ABSTRACT
Attribution studies tend to operate at the speculatively charged margins of the greater metropolitan Shakespeare industry. The dedicated attributionist invests considerable scholarly capital in the effort of “proving” that Middleton is the real author of The Revenger’s Tragedy or The Family of Love, or that Shakespeare is essentially the author of Sir Thomas More, or (even more painstakingly) that Shakespeare’s hand is most prominent in this or that act of Pericles while Fletcher’s imprint emerges more clearly in one or two others. As Marcy North acknowledges, in her groundbreaking book The Anonymous Renaissance (2003), the scholarly returns on a convincingly argued case of attribution can be quite high. As the recent release of Middleton’s Collected Works demonstrates, a successful argument for adding a play to the Middleton canon may not only lead to its re-publication and theatrical revival, but makes the play newly available for critical attention, and encourages a re-examination of how its inclusion affects our understanding of the other plays already assembled under the Middleton imprimatur.
