Measure, Macbeth & Middleton

Move over Christopher Marlowe; back up Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford; step off Francis Bacon. There’s a new sheriff in town, and he’s laying his own claim to some of Shakespeare’s plays. It is none other than Shakespeare’s contemporary and fellow playwright, Thomas Middleton. Your reaction to this news might be a maelstrom of emotions, asking yourself, “What does this mean for Shakespeare’s reputation?”; “How are the Oxfordians going to rebut this?”; and, most importantly, “Who the hell is Thomas Middleton?”
If you’re an aficionado of Jacobean drama, his name will not be a complete mystery to you; still, even for the faithful, Middleton’s best-known plays—The Revenger’s Tragedy, Women Beware Women, and The Changeling—rarely show up in multi-period anthologies or production. Nevertheless, Middleton did make an important contribution to English drama and, if you believe the evidence, a significant part of that contribution was the refining of some of Shakespeare’s plays. A new two-book set of Middleton’s plays takes the theory a step further, including two of Shakespeare’s plays. Many have speculated that Measure for Measure and Macbeth were partially written by Middleton and new textual analysis asserts that as much as ten percent of the plays may be his work. The relatively early publication of Shakespeare’s collected works (which appeared just seven years after his death) has long eclipsed Middleton’s potential contribution. This new collection seeks to re-stake Middleton’s claim as part of the Shakespearean canon.