Yes, real missed opportunity, if you ask me. An alternative would be to dump section one altogether, incorporate the remainder into the Collected Works and split that into two volumes but it seems the editors were hell-bent on being the first to produce a single-volume Middleton complete works.
Seems like they only achieved their aim in the most nominal of fashions, if a good chunk of book 2 (aka the companion volume) is what you need for purposes of context / itroduction / a generally more rounded experience after all ...
Really, they have compromised in their intended audience; if you took the authorship stuff, condensed it a bit and put it in the Collected Works you'd have the equivalent of the Oxford Complete Works of Shakespeare, perfectly satisfactory for a general audience, independent of the Companion. However, because Middleton studies are far behind Shakespeare studies, it's clear they wanted to include all the editorial apparatus for use solely by academics, which would have made for a practically unusable single volume. In my view their mistake was assuming that general readers aren't interested in authorship questions, which is odd, given the increased attention it gets in the Oxford Shakespeare 2nd Edition.
Odd in light of that, and also odd in light of the fact that just *because* Middleton is less well generally known, something providing *more* rather than *less* information would probably be received all the better (never mind the academic tone -- mixing my lit. references, I'd rather have stale lembas bread than no bread at all)!
Seems like they only achieved their aim in the most nominal of fashions, if a good chunk of book 2 (aka the companion volume) is what you need for purposes of context / itroduction / a generally more rounded experience after all ...