Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture: A Companion to the Collected Works

ISBN-13: 9780199678730 / Angielski / Miękka / 2014 / 1200 str.

Gary Taylor; John Lavagnino

Opis

Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture is not only a companion to The Collected Works of Thomas Middleton, which every scholar of Renaissance literature will find indispensable. It is also essential reading for anyone interested in the history of the book in early modern Europe.
The book is divided into two parts. The first part, on 'The Culture', situates Middleton within an historical and theoretical overview of early modern textual production, reproduction, circulation, and reception. An introductory essay by Gary Taylor ('The Order of Persons') surveys lists of persons written by or connected to Middleton, using the complex relationship between textual and social orders to trace the evolution of textual culture in England during the 'Middleton century' (1580-1679). Ten original essays then focus on Middleton's connections to different aspects of textual culture in that century: authorship (by MacD. P. Jackson), manuscripts (Harold Love), legal texts (Edward Geiskes), censorship (Richard Burt), printing (Adrian Weiss), visual texts (John Astington), music (Andrew Sabol), stationers and living authors (Cyndia Clegg), posthumous publishing (Maureen Bell), and early readers (John Jowett).
The second part, 'The Texts', supplies the documentation for claims made in the first part. This includes detailed evidence for the canon and chronology of Middleton's works in all genres, greatly extending previous scholarship, and using the latest corpus-based attribution techniques. A full editorial apparatus is supplied for each item in The Collected Works an Introduction, which summarizes and extends previous scholarship, is followed by textual notes, recording substantive departures from the control-text, variants between early texts, press-variants, discussions of emendations, and (for plays) an exact transcription of all original stage directions. Cross-references make it easy to move between the two volumes.
This authoritative account of the early texts includes some extraordinarily complicated cases, which have never before been systematically collated: 'Hence, all you vain delights' (the most popular song lyric from the Renaissance stage), The Two Gates of Salvation, The Peacemaker, and A Game at Chess (the most complex editorial problem in early modern drama, with eight extant texts and numerous reports of the early performances).

Recenzje

Few editorial projects have been as eagerly anticipated as the Oxford Middleton, which will utterly transform how we understand early modern drama, both in the classroom and in our research. As with Shakespeare, Gary Taylor and his team have set a new gold standard for textual editing and interpretive criticism, leaping from the 19th century to the 21st - finally an edition that captures Middleton's tremendous accomplishments.

O autorze

Gary Taylor is George Matthew Edgar Professor of English at Florida State University. He is general editor of prize-winning, innovative Oxford editions of Shakespeare's Complete Works and Middleton's Collected Works, as well as a prize-winning book on Shakespeare in performance, Moment by Moment by Shakespeare. In addition to his twenty-two scholarly books, he has written for newspapers and magazines on both sides of the Atlantic, been widely interviewed on radio and television, and spoken at major theatres in the UK, USA, and Canada. His reconstruction of The History of Cardenio has been developed through workshops and readings at many theatres, including Shakespeare's Globe (London), the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, the American Shakespeare Center, and the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington D.C John Lavagnino studied physics at Harvard University and American literature at Brandeis University, where he wrote his dissertation on Vladimir Nabokov. He has worked in atmospheric science at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and in electronic publishing for numerous organizations. He is now Senior Lecturer in Humanities Computing at King's College London, and is working on the digital Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450-1700.