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Thomas Middleton, The Collected Works. Ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. 2016 pp. ISBN 978 0 19 81569 7
Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture: A Companion to the Collected Works. Ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. 1183 pp. ISBN 978 0 19 818570 3.
The Collected Works of Thomas Middleton is a massive volume, over 2,000 pages and weighing in at nearly three kilos. It contains contributions from more than 70 scholars, and, together with its not much smaller Companion, was many years in the making. This is evident from the fact that some of the bibliographies and discussions of the plays in performance (e.g., for The Roaring Girl, The Changeling) were obviously completed several years before publication. There is a sense of rivalry with the Oxford Shakespeare and its Textual Companion (first published in 1986 and 1987), on which Gary Taylor also served as a General Editor. In a phrase typical of the grand ambition but also of the confusion of purpose of the Collected Works, he refers to it as "the Middleton First Folio". But what Taylor calls the "federal" approach of the Middleton edition undermines this claim and also sets it apart from the Oxford Shakespeare, which is unified by a common editorial policy set out in the general introduction by Stanley Wells, who also wrote all the individual introductions to each play. There are more than 50 separate texts, including juvenilia, in the Collected Works, and each is separately edited, sometimes with two or three individuals involved. The editors range from scholars with the highest credentials in this field to those whose first work of this kind appears here. In his preliminary section entitled "How to use this book" Taylor avoids any suggestion of an overall editorial policy, stressing that the variety and lack of consistency resulting from different approaches are to be regarded as intrinsic to the nature of the project. Different editorial practices "make a virtue out of multivocality" by illustrating a range of possible approaches to annotation; and the editorial process itself is foregrounded by the particular choices of certain editors; Jeffery Masten in The Old Law and Taylor himself in his editing of two separate...