The Changeling: The State of Play - (Arden Shakespeare the State of Play) by Gordon McMullan & Kelly Stage & Ann Thompson & Lena Cowen Orlin

Book Synopsis

This collection of original essays on Thomas Middleton and William Rowley's unsettling revenge tragedy The Changeling represents key new directions in criticism and research. The 13 chapters fall into six groups focusing on questions of space, theology, collaboration, disability both mental and physical, and performance both early modern and contemporary.

The Changeling's critical and theatrical history, and a selected bibliography for the volume helps readers easily find the most frequently cited materials in the volume as a whole, while individual essays detail the full expanse of critical sources to pursue for further analysis. With contributors ranging from highly regarded critics to emerging scholars drawn from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, France and Switzerland, the collection equips readers to engage with a variety of critical approaches to the play, moving a long way beyond the last century's tendency to treat Middleton as 'the early modern Ibsen', to ignore Rowley, and to focus almost wholly on a single aspect of the play's plot.

Key themes and topics include:

- Performance
- Space and affect
- Authorial collaboration
- Gender and representation
- Violence
- Disability

Review Quotes

About the Author

Gordon McMullan is Professor of English and Director of the London Shakespeare Centre at King's College London, UK. He is a general editor of Arden Early Modern Drama and a general textual editor of the Norton Shakespeare, 3E. His publications include The Politics of Unease in the Plays of John Fletcher (1994), the Arden 3 edition of Henry VIII (2000), Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing (2007) and Antipodal Shakespeare (2018).

Kelly Stage is Associate Professor of English and Director the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA. Her recent publications include Producing Early Modern London: A Comedy of Urban Space, 1598-1616 (2018) and an edition of Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker's The Roaring Girl (2019).