About the Book
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.
Table of Contents:
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Gary Taylor and Trish Thomas Henley: 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.
Review :
`Review from previous edition The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Middleton is by turns profoundly intelligent, brazenly provocative, and thoroughly engaging. It looks at a vast array of topics while remaining faithful to its fascinating subject. More important, it fulfils its editorial intention by stirring debate and challenging convention about the plays, the playing, the players, and the playwright.'
Patrick J. Murray, Theatre Journal
`This useful, edifying, well-informed volume brings together a range of essays ... this original and substantial collection of scholarship and criticism on Middleton, the first of its kind, will surely appeal to scholars, teachers, and students ... Recommended'
C.S. Cox, Choice
`this is a rich and wide-ranging collection that will make a major contribution to Middleton studies, illustrating the multiple interpretive perspectives that Middletons revitalized canon can both attract and sustain.'
Andrew Gordon, Renaissance Quarterly, Volume 66, No. 3
`Magnificent Middleton scholars, Middleton experts, and Middleton fans. It will overjoy them, since it's an exuberant performance from start to finish.'
Steve Donoghue, Open Letters Monthly
`[It] features the largest collection of Middleton criticism ever published ... highly recommended'
Clifford Cunningham, Sun News Network
