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The 37 essays in The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Middleton reinterpret the English Renaissance through the lens of one of its most original, and least understood, geniuses. Shakespeare's younger contemporary and collaborator, Middleton wrote modern comedies, tragedies, tragicomedies, history plays, masques, pageants, pamphlets, and poetry. The largest collection of new Middleton criticism ever assembled, this ambitious Handbook provides a comprehensive, in-depth, cutting-edge reaction to OUP's Collected Works of Thomas Middleton, winner of the 2009 MLA prize for editing, the first complete scholarly text of his voluminous and diverse oeuvre. The Handbook brings together an international, cross-generational team of experts to discuss all these genres through an equally diverse range of critical approaches, from feminism to stylistics, ecocriticism to performance studies, Aristotle to Zizek. Reinterpretations of canonical plays such as The Changeling, Women Beware Women, The Roaring Girl, and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside mingle with explorations of neglected or recently-identified works. Middleton's dramatic use of dance, music, and clothing, Middletonian adaptation, his relationships to the classical world and to continental Europe, his fascinating explorations of sexuality and religion, all receive attention. The collection also provides new essays on modern and postmodern reactions to Middleton, including recent Middleton revivals and films, and living artists' responses to his work-responses that range from the actresses who play Middleton's women to writers in various genres who have been freeired by his artistry. The Handbook establishes an authoritative foundation for the rapidly-expanding growth of interest in this extraordinarily protean, funny, moving, disturbing, and modern writer.
List of contents
- List of Figures
- List of Contributors
- Unintroduction: Middletonian Dissensus
- 1: Julian Yates: Thomas Middleton's Shelf Life
- 2: Paul Yachnin: Playing with Space: Making a Public in Middleton's Theatre
- 3: Gary Taylor: History . Plays . Genre . Games
- 4: Tiffany Stern: Middleton's Collaborators in Music and Song
- 5: Raphael Seligmann: Passionate Tunes for Amorous Poems: Middleton's Way with Music
- 6: Carol Chillington Rutter: Playing with Boys on Middleton's Stage-and Ours
- 7: Thomas Roebuck: Middleton's Historical Imagination
- 8: Barbara Ravelhofer: Middleton and Dance
- 9: Gail Kern Paster: The Ecology of Passions in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside and The Changeling
- 10: Lucy Munro: Middleton and Caroline Theatre
- 11: Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith: 'Time's comic sparks': the Dramaturgy of A Mad World My Masters and Timon of Athens
- 12: Eleanor Lowe: 'My cloak's a stranger; he was made but yesterday': Clothing, Language, and the Construction of Theatre in Middleton
- 13: Courtney Lehmann: 'Old Dad dead?' The Rise of the Neo-Noir 'Heritage' Film, Or, Middleton with a View
- 14: Douglas Lanier: 'Nimble in damnation, quick in tune': Vice and The Revenger's Tragedy
- 15: Jonathan Hope: Middletonian Stylistics
- 16: Trish Thomas Henley: Tragicomic Men
- 17: David Hawkes: Middleton and Usury
- 18: Richard F. Hardin: Middleton, Plautus, and the Ethics of Comedy
- 19: Meredith Molly Hand: 'More lies than true tales': Skepticism in Middleton's Mock Almanacs
- 20: Heidi Brayman Hackel: Staging Muteness in Middleton
- 21: Stephen Guy-Bray: Middleton's Language Machine
- 22: David Glimp: Middleton and the Theatre of Emergency
- 23: Indira Ghose: Middleton and the Culture of Courtesy
- 24: Gabriel Gbadamosi: Playwright to Playwright: The Changeling
- 25: Barbara Fuchs: Middleton and Spain
- 26: Ewan Fernie: Demonic Middleton
- 27: Lars Engle: Middleton and Mimetic Desire
- 28: Celia R. Daileader: Thomas Middleton, William Shakespeare, and the Masculine Grotesque
- 29: Joseph Campana: Middleton as Poet
- 30: Paul Budra: The Emotions of Tragedy: Middleton or Shakespeare?
- 31: Regina Buccola: Giving Revenger's Its Due
- 32: Douglas Bruster: Middleton's Imagination
- 33: Karen Britland: Middleton and the Continent
- 34: Terri Bourus: 'It's a whole different sex!': Women Performing Middleton on the Modern Stage
- 35: Bruce Boehrer: Middleton and Ecological Change
- 36: Mary Bly: 'The Lure of a Taffeta Cloak': Middleton's Sartorial Seduction in Your Five Gallants
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Gary Taylor is George Matthew Edgar Professor of English at Florida State University, founder of the History of Text Technologies program there, general editor (with Stanley Wells) of the Oxford edition of Shakespeare's Complete Works, and general editor (with John Lavagnino) of the Oxford edition of Middleton's Collected Works.
Trish Thomas Henley is an Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Cincinnati. She has published in Exemplaria, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and Theatre Journal, and is currently finishing a book manuscript, Velvet Women Within: The Boy Actor and the Prostitute on the Early English Stage.
Summary
The 36 new essays in the Handbook discuss Middleton's comedies, tragedies, history plays, masques, pageants, pamphlets, and poetry through a range of critical approaches such as feminism, ecocriticism, and performance studies. Reinterpretations of canonical plays like The Changeling mingle with explorations of recently-identified works.
Additional text
the diversity of the individual contributions to the Handbook is as much of a pleasure as the high standard of the work as a whole and suggests the potential for more such work in the future.
Report
the diversity of the individual contributions to the Handbook is as much of a pleasure as the high standard of the work as a whole and suggests the potential for more such work in the future. Helen Osborne, English
