Thomas Middleton

English playwright and poet

• Born: April 18, 1580 (baptized)
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: July 4, 1627
• Place of death: Newington Butts, Surrey, England

Middleton composed an extraordinary range of poetry, prose satire, almanacs, pamphlets, masques, civic pageants, comedies, and tragedies. His works expressed a cynical, Calvinistic attitude toward the follies of every social class in Jacobean London. A popular and occasionally controversial writer, he wrote bluntly realistic exposés of religious hypocrisy and passionately questioned contemporary sexual, social, and political conventions.

Early Life

Thomas Middleton was christened on April 18, 1580, at Saint Lawrence in the Old Jewry, in London. His father, William Middleton, a successful London bricklayer and member of the Tilers’ and Bricklayers’ Company, had married his mother, Anne Snow, daughter of another Londoner, on February 17, 1574. A sister, Avis, was born in 1582. Middleton’s father died when he was five, on January 20, 1586, having earned the rank of gentleman and leaving a substantial estate to his widow and children. His mother was remarried, on November 7, 1586, to Thomas Harvey (1559?-1606?), a gentleman and swindler. The marriage quickly became contentious, and until his death around 1606, Harvey embroiled his wife and stepchildren in lawsuits contesting their inheritance.

Middleton himself was named in a lawsuit regarding the family’s estate in 1598, and the three successive suits that he faced in 1600 significantly depleted his finances. However, this litigious background did serve to inspire the dominant themes of his mature dramas, as well as his acid perspective about the realities of money, power, women’s position in marriage, and the law.

Middleton’s first paid work was the poem The Wisdom of Solomon, Paraphrased (1597), dedicated to the second earl of Essex. He went on to Oxford in 1598, selling his inheritance in 1600 to pay for his studies. While at Oxford, Middleton wrote two lengthy poems, Micro-cynicon: Six Snarling Satires (1599), an attack on urban corruption, and The Ghost of Lucrece (1600), whose violent tone foreshadows his later revenge tragedies. In 1601, Middleton left Oxford to write full-time in London, probably for Philip Henslowe’s company, the Admiral’s Men.

In 1603, Middleton married Mary Marbecke (1575-1628), daughter of one of the six clerks in the Court of Chancery and sister of one of the actors in the Admiral’s Men. Their only child, Edward, was born a year later. Middleton, persistently short on cash throughout his lifetime, composed in several genres during the next few years. He contributed to The Magnificent Entertainment Given to King James (1603), a celebration of James I’s accession to the throne, and wrote his first extant play, The Phoenix (pr. 1604, pb. 1607); two pamphlets, Father Hubburd’s Tales (1604) and The Black Book (1604); and, in collaboration with Thomas Dekker , the comedy The Honest Whore, Part I (pr., pb. 1604). From 1603 to 1606, Middleton wrote several comedies for an all-boy acting company, the Children of Saint Paul’s, including The Phoenix, Michaelmas Term (pr. c. 1606, pb. 1607), A Mad World, My Masters (pr. c. 1606, pb. 1608), A Trick to Catch the Old One (pr. c. 1605-1606, pb. 1608), and The Puritan Widow (pr. 1606, pb. 1607).

Life’s Work

Middleton’s dramatic genius for appealing to audience tastes was early manifest in the highly successful “citizen comedies” like Michaelmas Term and A Trick to Catch the Old One, composed for the elite audiences of the children’s troupes, as well as for the popular audiences of adult acting companies like the Admiral’s Men and the King’s Men. This type of comedy portrayed all of the various social classes resident in London, and Middleton’s scathing satiric wit and skill for the lascivious found ample targets, whether in the court of the extravagant new king, in the general citizenry’s lust for money (especially the legal profession), in the social pretensions of the bourgeoisie and landed gentry, or in the hypocrisy of devout Puritans. Middleton later returned to the cheaters and the gullible sinners of citizen comedy in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (pr. 1611, pb. 1630), considered his finest comedy; Wit at Several Weapons (pr. 1613, pb. 1647), his first partnership with William Rowley, sometimes attributed to Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher ; and Anything for a Quiet Life (pr. c. 1621, pb. 1662), probably a collaboration with John Webster.

Middleton’s prodigious output during these years included pamphlets, drama and theatricals for the royal court, and processional celebrations for the city. For King James’s pleasure, he produced court masques as well as civic pageants such as Triumphs of Truth (pr., pb. 1613) and Civitas Amor (pr., pb. 1616). This type of adulatory work continued up to the 1626 processional The Triumph of Health and Prosperity (pr., pb. 1626). Middleton’s principal work was for the theater, however, and he is one of the few known playwrights to have collaborated with William Shakespeare, in composing Timon of Athens (pr. c. 1607-1608); he was later commissioned to revise Shakespeare’s Macbeth (pr. 1606) and Measure for Measure (pr. 1604).

If Shakespeare’s gift was his extraordinary grasp of the ambiguity and complexity of human character, Middleton’s was his ability to manipulate dramatic effect. He pursued savage parody in comedy and reached to sensationalism in tragedy. His caustic dissection of the underside of human behavior is everywhere evident in the dramas. In the comedies, scarcely any character behaves without guile, from pawnbrokers and impoverished aristocrats to prostitutes and self-proclaimed Puritan worthies. Along with his often merciless ironic tone, moreover, Middleton possessed a committed, albeit pessimistic, moral drive. The biting sarcasm of a comedy like A Chaste Maid in Cheapside segued, in his tragedy and tragicomedy, into depictions of most of the seven deadly sins.

Middleton had, early on, dramatized a notorious domestic murder as a tale of villainy and fateful retribution in A Yorkshire Tragedy (pr. 1605, pb. 1608), which bears a thematic resemblance to medieval morality plays, with their didactic displays of sin and inevitable punishment. A Yorkshire Tragedy was followed by the more character-driven analysis of revenge and its due punishment in Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy (pr. 1606-1607, pb. 1607), which at one time was mistakenly attributed to Cyril Tourneur.

For the dramas of his mature years, some of which were written in collaboration with Thomas Dekker, William Rowley, and John Webster, Middleton retained his piercing judgment and cynical wit, using well-known persons and scandals to comment upon the social issues and political circumstances of the age. The bawdy antics of The Roaring Girl: Or, Moll Cutpurse (pr. c. 1610, pb. 1611, written with Dekker), based on the escapades of the androgynous London rebel Mary Frith, showcase that woman’s dissent from the misogynistic repression of women’s social and sexual freedom.

Indeed, Middleton possessed an exceptional capacity to portray women of depth, who may resist but do not ultimately escape patriarchal control or the dramatist’s own censure for acting on their desires. The portraits of Beatrice-Joanna, whose capitulation to lust traps her in the revenge plot of her rapist in The Changeling (pr. 1622, pb. 1653, written with Rowley), and Livia, the pandering mother who typifies the political and sexual license of Women Beware Women (pr. c. 1621-1627, pb. 1657) demonstrate Middleton’s Calvinistic pessimism as well as his sardonic view of behavior at King James’s court. The virginity test plot and the murder of the inconvenient husband in The Changeling were drawn from the scandal regarding the marriage of Catholic Frances Howard to the king’s favorite, the earl of Somerset.

Middleton, in The Changeling, may have been aiming insult at the court and at English Catholics, but there is little doubt of his political target in his last, controversial, hit, A Game at Chess (pr. 1624, pb. 1625). That tragicomedy represented an attack on the proposed alliance of England and Spain through the marriage of Prince Charles with the Spanish Infanta. It ran for nine consecutive days (an unprecedented success at the time), until it was closed by royal order in response to formal complaints lodged by the Spanish ambassador, Count Gondomar.

In his final years, Middleton continued writing in his capacity as London’s first chronologer of city events. Financial difficulties bedeviled Middleton in his last year, 1627, as he was involved in disputes regarding payment for the lord mayor’s pageants and his work on the coronation pageant for King Charles I . After his death, he was buried in Newington Butts on July 4, 1627.

Significance

Just as there is ongoing debate about the extent of Middleton’s extraordinary canon, there remains critical disagreement about the nature of Middleton’s vision. The latter argument centers on whether Middleton is an ironic realist or a bitterly sectarian moralist. Margot Heinemann ignited the debate about the perspective expressed in Middleton’s works in Puritanism and Theatre: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama Under the Early Stuarts (1980), arguing that Middleton was a fierce Puritan, opposed to the moral excesses of the Jacobean court and the city of London, as well as to King James’s policy of absolute royal power. Under later critics, as the study of Middleton burgeoned, the pendulum of cricitical opinion swung midway, and critics, including Gary Taylor, the general editor of the collected works, defined Middleton as an astonishingly prolific writer whose driving moral passion triumphed in theater.

Middleton’s Major Works

1597

• The Wisdom of Solomon, Paraphrased

1599

• Micro-cynicon

1600

• The Ghost of Lucrece

1603

• The Magnificent Entertainment Given to King James (with Ben Jonson and Thomas Dekker)

1604

• The Black Book

1604

• Father Hubburd’s Tales (includes poetry)

1604

• The Honest Whore, Part I (with Thomas Dekker)

1604

• The Phoenix

c. 1604-1607

• The Family of Love

1604-1607

• Your Five Gallants

c. 1605-1606

• A Trick to Catch the Old One

c. 1606

• A Mad World, My Masters

c. 1606

• Michaelmas Term

1609

• Sir Robert Sherley

c. 1610

• The Roaring Girl: Or, Moll Cutpurse (with Dekker)

c. 1610

• The Witch

1611

• A Chaste Maid in Cheapside

c. 1613-1627

• No Wit, No Help Like a Woman’s

c. 1615

• More Dissemblers Besides Women

c. 1615-1617

• A Fair Quarrel (with William Rowley)

c. 1616

• The Widow (with Ben Jonson and John Fletcher?)

c. 1616-1620

• The Major of Queenborough

c. 1618

• The Old Law: Or, A New Way to Please You (with Rowley and Philip Massinger)

1620

• The World Tossed at Tennis (with Rowley)

c. 1621

• Anything for a Quiet Life (with John Webster?)

c. 1621-1627

• Women Beware Women

1622

• The Changeling (with Rowley)

1624

• A Game at Chess

Bibliography

Bawcutt, N. W. “Was Thomas Middleton a Puritan Dramatist?” Modern Language Review 94 (1999): 925-939. Argues against Margot Heinemann’s 1980 thesis that Middleton was sympathetic to Puritans, insisting that the reference to Puritan attitudes is distinctly satiric. Discusses Middleton’s patrons, pageants, and A Game at Chess.

Chakravorty, Swapam. Society and Politics in the Plays of Thomas Middleton. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1996. Analyzes several of Middleton’s dramas as subversive criticism of the sexual and social restrictions, and the corruption, of Jacobean England.

Heinemann, Margot. Puritanism and Theatre: Thomas Middleton and Oppositional Drama Under the Early Stuarts. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Develops the now-challenged thesis that Middleton used the theater to express his Puritan protest to the social, political, and religious milieu of his time.

Jowett, John. “Thomas Middleton.” In A Companion to Renaissance Drama, edited by Arthur F. Kinney. Oxford, England: Blackwell, 2002. Reviews Middleton’s life, canon, satire of court life, and dramatization of the abusive treatment of women in society.

Taylor, Gary, and John Lavagnino, eds. The Collected Works of Thomas Middleton. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 2002. Reissue of all the works currently attributed to Middleton, arranged in chronological order. Includes essays on Middleton’s life and reputation, on London, and on drama of the English Renaissance.