Thomas Middleton

Gary Taylor, who's a big name in Shakespeare studies on both sides of the Atlantic, gave a fascinating platform talk at the National Theatre last night on Thomas Middleton, whose collected works he's been editing for the past two decades for OUP with a team of other scholars.  He made the case for Middleton being right up there with Shakespeare in the range and quality of his dramatic writing, and outlined very lucidly the reasons why he fell into oblivion.  Two factors seem to have been responsible;  firstly, Middleton wrote his plays for all sorts of companies and unlike Shakespeare, didn't have a loyal group of colleagues who collected his scripts and published them in a folio.  Secondly, his plays were effectively (though perhaps not legally) unperformable until the abolition of theatre censorship in the 1960s.  He made two other points which interested me greatly.  The Revenger's Tragedy is now overwhelmingly attributed by scholars to Middleton, though theatres and publishers don't yet seem to have caught up.  And Professor Taylor is, like me, itching to see someone take the risk of reviving Middleton's A Game At Chess, the biggest hit of English Renaissance theatre bar none.  I have seen this just once -- in a student production on the lawn of an Oxford college (I think it was Trinity) in about 1969.  Does anyone out there recall it and does anybody know who was clever enough to put it on?   I can still remember that Oxford production, with the actors performing on a giant black and white chess board.  Gary Taylor's never seen the play at all, though he's absolutely certain that it would work on stage.  There's a lot of contemporary politics in it, but he doesn't think that's an obstacle.