Title: “Second only to Shakespeare”? Middleton 400

Dates (provisional): 28-29 October 2027

Place: University of Naples “L’Orientale” – ARGO Research Centre (Interuniversity Research Centre for the Study of Argumentation, Pragmatics and Stylistics)

Organisers: Daniela Guardamagna and Tommaso Continisio 

Deadline for abstract submission: 31 December 2026.

Send to:

guardamagna@lettere.uniroma2.it

continisio@lettere.uniroma2.it

Four hundred years since Thomas Middleton’s death, claims about his merits and importance as a playwright often take the form of a comparison with Shakespeare. “Second only to Shakespeare” was T. S. Eliot’s verdict on Middleton’s achievement in tragedy. “Our other Shakespeare” was the phrase championed by the editors of the foundational 2007 Middleton: The Collected Works. A century after Eliot, two decades after the Oxford edition, and at this four-hundred-year anniversary, what do these formulations still allow us to see, and what do they prevent us from seeing, considering Middleton’s rich career as a poet, satirist, pageant writer, polemicist, and City Chronologer of London?

Such questions continue to invite attention because Middleton’s and Shakespeare’s careers were entangled in ways that are not yet settled. Middleton’s presence in Timon of Athens as a collaborator is now widely accepted; a strong consensus holds that he adapted Macbeth, and a detailed case has been made for his revision of Measure for Measure. Shakespeare and Middleton often wrote for the same theatres, sometimes sharing the same material, yet each retained a dramatic method which was recognisably his own. 

As an opportunity for reconsideration as much as commemoration, a two-day international conference hosted by the ARGO Research Centre (Interuniversity Research Centre for the Study of Argumentation, Pragmatics and Stylistics, University of Naples “L’Orientale”) aims to explore the scope of Middleton’s achievement, particularly in drama. What does a study of Middleton reveal about early modern dramatic culture that a Shakespeare-centred narrative cannot? How might his works reshape our understanding of attitudes to authorship, collaboration, the conventions of genre, and the theatre’s attention to questions of power? And what might it mean to shift Middleton from the margins of accounts of early modern English literary culture, particularly in Italy?

We invite proposals for twenty-minute papers on any aspect of Middleton’s works, contexts, collaborators, reception, and afterlives. Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• The history of the “second only” and “other Shakespeare” formulations;

• Middleton and Shakespeare: collaboration, revision, adaptation,

attribution, and the porous boundaries of the two canons;

• Editing, textual transmission, and intertextuality;

• Jacobean Middleton: city comedy, tragedy, satire, and genre;

• ⁠London, urban culture, and the public sphere;

• ⁠Religion, politics, and censorship, from anti-Catholic satire to the suppression of A Game at Chess;

• Gender, sexuality, kinship, and the body;

• Witchcraft, demonology, prophecy, and the supernatural;

• Performance history, adaptation, translation, and global Middleton.

Please send an abstract of 250-300 words, together with a short biographical note (including your name, institutional affiliation, and contact details), to both organisers at the email addresses provided above.