SOURCE: Bergeron, David M. “Thomas Middleton and Anthony Munday: Artistic Rivalry?” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 36, no. 2 (spring 1996): 461-79.

In the following essay, Bergeron questions the accepted belief by many scholars that Middleton had nothing but contempt for Munday.

Artistic lives have intersected in varied, challenging, and sometimes productive ways, whether T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, or Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. In the early seventeenth century Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher seem a fixture of artistic collaboration. We know that Thomas Middleton worked with Thomas Dekker in The Roaring Girl and with William Rowley in The Changeling, to cite two well-known examples. Yet such artistic collaboration may involve rivalry, as we think of Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones working on the court masques. Their relationship, we recall, eventually collapsed. Nearly 180 years of scholarship have documented Middleton's presumed contempt for his...