Thomas Middleton (18 April 1580 – 1627) was an English Jacobean playwright and poet. Middleton stands with John Fletcher and Ben Jonson as among the most successful and prolific of playwrights who wrote their best plays during the Jacobean period. He was one of the few Renaissance dramatists to achieve equal success in comedy and tragedy. Also a prolific writer of masques and pageants, he remains one of the most noteworthy and distinctive of Jacobean dramatists.
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Middleton was born in London and baptized on 18 April 1580. He was the son of a bricklayer who had raised himself to the status of a gentleman and who, interestingly, owned property adjoining the Curtain theatre in Shoreditch. Middleton was just five when his father died and his mother's subsequent remarriage dissolved into a fifteen year battle over the inheritance of Thomas and his younger sister: an experience which must surely have informed and perhaps even incited his repeated satirizing of the legal profession.
Middleton attended Queen’s College, Oxford, matriculating in 1598, although he did not graduate. Before he left Oxford (sometime in 1600 or 1601[1]), he wrote and published three long poems in popular Elizabethan styles; none appears to have been especially successful, and one, his book of satires, ran afoul of the Anglican Church's ban on verse satire and was burned. Nevertheless, his literary career was launched.
In the early 1600s, Middleton made a living writing topical pamphlets, including one—Penniless Parliament of Threadbare Poets—that enjoyed many reprintings as well as becoming the subject of a Parliamentary inquiry. At the same time, records in the diary of Philip Henslowe show that Middleton was writing for the Admiral's Men. Unlike Shakespeare, Middleton remained a free agent, able to write for whichever company hired him. His early dramatic career was marked by controversy. His friendship with Thomas Dekker brought him into conflict with Ben Jonson and George Chapman in the War of the Theatres. The grudge with Jonson continued as late as 1626, when Jonson's play The Staple of News indulges a slur on Middleton's great success, A Game at Chess.[1] It has been argued that Middleton's Inner Temple Masque (1619) sneers at Jonson (then absent in Scotland) as a "silenced bricklayer."[2]
In 1603, Middleton married. The same year, an outbreak of plague forced the closing of the theaters in London, and James I assumed the English throne. These events marked the beginning of Middleton's greatest period as a playwright. Having passed the time during the plague composing prose pamphlets (including a continuation of Thomas Nashe's Pierce Penniless), he returned to drama with great energy, producing close to a score of plays for several companies and in several genres, most notably city comedy and revenge tragedy. He continued his collaborations with Dekker, and the two produced The Roaring Girl, a biography of contemporary thief Mary Frith.
In the 1610s, Middleton began his fruitful collaboration with the actor William Rowley, producing Wit at Several Weapons and A Fair Quarrel; working alone he produced his comic masterpiece, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, in 1613. His own plays from this decade reveal a somewhat mellowed temper; certainly there is no comedy among them with the satiric depth of Michaelmas Term and no tragedy as bloodthirsty as The Revenger's Tragedy. Middleton was also branching out into other dramatic endeavors; he was apparently called on to help revise Macbeth and Measure for Measure, and at the same time he was increasingly involved with civic pageants. This last connection was made official when, in 1620, he was appointed City Chronologer of the City of London. He held this post until his death in 1627, at which time it was passed to Jonson.
Middleton's official duties did not interrupt his dramatic writings; the 1620s saw the production of his and Rowley's tragedy The Changeling, and several tragicomedies. In 1624, he reached a pinnacle of notoriety when his dramatic allegory A Game at Chess was staged by the King's Men. The play used the conceit of a chess game to present and satirize the recent intrigues surrounding the Spanish Match. Though Middleton's approach was strongly patriotic, the Privy Council shut down the play after nine performances on the complaint of the Spanish ambassador. Middleton faced an unknown, but likely frightening, degree of punishment. Since no play later than A Game at Chess is recorded, it has been hypothesized that his punishment included a ban on writing for the stage.
Middleton died at his home in Newington Butts in 1627.
Middleton wrote in many genres, including tragedy, history and city comedy. His best-known plays are the tragedies The Changeling (written with William Rowley) and Women Beware Women, and the cynically satirical city comedy A Chaste Maid in Cheapside. Although earlier editions of The Revenger's Tragedy attribute the play to Cyril Tourneur,[3] or refused to arbitrate between Middleton and Tourneur,[4] since the massive and widely acclaimed statistical studies by David Lake[5] and MacDonald P. Jackson,[6] Middleton's authorship has not been seriously contested, and no scholar has mounted a new defense of the discredited Tourneur attribution.[7] The Oxford Middleton and its companion piece, Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture offer the most extensive and decisive evidence to date not only for Middleton's authorship of The Revenger's Tragedy, but also for his collaboration with Shakespeare on Timon of Athens and his adaptation and revision of Shakespeare's Macbeth and Measure for Measure.
Middleton's work is diverse even by the standards of his age. He did not have the kind of official relationship with a particular company that Shakespeare or Fletcher had; instead, he appears to have written on a freelance basis for any number of companies. Particularly in the early years of his career, this freedom led to a great diversity in his output, which ranges from the "snarling" satire of Michaelmas Term (performed by the Children of Paul's) to the bleak intrigues of The Revenger's Tragedy (performed by the King's Men), assuming he is the author of the latter. Also contributing to the variety of the works is the scope of Middleton's career. If his early work was informed by the flourishing of satire in the late-Elizabethan period,[8]
His maturity was influenced by the ascendancy of Fletcherian tragicomedy. If many of these plays have been judged less compelling than his earlier work, his later work, in which satiric fury is tempered and broadened, also includes three of his acknowledged masterpieces. A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, produced by the Lady Elizabeth's Men, skillfully combines Middleton's typically cutting presentation of London life with an expansive view of the power of love to effect reconciliation. The Changeling, a late tragedy, returns Middleton to an Italianate setting like that in The Revenger's Tragedy; here, however, the central characters are more fully drawn and more compelling as individuals, again, assuming he wrote The Revenger's Tragedy.[9] Similar changes may be seen in Women Beware Women.[10]
Middleton's plays are characterized by their cynicism about the human race, a cynicism that is often very funny. True heroes are a rarity in Middleton; in his plays, almost every character is selfish, greedy, and self-absorbed. This quality is best observed in the A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, a panoramic view of a London populated entirely by sinners, in which no social rank goes unsatirized. It can also be seen in the tragedies Women Beware Women and The Revenger's Tragedy, in which enjoyably amoral Italian courtiers endlessly plot against each other, resulting in a climactic bloodbath. When Middleton does portray good people, the characters have very small roles, and are flawless to perfection. Thanks to a theological pamphlet attributed to him, Middleton is thought by some to have been a strong believer in Calvinism, among the dominant strains in the theology of the English church of his time, which rigidly divides humanity into the damned and the elect, which focuses on human sinfulness and inadequacy more than in the other denominations of Christianity.
Middleton's work has long been praised by literary critics, among them Algernon Charles Swinburne and T. S. Eliot. The latter thought Middleton was second only to Shakespeare. In his own time, he was thought talented enough to revise Shakespeare's Macbeth and Measure for Measure.
Middleton's plays have been staged throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, each decade offering more productions than the last. Even less familiar works have been staged: A Fair Quarrel was performed at the National Theatre, and The Old Law has been performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company. The Changeling has been adapted for film several times, and the tragedy Women Beware Women remains a stage favorite. The Revenger's Tragedy was adapted into Alex Cox's film Revengers Tragedy, the opening credits of which attribute the play's authorship to Middleton.
Note: The Middleton canon is beset by complications involving collaboration and debated authorship. The most recent and authoritative Middleton canon has been established by the editors of the Oxford Middleton (2007). All dates of plays are dates of composition, not of publication.
Thomas Middleton (1580 – 1627) was an English Jacobean playwright and poet. Middleton stands with John Fletcher and Ben Jonson as among the most successful and prolific of playwrights who wrote their best plays during the Jacobean period. He stands with William Shakespeare as one of the few Renaissance dramatists to achieve equal success in comedy and tragedy. Also a prolific writer of masques and pageants, he remains one of the most noteworthy and characteristic of Jacobean dramatists.
THOMAS MIDDLETON (c. 1570-1627), English dramatist, son of William Middleton, was born about 1570, probably in London. There is no proof that he studied at either university, but he may be safely identified with one of the Thomas Middletons entered at Gray's Inn in 1593 and 1596 respectively. He began to write for the stage with The Old Law, in the original draft of which, if it dates from 1599 as is generally supposed, he was certainly not associated with William Rowley and Philip Massinger, although their names appear on the title-page of 1656. By 1602 he had become one of Philip Henslowe's established playwrights. The pages of Henslowe's Diary contain notes of plays in which he had a hand, and in the year1607-1608he produced no less than six comedies of London life, which he knew as accurately as Dekker and was content to paint in more realistic colours. In 1613 he devised the pageant for the installation of the Lord Mayor, Sir Thomas Middleton, and in the same year wrote an entertainment for the opening of the New River in honour of another Middleton. From these facts it may be reasonably inferred that he had influential connexions. He was frequently employed to celebrate civic occasions, and in 1620 he was made city chronologer, performing the duties of his position with exactness till his death.
The most notable event in his career was the production at the Globe theatre in 1624 of a political play, A Game at Chess, satirizing the policy of the court, which had just received a rebuff in the matter of the Spanish marriage, the English and Spanish personages concerned being disguised as the White Knight, the Black King, and so forth. The play was stopped, in consequence of remonstrances from the Spanish ambassador, but not until after nine days' performances, and the dramatist and the actors were summoned to answer for it. It is doubtful whether Middleton was actually imprisoned, and in any case the king's anger was soon satisfied and the matter allowed to drop, on the plea that the piece had been seen and passed by the master of the revels, Sir Henry Herbert. Middleton died at his house at Newington Butts, and was buried on the 4th of July 1627.
He worked with various authors, but his happiest collaboration was with William Rowley, this literary partnership being so close that F. G. Fleay (Biog. Chron. of the Drama) treats the dramatists together. The plays in which the two collaborated are A Fair Quarrel (printed 1617), The World Lost at Tennis (1620), an ingenious masque, The Changeling (acted 1624, printed 1653), and The Spanish Gipsie (acted 1623, printed 1653). The main interest of the Fair Quarrel centres in the mental conflict of Captain Ager, the problem being whether he should fight in defence of his mother's honour when he no longer believes his quarrel to be just. The underplot, dealing with Jane, her concealed marriage, and the physician, which is generally assigned to Rowley, was suggested by a story in Giraldi Cinthio's Hecatommithi. The Changeling is the most powerful of all the plays with which Middleton's name is connected. The plot is drawn from the tale of Alsemero and Beatrice-Joanna in Reynolds's Triumphs of God's Reveng against Murther (bk. i., hist. iv.), but the story, black as it is, receives additional horror in Middleton's hands. The famous scene in the third act between Beatrice and De Flores, who has murdered Piracquo at her instigation, is admirably described by Swinburne: "That note of incredulous amazement that the man whom she has just instigated to the commission of murder ` can be so wicked ' as to have served her end for any end of his own beyond the pay of a professional assassin, is a touch worthy of the greatest dramatist that ever lived.. .. That she, the first criminal, should be honestly shocked as well as physically horrified by revelation of the real motive which impelled her accomplice into crime, gives a lurid streak of tragic humour to the lifelike interest of the scene; as the pure infusion of spontaneous poetry throughout redeems the whole work from the charge of vulgar subservience to a vulgar taste for the presentation or the contemplation of criminal horror." Leigh Hunt thought that the character of De Flores, for effect at once tragical, probable and poetical, "surpassed anything with which he was acquainted in the drama of domestic life." The underplot of the piece, though it is based on the humours of a madhouse, has genuine comic flashes. The Spanish Gipsie has a double plot based on the Fuerza de la sangre and the Gitanilla of Cervantes. Much has been said on the collaboration of Middleton with Rowley, who was much in demand with fellowdramatists, especially for his experience in low comedy. These plays, even in scenes where the evidence in favour of one or other of the collaborators is clear, rise to excellence which neither dramatist was able to achieve alone. It was clearly no mechanical partnership the limits of which can be said to be definitely assigned when the actual text has been parcelled out between the collaborators.
With Thomas Dekker he wrote The Roaring Girle, or Moll CutPurse (1611). The frontispiece represents Moll herself in man's attire, indulging in a pipe of tobacco. She was drawn or idealized from life, her real name being Mary Frith (1584-1659 ?), who was made to do penance at St Paul's Cross in 1612. "Worse things, I must confess," says Middleton in his preface, "the world has taxed her for than has been written of her; but 'tis the excellency of a writer to leave things better than he finds 'em." In the play she is the champion of her sex, and is equally ready with her sword and her wits. Middleton is also credited with a share in Thomas Dekker's Honest Whore (pt. i., 1604). The Witch, first printed in 1778 from a unique MS., now in the Bodleian, has aroused much controversy as to whether Shakespeare borrowed from Middleton or vice versa. The dates of both plays being uncertain, there are few definite data. The distinction between the two conceptions has been finely drawn by Charles Lamb, and the question of borrowing is best solved by supposing that what is common to the incantations of both plays was a matter of common property. The Mayor of Quinborough was published with Middleton's name on the title-page in 1661. Simon, the comic mayor, is not a very prominent character in the plot, which deals with Vortiger, Hengist, Horsus and Roxena among other characters. One of its editors, Mr Havelock Ellis, thinks the proofs of its authenticity as Middleton's work very slender. It is generally supposed to have been a very early work subjected to generous revision.
The plays of Middleton still to be mentioned may be divided into romantic and realistic comedies of London Life. Dekker had as wide a knowledge of city manners, but he was more sympathetic in treatment, readier to idealize his subject. Two New Playes. Viz.: More Dissemblers besides Women. Women beware Women, of which the former was licensed before 1622, appeared in 1657. The plot of Women beware Women is a double intrigue from a contemporary novel, Hyppolito and Isabella, and the genuine history of Bianca Capello and Francesco de Medici. This play, which ends with a massacre appalling even in Elizabethan drama, may be taken as giving the measure - no mean one of Middleton's unaided power in tragedy.
The remaining plays of Middleton are: Blurt, Master-Constable. Or the Spaniards Night-walke (1602); Michaelmas Terme (1607), described by A. C. Swinburne as an excellent Hogarthian comedy; The Phoenix (1607),(1607), a version of the Haroun-al-Raschid trick; The Famelie of Love (1608); A Trick to catch the Old-one (anonymously printed, 1608); Your Five Gallants (licensed 1608); A Mad World, my Masters (1608); A Chast Mayde in Cheapside (printed 1630), notable for the picture of Tim, the Cambridge student, on his return home; Anything for a Quiet Life (c. 1617, printed 1662); No Wit, No Help like a Woman's (c. 1613, printed 1657); The Widdow (printed 1652), on the title-page of which appear also the names of Ben Jonson and John Fletcher, though their collaboration may be doubted. Eleven of his masques are extant. A tedious poem, The Wisdom of Solomon paraphrased, by Thomas Middleton, was printed in 1597, and Microcynicon, Six Snarling Satires by T. M. Gent, in 1599. Two prose pamphlets, dealing with London life, Father Hubbard's Tale and The Black Book, appeared in 1604 under his initials. His non-dramatic work, however, even if genuine, has little value.
-His works were edited by Alexander Dyce (5 vols.) in 1840, with a valuable introduction quoting many documents, and by A. H. Bullen (8 vols.) in 1885. The Best Plays of Thomas Middleton were edited for the Mermaid series (1887) by Havelock Ellis with an introduction by A. C. Swinburne. See also Miss P. G. Wiggin's Inquiry into the Authorship of the Middleton-Rowley Plays (Boston, 1897), and the notice on Middleton in Professor A. W. Ward's Hist. of Eng. Dram. Lit. (ed. 18 99; ii , 493-540), which contains a full account of Middleton's Game at Chesse. A careful examination of the parallelisms between the plays of Shakespeare and Middleton is made by D. Hugo Jung in "Das Verhaltnis Thomas Middleton's zu Shakspere" (Miinchener Beitrage zur roman. u. engl. Phil. vol. xxix., 1904).
Categories: MEU-MIL | English poets | British dramatists and playwrights
   | The Plays of Thomas Middleton - The Plays of Thomas Middleton (1580-1627) |
| | Gutenberg e-text - The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Age Of Shakespeare, by Algernon Charles Swinburne. |
| | Bartleby e-text - Vol. 6. The Drama to 1642, Part Two. The Cambridge History of English and American Literature: An Encyclopedia in Eighteen Volumes. 1907–21 |
| | Holloway e-text - The Holloway Pages: Ben Jonson: Works (1692 Folio): The Staple of News |
| | The Oxford Middleton Project - Florida State University - English Department - Online Library - Middleton |
| | (The Old Law) - Etudes Epistémè - Sommaires - |
| | (A Game at Chess) - Etudes Epistémè - Sommaires - |
| | Luminarium: Thomas Middleton - Thomas Middleton (c.1580-1627) |
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