Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works and Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture: A Companion to the Collected Works. Edited by Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007; pp. 3212. $350 cloth.

This essay argues that Thomas Middleton and William Rowley's The Changeling (1622) draws on debates about sense perception in the period to interrogate the effects of dramatic representation. After a brief overview of early modern perceptual theory, this essay demonstrates that the play's villain, De Flores, manipulates other characters’ perception through language. In fact, De Flores uses theatrical language to manipulate how other characters perceive their environment, indicating the theater's ability to manipulate audiences. By affecting how characters perceive, De Flores affects other characters’ ability to process and react to their environment, which impedes their judgment. The essay argues that much of The Changeling's dramatic action unfolds through a conflict between two models of perception—presentational and representational—that undergird much of the play's dramatic conflict. In the play, pervasive anxiety about judgment, particularly how perception affects judgment, is structured around the distinction between these two models of perception. Considering the play alongside representational and presentational models indicates how early modern dramatists engage with intellectual theories to consider how representation works and how spaces are experienced. In this way, the theater refracts and dramatizes theories about perception.

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Handling the Theme of Hands in early Modern Cross-over Contexts

Early Modern Culture Online ◽

10.15845/emco.v5i0.1291 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 5 ◽

pp. 31

Author(s):

Anne Sophie Haar Refskou ◽

Laura Søvsø Thomasen

Keyword(s):

Early Modern ◽

Human Perception ◽

Human Hand ◽

Complex Phenomenon ◽

Comparative Analyses ◽

Different Types ◽

Textual Culture ◽

The Many ◽

Frequent Presence

The human hand is a complex phenomenon within the contexts of early modern visual and textual culture. Its frequent presence in early modern texts and illustrations - as well as the many different types of described and depicted hands - raises a number of questions as to its functions and significances. In this article, we examine the role of the hand and two of its familiar functions –pointing and touching – against diverse and diverging understandings of human perception and cognition in the period focussing particularly on relations between bodies and minds. Through comparative analyses of cross-over examples from both medicine, manuals and drama – primarily John Bulwer’sChirologia and Chironomia, William Harvey’s de Motu Cordis and extracts from Shakespeare’s plays – we explore the questions implied by hands and their contributions to the knowledge probed and proposed by these texts and illustrations.

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Clothing and Queer Style in Early Modern English Drama

10.1093/oso/9780198867821.001.0001 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

James M. Bromley

Keyword(s):

Early Modern ◽

Ben Jonson ◽

Historical Context ◽

Thomas Middleton ◽

Thomas Dekker ◽

Theoretical Frameworks ◽

Early Modern English Drama ◽

Early Modern English ◽

Current Thinking ◽

George Chapman

This book examines ‘queer style’ or forms of masculinity grounded in superficiality, inauthenticity, affectation, and the display of the extravagantly clothed body in early modern English city comedies. Queer style destabilizes distinctions between able-bodied and disabled, human and nonhuman, and the past and the present—distinctions that have structured normative ways of thinking about sexuality. Glimpsing the worldmaking potential of queer style, plays by Ben Jonson, George Chapman, Thomas Middleton, and Thomas Dekker imagine alternatives to the prevailing modes of subjectivity, sociability, and eroticism in early modern London. While the characters associated with queer style are situated in a hostile generic and historical context, this book draws on recent work on disability, materiality, and queer temporality to rethink their relationship to those contexts so as to access the utopian possibilities of early modern queer style. These theoretical frameworks also help bring into relief how the attachments and pleasures of early modern sartorial extravagance can estrange us from the epistemologies of sexuality that narrow current thinking about sexuality and its relationship to authenticity, pedagogy, interiority, and privacy.

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Performing Conversion

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474482721.001.0001 ◽

2021 ◽

Keyword(s):

Early Modern ◽

Cultural Exchange ◽

Thomas Middleton ◽

Colonial Mexico ◽

Early Modern Europe ◽

Early Modernity ◽

Early Modern Theatre ◽

Commercial Theatre ◽

Theatrical Practice ◽

Selection Of

This volume asks, how did theatrical practice shape the multiplying forms of conversion that emerged in early modern Europe? Each chapter focuses on a specific city or selection of cities, beginning with Venice, then moving to London, Mexico City, Tlaxcalla, Seville, Madrid, Amsterdam, Zürich, Berne, and Lucerne (among others). Collectively, these studies establish a picture of early modernity as an age teeming with both excitement and anxiety over conversional activity. In addition to considering the commercial theatre that produced professional dramatists such as Lope de Vega and Thomas Middleton, the volume surveys a wide variety of other kinds of theatre that brought theatricality into formative relationship with conversional practice. Examples range from civic pageantry in Piazza San Marco, to mechanical statues in Amsterdam’s pleasure labyrinths, to the dramatic dialogues performed by students of rhetoric in colonial Mexico. As a whole, the volume addresses issues of conversion as it pertains to early modern theatre, literature, theology, philosophy, economics, urban culture, globalism, colonialism, trade, and cross-cultural exchange.

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Competitive Capers

The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Competition ◽

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190639082.013.3 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 64-86

Author(s):

Emily Winerock

Keyword(s):

Early Modern ◽

Early Modern Period ◽

Thomas Middleton ◽

Literary Works ◽

Twelfth Night ◽

Dance Floor ◽

William Rowley ◽

Modern Period

Whereas much of the dancing of the early modern period emphasized the cohesion or “harmoniousness” of the group, competitive dancing allowed participants to distinguish themselves as individuals. In formal, staged competitions and in informal dance-offs, dancing highlighted individuals’ grace and skill. In addition, masterful dancing implied excellence more broadly: for men, impressive athletic displays on the dance floor also suggested virility and sexual prowess. This chapter examines two groups of complementary sources for early modern competitive dancing: didactic manuals that provide detailed instructions for dances like the galliard and games like “Kick the Tassel,” and literary works that stage or describe competitive dancing, with particular attention to Thomas Middleton, William Rowley, and Philip Massinger’s The Old Law, William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, William Kemp’s Nine Daies Wonder, and an anonymous song from the “Blundell Family Hodgepodge Book.”

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[They Dance]

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance ◽

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190498788.013.12 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 236-260

Author(s):

Seth Stewart Williams

Keyword(s):

Early Modern ◽

Thomas Middleton ◽

Early Modern England ◽

Significant Alteration ◽

Fictional World ◽

William Davenant ◽

Commercial Theater ◽

A Share

This chapter argues that in early modern England, dance scenes were among the most radically collaborative components of a play’s text, prone to complicating questions of authorship and attribution. Arguing that dances rarely circulated between contemporaneous plays without significant alteration, it also takes a long view of collaboration, noting the successive alterations to the play made by Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, and William Davenant, whose transtemporal collaborations leave dance spanning multiple compositional temporalities. Relatedly, the fictional world within plays also depicts dance as complexly authored, and playwrights often attribute choreographic authorship to one or multiple characters in order to explore broader thematic tensions concerning origins and responsibility. In The Two Noble Kinsmen, the dancing of the Jailer’s Daughter is attributed to several men who have had a share in her suffering; in The Tragedy of Macbeth, the witches’ fidelity to necromantic choreographies proves inseparable from the question of how and whether they author human misfortune. Macbeth also proved a key play in the development of choreographers as a class of professionals in the commercial theater, and the chapter closes with a reflection on how scripts shaped their work as “composers,” one of the terms used to characterize their work before the word “choreographer” was in use.

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