The Oxford handbook of Thomas Middleton

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Gary Taylor and Trish Thomas Henley, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Middleton (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012). 670pp. ISBN 978 0 1995 5988 6.The editors of The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Middleton, Gary Taylor and Trish Thomas Henley, open their collection by surveying the relatively barren landscape of Middleton studies prior to the publication of The Collected Works in 2007: 'Looking backward from this vibrant moment, what will strike anyone about the history of Middleton criticism is its paucity, its discontinuity, its lost and riven heart' (p. 1). It would be difficult to argue with their claim that 'In a real sense, Middleton criticism started, or started over, in 2007' (p. 13); accordingly, the thirty-six essays in The Oxford Handbook reveal that the heart of Middleton criticism has not only been stabilized and resuscitated, it now pulses with an energy that will no doubt invigorate the study of early modern literature for some time to come.In many ways, The Oxford Handbook is a natural extension of Oxford's Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works and its companion volume, Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture, in that the extensive groundbreaking scholarship of the earlier volumes frees contributors from the obligation of providing broad introductory contexts for particular works or of tackling thorny questions related to attribution. Numerous contributors to The Oxford Handbook were also involved in the preparation of these earlier volumes, but they now enjoy a perspective on the Middleton canon that was previously unavailable to them. In the words of Taylor and Henley, 'all the critical introductions and essays in the 2007 Oxford Middleton were written before the 2007 Oxford Middleton was published. The individual contributors could not stand back and get a perspective on the massive collective structure that each was helping to build. Every reader of the Oxford Middleton can see Middleton better than any reader before November 2007' (p. 14). If the process of building the Middleton canon is complete (for the time being), then The Oxford Handbook represents a series of detailed journeys through hitherto unexplored passageways and stairwells that link Middleton's works to one another and link Middleton to the work of his contemporaries and to his historical moment. Indeed, significant portions of a number of the essays in The Oxford Handbook are devoted to vigorously surveying or mapping a certain issue or theme across Middleton's corpus; there are so many connections to be discovered - so many forgotten or ignored texts to consider - that one can sense the excitement that accompanies the blazing of new interpretive pathways. In 'Staging Muteness in Middleton,' for instance, Heidi Brayman Hackel identifies Middleton's fascination with 'the theatrical elements that most resist the faculties of a hearing audience: muteness, gesture, and dumb show' (p. 330) in tragedies, comedies, and civic entertainments across his entire career before she gestures at the broader implications of her findings: 'Early modern dumb shows were, finally, not solutions to dramatic problems but rather complex assertions of silence and meaning available in the body' (p. 344). Similarly, 'Middleton's Stylistics' by Jonathan Hope ranges across multiple works and genres to establish Middleton's linguistic preferences, stylistic markers, and his awareness 'of print as a technology, . . . of books as 'things,' . . . of the materiality of manuscript culture, and the handwritten word' (p. 250). Essays devoted to individual works are in the minority, but these too have a freshness about them, as Middleton's best-known works are approached from new angles (such as Regina Buccola's comparative examination of two 2008 productions of The Revenger's Tragedy in 'Giving Revenger's Its Due'), and some of Middleton's lesser-known works are treated to an attentiveness that has rarely, if ever, been shown them: Stephen Guy-Bray does much to salvage the reputation of Middleton's seemingly universally-disparaged The Wisdom of Solomon in 'Middleton's Language Machine,' and Julian Yates helps to navigate the genre-defying swerves of The Owl's Almanac in 'Middleton' s Shelf Life. …