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Middleton - Our Other ShakespeareAnita Butler reports on the National Theatre Platform with Professor Gary TaylorDateline: 6th June, 2008Gary Taylor, George Matthew Edgar Professor of English at Florida State University and guest speaker for the Platform series of talks in support of current National productions, made a striking figure in lilac shirt and grey suit with pony-tailed hair, earrings and black painted nails, almost an academic 'Iggy Pop'. His task: to convince a packed auditorium, in twenty five minutes, that Thomas Middleton is a playwright similarly gifted to Shakespeare. Professor Taylor's passionate and genial delivery was assisted by visual props: William Shakespeare: The Complete Works (OUP 1986, 2005) for which Taylor is General Editor, and his recent Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works (OUP 2007), sat together like literary 'scales of justice', with the Middleton tome the winner for size and weight. Both playwrights wrote tragedy, comedy, tragicomedy, and non-dramatic narrative, with Middleton collaborating on Timon of Athens and probably abridging Macbeth. So why do we know Shakespeare, and not Middleton? Taylor's exposition began with the analogy of two beautiful women at a party. Each is differently gorgeous and to choose would be hard, but one of them leaves the room, only to find on her return that we are already in love and can see no other: the seventeenth-century fell in love with Shakespeare, needed no other, and the affair continues. Middleton's tragedy was not being in the right place at the right time. There are other reasons, mostly circumstantial. While Shakespeare wrote for the same ensemble, Middleton worked for many companies, matching script to space, be it small or large. This diversity meant that, while Shakespeare's manuscripts were available to friends and fellow actors after his death, to be presented in the 1623 First Folio, Middleton's manuscripts belonged to no-one. He was a freelancer and died in poverty shortly after his A Game at Chess - the first play about modern parliament as we know it today and, interestingly, the most successful play in the English Renaissance - was forbidden to be performed. As Taylor explained, Middleton represented feelings that we are supposed to suppress, focussing on what happens after marriage - the adultery, rather than the matrimonial bliss. Shakespeare was the master of a literary richness that could seem anachronistic to his own time; Middleton was the great abridger, writing with a packed simplicity that would have seemed 'modern' to his own audience, and seems modern to us now. Shakespeare's lyricism can be enjoyed on the page, whereas Middleton's words need the stage. The nineteenth-century showed some interest in Middleton, but Shakespeare had a two hundred year advantage. It would take the 'permissive' 1960's to present the 'un-performable' Middleton once again. Touchingly, the Oxford collection is Middleton's 'first folio'. We were urged to discover Middleton for ourselves: as readers of his plays, as performers acting his lines, as directors ensuring revivals. It will be interesting to see if The Revenger's Tragedy (both at the National and in Manchester) will encourage such a revival and allow Middleton to emerge from beneath Shakespeare's wing - if not to take centre stage, then at least to share it.
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