.
The Collected Works (volume one of the Oxford Middleton) functions independently of the Companion (volume two). Not only is this second volume beyond most people's budgets (at around £120), it is also beyond their needs, being devoted to such things as collations of textual variants. It is intended for serious Middleton scholars, as opposed to students of Renaissance drama and interested readers more generally.
As well as plentiful glosses, each play in The Collected Works features a concise but illuminating essay cum introduction. Notes on the play's performance history are contained in these introductions, together with those facets (sometimes relating to religion, sometimes economic history or feminist criticism) that are considered by the individual editor to be of particular interest.
Even by Jacobean standards, Middleton was an unusually prolific writer. Five titled works of his are known to have been lost and Taylor estimates that had all of his writing survived The Collected Works would have been double or even treble the size - difficult to conceive let alone handle, since the current volume extends to over 2000 pages as it is!
Some 75 scholars contributed to this book. Among them is a former personal tutor of mine, Julia Briggs, who edited and introduced The Lady's Tragedy (more widely known as The Second Maiden's Tragedy). She records that the first performance of the play for nearly 400 years took place in 1984 at the Upstream Theatre, London (I was lucky enough to be there). Briggs cogently alerts readers to the 'gendered symbolism of poisoned lips and sword' and the play's close structural and linguistic affinities with The Changeling - features that I, for one, had missed. Her work is typical of the high level of original scholarship that characterises this astonishing megalith of a volume.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
I bought the two volume set, with the companion. These are seriously weighty tomes - you can read them in bed, but only if you put a pillow on your chest to cushion the weight. My main early impression is of massive fecundity - there's just so much of everything. Literally dozens of works I've never heard of (I only knew the three or four most familiar Middleton plays, such as Women Beware Women), across a staggering range of genres, plus a huge abundance of interesting editorial material. It's impossible to imagine this sort of thing being done better - and given the costs, i doubt anyone will try. Expensive, of course, but these are beautiful books. If you're a scholar, it's a no-brainer. But what if like me you're a casual reader with a passing interest in jacobean drama? It's possible that in that case you might be better off with one of the smaller editions of selected plays, which will certainly be easier to read. But if you also love books as objects, then you'll find this behemoth hard to resist!
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