Renaissance Forum: Volume 6, Number 1, Winter 2002: James Mardock

Thomas Middleton. 2000. Michaelmas Term. Ed. Gail Kern Paster. The Revels Plays. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 205pp. ISBN 0-7190-1552-9. Ł40.00/$69.95.

During the long period of anticipation of the perpetually forthcoming Oxford Middleton, publishers have been understandably reluctant to produce new single-volume critical editions of Middleton's plays. Although the New Mermaids series issued editions of The Roaring Girl, Women Beware Women, and The Witch in the 1990s, until recently the last Revels Plays contribution to modern Middleton editions was Paul Mulholland's Roaring Girl in 1987. Gail Kern Paster's edition of Michaelmas Term is a welcome exception to this relative dearth. Paster is careful to acknowledge her consultation and use of Theodore Leinwand's work on the play for the Oxford anthology, but it is hard to imagine a more complete, thoughtful, and balanced edition. It stands currently as the only readily available single-volume edition of Michaelmas Term, Richard Levin's 1966 Regents Renaissance Drama edition being out of print. The only other available edition of the play is Michael Taylor's in the World's Classics anthology A Mad World, My Masters and Other Plays (1995), but while this, like all the volumes in that series, is excellent value for the money, the anthology format precludes extensive notes and critical apparatus.
The difference is, of course, a matter of target audiences. Paster's edition, like all the Revels editions, aims to be the most comprehensive to date; the introductory material runs to fifty pages, compared to sixteen for Levin's, and the nineteen-page essay on all four Middletonian city comedies included in Taylor's anthology. Paster's textual collations are judicious and readable, and the extensive commentary notes go well beyond glossary. As one would expect from the author of The Idea of the City in the Age of Shakespeare (1985), Paster displays a thorough awareness of the historical contexts of early-modern urban life; her references to contemporary historians like John Stow give a welcome sense of setting, and she never allows the play to become a lone witness to the issues it discusses – Quomodo's shady business practices, for example, are set against contemporary regulations by the Court of Aldermen (55n).
The main strengths of the introduction are very much in the spirit of the Oxford project. Paster's discussion of textual evidence is admirably careful and balanced in its claims, summarizing previous critics' conjectures about the play's date and the manner of its printing, presenting exactly what we know and what we do not know, and dealing in likelihoods rather than speculation. This is also, more importantly, how she treats the vexed question of whether Michaelmas Term influenced Volpone or vice versa.
More striking is Paster's implicit defence of Middleton against the attacks and condescension of previous critics and editors. Comparisons to Shakespeare, importantly, have been relegated to the extensive network of cross-referencing footnotes that include all of Middleton's contemporaries, and where the spectre of Shakespeare looms large in Levin's and Taylor's introductions, his name does not appear in Paster's. Those elements of the play that have been seen as the most problematic Paster's edition seeks to explain or to justify. Some critics have found Michaelmas Term's structure disjointed; Levin's introduction, for example, concedes that the integration of the two plots is 'something less than satisfactory' (Levin xxii). Paster, by contrast, identifies several parallels and links between the Easy-Quomodo main plot and the Andrew Lethe subplot, seeing the stories of the two gulled gallants as thematic foils. Moreover, as part of a sophisticated consideration of the play's treatment of gender that is long overdue, she draws a further, gendered parallel between Easy's and Lethe's stories and the narrative of the Country Wench. Paster acknowledges the obvious linking of the plot and subplot through the Quomodo family's aspirations to gentility. Instead of apologizing as Levin does for the relative tenuousness of this link, however, she finds a stronger source of cohesion, arguing that what really holds the plots together is Middleton's mastery at portraying a whole and interconnected world at once: 'a sequence of three ensemble scenes (in 1.1, 2.1, and 3.1)', she points out, depict 'gallants engaged in myriad forms of social and sexual display, scenes which taken together function almost as genre pictures of an early seventeenth-century "Gallant's Progress" ' (22). This astute awareness of Middleton's dramaturgy – especially his use of space and pace to create implied dramatic locales that define the structure of class, morality, and gender in the play's London – is characteristic of Paster's edition.
Similarly, where some critics and editors tend to summarize Middleton's moral attitude as unambiguously and simplistically cynical, Paster treats the play as having a nuanced and specific satirical voice. 'If we hope to find what is distinctive and fresh in this play's presentation of ideas and imagery,' she argues, 'we must try to hear the city comedy clichés of class rivalry less as the core of Middleton's real interest in Michaelmas Term than as the conventional narrative means to more compelling thematic ends' (26). Consequently, her introduction moves beyond the critical commonplaces about Middleton's city comedy equating sex with commerce into a broader discussion of the desire and lack that impels all the plot strands. Ultimately, she argues, Middleton uses this dynamic of desire and lack to critique specific urban ideals: Easy's idealized version of male friendship, for example, becomes reduced to mere fashion in the hands of London's gallants, and indeed becomes Shortyard's most effective tool for gulling him. Likewise, Paster finds an explanation for the device of Quomodo's counterfeit death that critics have found troublingly unmotivated; his bizarre course of action is impelled by his yearning for the perceived ease of land ownership, a version of pastoral that the play reveals as 'idyllic and brutally unreal' (44).
The tooth-and-nail defence of Middleton is implicit in Paster's editorial practices, as well. Where other editors have apologized and tried to regularize Middleton's characteristically loose verse and verse-like prose rhythms into something resembling Shakespeare's cleaner shifts between verse and prose, Paster treats his style as a strength. She relineates prose to verse 'only where the metrical pulse beats very audibly indeed' (7). The edition rightly treats the text as though it was written for an audience and not a readership; Middleton, like his contemporaries, wrote for the ear and not the eye, and Paster's editing is geared toward preserving the 'easy colloquial flair' of a play whose characters' vocal rhythms move along a spectrum of iambic theatricality just as their identities shift with all the fluidity of a player's costume. In dealing with passages pointed in the copy-text only with commas, she shows an awareness of the difficult balance to be struck between readability and the interpretive fluidity of loose seventeenth-century syntax. Her modernized punctuation does, as she acknowledges, lead to a 'loss in interpretive resonance' (7), but her footnotes go a long way toward restoring it.
The edition is a welcome contribution to Middleton scholarship, and the best edition of Michaelmas Term available. Without a sense of protesting too much, Paster removes the playwright from the shadow of his more canonical contemporaries, and the play from the shadow of Middleton's more widely read work. It is a valuable step in decentring Shakespeare, or at least reconsidering seventeenth-century drama as a broader phenomenon, but the question then arises: at whom are we aiming the new canon? The excellence of Paster's edition reminds us that it is the only single-volume edition available but one that is, at Ł40, well out of most students' reach and, with the comprehensiveness of interpretive and textual apparatus that characterizes the Revels editions, potentially beyond their scope. It is of course a question of marketing, but Paster's edition seems to call for a Michaelmas Term volume in the series of Revels Plays Student Editions, at least as a stop-gap until the Oxford Middleton arrives.

JAMES MARDOCK
UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK