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The publication of the Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works by Oxford University Press in 2007 has placed Middleton's work in direct dialogue- sometimes contentious-with Shakespeare's plays in recent scholarship. There are two main reasons for the attention and the attendant fray: first, the Oxford Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works volume is, purposefully, a direct aesthetic parallel to The Oxford Shakespeare, and the two texts have one general editor in common (Gary Taylor). Moreover, Taylor has, provocatively, presented the Oxford Middleton as supporting evidence for Middleton as "our other Shakespeare."
Second, the Oxford Middleton performs what some perceive as a sort of "raid" on the terrain of The Oxford Shakespeare, claiming Timon of Athens, Macbeth, and Measure for Measure for both volumes on the basis of the conclusion (not at all conclusive with respect to Macbeth and Measure, in the view of some scholars) that Middleton either revised these plays for their 1623 publication in Shakespeare's First Folio, or collaborated with Shakespeare in their composition. Among the reviewers who acknowledged this controversial aspect of the Oxford Middleton are Jonathan Bate in the TLS, Heather Hirschfeld in Theatre Survey, Lukas Erne in Modern Philology, and Mark Hutchings and Michelle O'Callaghan in Review of English Studies; Hutchings and O'Callaghan neatly sum up both sides of the debate: "Some readers may cavil at the inclusion of the Middleton-Shakespeare collaboration Timon of Athens, alongside Measure for Measure and Macbeth (both adapted by Middleton), but if deliberately provocative this is also a necessary corrective to the silencing of Middleton by Shakespeare editors" (Hutchings and O'Callaghan 318).
Alice Walker and Gary Taylor and John Jowett have considered the role that Middleton likely played in revising the text of Measure for Measure that has come down to us in the First Folio of 1623,2 and Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith teamed up to argue that evidence of Middleton's impact on the composition of Timon can be found in his own A Mad World, My Masters. Maguire and Smith conclude that "perhaps Mad World begins a dramaturgical collaboration with Shakespeare which will take in most of the plays traditionally allocated to the period around 1604-7-Measure for Measure, All's Well, Macbeth, and Timon . . . What the [Middleton] Collected Works has done-as we have-is...