A Tale of Two Fools: Middleton, Shakespeare, and Co-Authorship in <i>Timon of Athens</i> and <i>King Lear</i>

In recent decades, scholars have largely come to recognize the Jacobean dramatist Thomas Middleton as one of the most prominent contemporaries to feature in Shakespeare's story.Although John Fletcher remains the only playwright universally agreed to have directly coauthored more than one play with Shakespeare, recent developments indicate, as Emma Smith remarks, that "Middleton may yet emerge as a more significant collaborator", his extant works showing him to have been "a creative and responsive early reader and reviser of the older playwright's work" (297).Middleton not only co-wrote the experimental tragedy Timon of Athens with Shakespeare -a play which Eilidh Kane argues clearly shows "two individual writers [] bring[ing] their own skills to bear on a shared project" (233) -but it was also Middleton, not Fletcher, to whom Shakespeare's former playing company the King's Men turned when the need arose to adapt several of Shakespeare's plays for revival following the older playwright's death in 1616: for this reason, Middleton's hand has also been identified in Measure for Measure, All's Well That Ends Well, Macbeth, and (in a far less convincing attribution) the 1623 First Folio text of Titus Andronicus.Considering how closely Shakespeare and Middleton's respective canons seem to have been connected, it is to be expected that one influenced the other.Perhaps predictably, however, the direction of influence has often been assumed to have moved one way, from the "senior" playwright to the junior.Gary Taylor remarks, for instance, in a study in "microattribution" in which he attempts to delineate Middleton's contributions to the extant text of Macbeth: "Shakespeare influenced Middleton [] while there is no clear case of Shakespeare being influenced by Middleton" ("Empirical Middleton" 251).But what this claim ignores is that influence can take many forms.