Thomas Middleton - Works

Works

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, or refused to arbitrate between Middleton and Tourneur, since the massive and widely acclaimed statistical studies by David Lake and MacDonald P. Jackson, Middleton's authorship has not been seriously contested, and no scholar has mounted a new defence of the discredited Tourneur attribution. 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. It has also been argued that Middleton collaborated with Shakespeare on All's Well That Ends Well.

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. His early work was informed by the flourishing of satire in the late-Elizabethan period, while 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, skilfully 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. Similar changes may be seen in Women Beware Women.

Middleton's plays are characterised 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 unsatirised. 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.