The Bloody Banquet

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The Bloody Banquet [1] is an early 17th-century play, a revenge tragedy of uncertain date and authorship, attributed on its title page only to "T.D." It has attracted a substantial body of critical and scholarly commentary, chiefly for the challenging authorship problem it presents. It has been attributed to a collaboration between Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton.

[edit] Publication

The Bloody Banquet was never entered into the Register of the Stationers Company, but an order from the Lord Chamberlain (then Philip Herbert, 4th Earl of Pembroke), dated August 19, 1639, lists it among forty plays that are the property of William Beeston and can be performed only by his company, Beeston's Boys. It was first published in quarto in the same year, 1639, by Thomas Cotes, with the attribution to "T. D." on its title page.

[edit] Source

The play draws its plot from Pan His Syrinx (1584, 1597) by William Weaver.[2] The playwright(s) took elements from four of the seven stories in Weaver's volume, to create a revenge tale in which a Tyrant serves up a cannibal banquet, only to be assassinated at the dining table, yielding the "bloody banquet" of the title. The sole extant text of the play is only about 1900 lines lines in length, roughly 500 lines shorter than the average for plays of its era; discontinuities in the text suggest that it was edited before publication.[3] The drama's date is uncertain, although its general style and tone place it sometime after 1600.

[edit] Authorship

Some seventeenth-century sources point to Thomas Dekker as the "T. D." of the title page. Nineteenth-century critic F. G. Fleay identified T. D. as Thomas Drue on the strength of the common initials — but since virtually nothing is known about Drue (the author of only one acknowledged play, The Duchess of Suffolk), the attribution offered little enlightenment, and left the field open for other candidates. Robert Davenport was also suggested as a possibility.[4][5]

In 1925, E. H. C. Oliphant first linked the name of Thomas Middleton with the play; he argued that The Bloody Banquet was a Dekker/Middleton collaboration.[6] Further research and the use of stylistic analysis has brought about a consensus that the authors were Dekker and Middleton. David Lake, in his 1975 analysis of attribution problems in the Middleton canon, suggested that "The play is a much-revised one, written originally by Middleton with some help from Dekker about 1600–02"[7] — though he acknowledged this as only one possibility. Macdonald Jackson strengthened the case for Middleton two decades later.[8] More recently, Gary Taylor has argued that the play was originally written by Middleton and Dekker in 1608–09, and then adapted in the 1620s.[9]

[edit] References

  1. ^ Samuel Schoenbaum, ed., The Bloody Banquet, Malone Society Reprints, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1961, 1962.
  2. ^ Wallace A. Bacon, ed., William Warner's "Syrinx, or a Sevenfold History", Evanston, IL, Northwestern University Press, 1950; reprinted New York, AMS Press, 1970.
  3. ^ Introduction to the Malone Society reprint, pp. vii-viii.
  4. ^ David J. Lake, The Canon of Tomas Middleton's Plays, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1975; p. 232-4.
  5. ^ James G. McManaway, "Latin Title Page Mottoes as a Clue to Dramatic Authorship," The Library, Vol. 26 (1946), pp. 28-36.
  6. ^ E. H. C. Oliphant, "The Bloodie Banquet, A Dekker-Middleton Play," Times Literary Supplement, 17 December 1925, p. 882.
  7. ^ Lake, p. 241.
  8. ^ Macdonald Jackson, "Editing, Attribution Studies, and 'Literature Online': A New Resource for Research in Renaissance Drama," Research Opportunitites in Renaissance Drama, Vol. 37 (1998), pp. 1-15.
  9. ^ Gary Taylor and Julia Gasper, Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture, Oxford, Oxford Univeristy Press, 2007; pp. 364-5.