Primrose Road

The London Times reports that "computer assisted research" strongly suggests that portions of what we now know as Macbeth and Measure for Measure were written (actually, added afterwards, perhaps after Shakespeare's death) by Thomas Middleton, known for his city comedies A Chaste Maid at Cheapside and The Roaring Girl and the tragedy The Changeling. Notice that no one's arguing that there was a major coverup going on: Middleton added some lines to Shakespeare's plays. In fact, Middleton added some important lines to the Scottish Play (the MacDuff family scenes). Researchers didn't pick up on it for generations because for the last two centuries or so, Shakespeare has been presented 'bookishly' -- as though every word that appears inside a cover labeled "William Shakespeare" were composed by Shakespeare himself. What this argument in no way says is that Middleton wrote the entire Shakespearean corpus or even one full play. And it suggests that the fact that Middleton wrote parts of Macbeth and Measure for Measure would have been 'common knowledge' of sorts in the seventeenth century; it's a fact that was overlooked historically, not covered up by some vast conspiracy. (I still hold that if Christopher Marlowe -- a spy and possibly a double agent with a Catholic agenda -- didn't have to write his plays under an assumed name, no one had to write plays under an assumed name.) Anyhow, there are some sticky areas in this Middleton argument: previous "computational" studies establishing Shakespeare as the author of the anonymous Arden of Faversham and others contradicting Shakespeare's "authorship" have been criticized for not taking historical and cultural factors into account. Additionally, the argument partly relies, according to the Times article, on the "circumstances of Middleton's childhood," a Romantic (or perhaps Freudian reading in which an author is inspired by his or her personal life. Overall, though, the research looks both promising and interesting, especially in that it deals with some of what I find to be the most moving and tragic scenes in Macbeth.