“Shameless Collaboration”: Mixture and the Double Plot of The Changeling

Abstract

lthough he held Middleton among the finest of Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights, T. S. Eliot nevertheless remained ambivalent about a his “authorial” status, Middleton’s role as a “shameless collaborator” hardly to be separated from Rowley. Unlike Shakespeare or Jonson or Donne, Middleton poses a peculiar dilemma for Eliot: he lacks “personality.” From his works alone, Eliot cannot imagine Middleton, as he might Jonson, “discoursing at the Mermaid or laying down the law to Drummond of Hawthornden.” We have no clues to his habits or his eccentricities of character. For modern readers, Eliot complains, Middleton exists only as some “collective name” unifying an otherwise disparate body of works, a textual marker devoid of any real, authorial substance. Although this emptiness may arise in part from Eliot’s ignorance about Middleton’s biography, it actually seems to be more firmly rooted in the distinctive features of collaboration, the incoherence of voice Eliot suggestively links to the multiple voices of collaborative authorship. The exceptionally diverse plays attributed to Middleton, from Women Beware Women to The Roaring Girl, are in Eliot’s mind “as if written by two different men.” Despite ostensibly arising from the sheer variety of his plays, from the lack of a single voice running throughout his many works, Eliot’s concern withMiddleton’s