4 - Middleton and Shakespeare

Summary

While Middleton's and Dekker's collaborations indicate a pattern of allegiances, the plays that associate Middleton with William Shakespeare (1564-1616) suggest a more complex relationship, the precise details and implications of which are far from certain. But it is in the traces of this professional link that we find the most fascinating evidence of the myriad ways in which playwrights worked, and texts were constituted, experienced and reconstituted, in the playhouse. Indeed, in this case particularly, it is a process that continues today in the role scholars, editors, and publishers play in canon formation.

Middleton's connection with Shakespeare is not well known. Yet the surviving evidence indicates that several ‘Shakespeare’ plays are in fact not his alone, but are linked in various ways to Middleton. As will be shown, these plays reveal - if at the same time obscure - a complex pattern of collaboration. What this pattern indicates challenges long-held assumptions surrounding the consecration of Shakespeare as an independent writer - a writer whose achievement is testament, tradition has it, to individual genius, rather than the product of several hands. This chapter outlines the evidential - and possible - intersections between Middleton and Shakespeare, and focuses on what this ‘textual intercourse’ might tell us about their collaborative practices.

PATTERNS

Unlike Shakespeare, who spent most of his career with one company, Middleton wrote for a number of troupes, adult and child; but, like Shakespeare, Middleton wrote for the King's Men, and this in part explains their connection. One distinct pattern that emerges, then, is directly related to company affiliation. This ought not to surprise us, for clearly it made commercial and artistic sense for writers who worked for the same company to pool or share ideas, and thus make the best use of its resources. Equally, however, playwrights were, of course, competitors (financially) and rivals (artistically), and thus might be considered to be servants of two masters: the company that commissioned them, and their own ambition. It may be useful, then, to think of the various links between Middleton and Shakespeare as being in different degrees materialist and aesthetic.

If the extent of their cooperation remains largely conjectural, they must have thought highly of each other's work, regardless of differences they may have had.