Afterword

Summary

Quests for my own words are quests for a word that is not my own.

(Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, 1986)

'Collaboration’, rather than ‘authorship’, is an appropriate term to describe not only early modern playwriting but the process by which the playhouse brought plays to life. Collaboration - the labour that lies within the process - writ large signifies the work done by numerous hands, many unknown, in bringing the play to a tangible form. Thus writers, patrons, actors, printers, compositors in turn all bring into play earlier texts and remembered theatrical moments, which served as sources on which playwrights drew, and later writers and editors have continued to draw, right up to the present. Howard Barker's version of Women Beware Women (1986) and Alex Cox's film Revengers Tragedy (2002), like Middleton's adaptation of Measure for Measure (1621), are instances of posthumous collaboration, where the original ‘author’ has been bypassed: what Middleton does with ‘Shakespeare’, modern collaborators do with ‘Middleton’. But the mediation process by which an early modern play is edited, printed and categorized also brings the scholar and editor into a collaborative relationship with the text. This is nowhere more evident than in the case of Middleton. He was long regarded as an important dramatist ranking just below Jonson and Marlowe; now his critical fortunes are tied closely to the canon, and equally importantly with his connection with Shakespeare. This is unfortunate but inevitable. The Oxford Middleton may do for Middleton what the First Folio did for Shakespeare, but in neither case can any of the texts be placed outside a collaborative matrix, spanning both the past and the immediate present.

Writing about Middleton entails writing about collaboration; but it also raises the issues of canon and attribution. This book declared at the outset that determining playwrights’ ‘shares’ in a given text is not its primary concern: for reasons of space, too, collaboration, rather than disintegration, is its focus. Yet clearly the canon is bound up with attribution issues, and since the 1950s Middleton studies have been dominated by this question. It remains here to return, briefly, to this matter, and suggest ways in which an approach that focuses on collaboration may lead to deeper insights into the text.