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Appendix I 1 the Revenger's Tragedy': Middleton's Or Tourneur's?

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Appendix I 1 the Revenger's Tragedy': Middleton's Or Tourneur's? Appendix I 1 The Revenger's Tragedy': Middleton's or Tourneur's? I To my knowledge, only one edition of The Revenger's Tragedy attributes the play to Middleton rather than Tourneur, and even then the editors express some reservations (Loughrey and Taylor, Thomas Middleton: Five Plays, 1988; see below). Of the two writers, however, the case for Middleton, if not conclusive, is by far the stronger. On 7 October 1607, the printer George Eld submitted 'Twoo plaies' to the censor, Sir George Buc, for licensing - 'th[e] one called the revengers tragedie th[e] other A trick to catche the old one'. The Revenger's Tragedy had probably been written and performed the previous year. When it was published, the title page of the quarto carried no author's name (not unusual for the period), but noted that the play 'hath beene sundry times Acted, by the Kings Maiesties Seruants' (at the Globe). With no name indicated in either instance there is, on the face of it, no external evidence to support a claim for any particular author. Other factors, however, point forcefully towards Middleton as the playwright. David Lake has noted that 'there is no instance of the coupling of plays known to be by different authors through the entire Elizabethan and Jacobean periods', while 166 'The Revenger's Tragedy': Middleton's or Tourneur's? 167 'there are several couplings of plays by the same author' (Lake, 1975: 140). Middleton is the undisputed author of A Trick and Lake concludes that 'if The Revenger's Tragedy is not by the same author as A Trick to Catch the Old One, then it is the sole exception to this rule in the reigns of Elizabeth and James' (Lake, 1975: 141; my emphasis). In his commendatory verse attached to the printed text of Women Beware Women (another undisputed Middleton play), Nathaniel Richards used the phrase 'drabs of state' (1. 2). This is a quotation from The Revenger's Tragedy, a fact that must have been known to Richards, since he used the complete line ('A drab of state, a doth of silver slut') in his own play, Messalina, and other references in the verses indicate that Richards was well acquainted with Middleton and his work. The inclusion of these words from The Revenger's Tragedy in a tribute to Middle­ ton may well suggest some link between the two. At the time The Revenger's Tragedy was produced, Middleton's extant, undisputed work. appears to have been written solely for the boys' companies, most notably the series of satiric, city comedies for the Children of Paul's. Some critics have con­ sequently considered it unlikely that in this situation Middleton would have written a 'tragedy' for the adult King's Men. But Middleton had already been employed by an adult company (Henslowe's Admiral's- later Prince's- Men) for whom he had written one tragedy (now lost) called Randall, Earl of Chester, and collaborated on another, and it has been suggested that he had already worked for the King's Men, collaborating with Shakespeare on Timon of Athens. It has also been suggested that The Revenger's Tragedy might have been written with performance by a boys' company in mind, and then acquired later in some way by the King's Men when the Children of Paul's company folded, as it appears they did in 1606. This theory is supported by the play's use of the mannered technique typical of the work performed by the boy actors in the private theatres, and by the fact that in May 1606 Middleton provided The Viper and Her Brood (now lost) for the Children of the Queen's Revels. It has at times been proposed that this was The Revenger's Tragedy under another name, but whether that is so or not, the play appears to show Middleton writing a tragedy (it certainly does not sound like the title of a 168 Middleton and Tourneur comedy) for a private theatre at the right date. Peter Thomson's observation (1983: 77) that The Revenger's 'ITagedy was not par­ ticularly successful in its own time indicates, perhaps, that the Globe audience was unready for the play's particular strategies. In many ways the effort to demonstrate that Middleton might have pt:<>duced a tragedy in 1606 is fruitless, since The Revenger's 'ITagedy is arguably more akin to the city comedies than to conventional tragedy, a cross-over noted by Brian Gibbons (1980: 121) when he writes that in Middleton's satirical comedy Michaelmas Term 'the dark and savage potential of the action expresses itself with a power more usually found in satiric tragedy', and, as Loughrey and Taylor (1988: xxvi) note, 'If one were worried that Middleton might have been moving too violently from comedy to tragedy in 160fr7, these observations might allay one's worries'. Finally, it should be noted that many aspects of The Revenger's 'ITagedy - such as the bold mixture of comic and savage elements, the use of Morality play devices, the stance it takes on social issues, and the satirical view of court life it offers - though not unique to Middleton, are found not only in plays he is known to have written earlier, but remain characteristics of his outlook and dramatic method throughout his career. II The attribution to Cyril Tourneur is, by comparison, very flimsy indeed, and anyone coming to it fresh may be surprised at the extent to which it has survived. Toumeur was first named as the author in a playlist published by Edward Archer in 1656 and attached as an appendix to a play also (ironically) involving Middleton - The Old Lilw, a tragicomedy, probably written in collaboration with his regular partner William Rowley, and (possibly) Philip Massinger. The attribution was repeated in subsequent lists issued in 1661 and 1671 by Francis Kirkman who, though he elaborated on the information, had no indepen­ dent source: as usual he unquestioningly accepted Archer's (frequently totally wrong) ascriptions. Gerard Langbaine, again with no further evidence, repeated the attribution in 1691, which 'The Revenger's 1Tagedy': Middleton's or Tourneur's? 169 means that the ascription of the play to Toumeur is ultimately derived from Archer's original - and highly questionable - claim. Towards the end of the nineteenth centwy scholars began to query the Toumeur attribution, but it was E. C. H. Oliphant who, in 1926, first made a specific claim for Middleton, since when others have joined in, supporting their arguments with a range of verbal, metrical, lexical and other stylistic analyses. Of these, the most detailed have been those of G. R. Price, M. P. Jackson, David Lake and P. B. Murray.t Lake, even before he began his own study, considered that 'the conclusion must by now be almost irresistible that the copy for the substantive early quarto was a Middleton holograph' [a copy in the author's own handwriting] (Lake, 1975: 136). Following his own analysis Lake attributed 'every scene of The Revenger's 1Tagedy to Middleton: there is no convincing sug­ gestion of any collaborator' (Lake, 1975: 142). Others have been less convinced. R. A. Foakes, having edited the play for the Revels series, finds the evidence for Middleton's authorship 'strong but not conclusive', and on balance inclines towards Toumeur. Brian Gibbons, whose New Mermaids edition appeared in 1967, concludes that: 'it seems reasonable to ascribe the play to Cyril Toumeur, allowing that it reveals the influence of Thomas Middleton and John Marston and even, palely, like most Jacobean satiric plays, the influence of Ben Jonson' (xii). Another editor, George Parfitt, considers that to attribute the play to either Toumeur or Middleton 'at the present state of play, would be irresponsible' and suggests that 'the play has to be regarded as anonymous.' He concludes: It seems to me that we are not really even in a position to rule out the possibility that The Revenger's 1Tagedy is the work of a known dramatist other than Toumeur or Middleton, if we remember the versatility of most major Jacobean writers. (The Plays of Cyril 'fourneur, Cambridge, 1978: xvii) In 1966, Samuel Schoenbaum (who had earlier accepted Middleton's authorship, and included The Revenger's 1Tagedy in his critical study Middleton's 1Tagedies, 1955), offered his revised opinion: 170 Middleton and Tourneur the external evidence does not sweep all before it, and the situation, as it stands, is that neither Middleton's or Tour­ neur's advocates have been able to bring forward the kind of proof to which one party or the other must submit.2 Andrew Gurr, on the other hand, has taken the opposite course to Schoenbaum, and moved from rejection of Middleton in the first edition of The Shakespearean Stage, to acceptance in the second. Margot Heinemann's 'feeling that the play cannot confidently be taken as Middleton's is based on both dramatic and poetic style, as well as on the internal evidence', and she offers the view that while the author of The Revenger's Tragedy 'seems often to think in coloured images', Middleton's images, though visual, are, in the tragedies, limited to 'black and white, gold and silver' (Heinemann, 1982: 287-8). The most recent contributions to the debate, however, have come down firmly on Middleton's side. ThomllS Middleton: Five Plays includes The Revenger's Tragedy, providing, as the editors say, 'an opportunity to read The Revenger's Tragedy alongside some plays uncontroversially ascribed to Middleton', though even they admit that 'it would be dishonest of us to claim that our own subjective reading convinces us in the very marrow of our bones that The Revenger's Tragedy could only have come from the pen of Middleton' (Loughrey and Taylor, 1988: xxviii).
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