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Gary Taylor's "Life of Middleton"

Early Years and Education | First Writings | Marriage and Maturity | Thirty-Something | Final Decade | Personality and Achievement

Middleton, Thomas (1580-1627), author, was baptized on 18 Apr 1580 in St Lawrence Jewry, London, the first son and oldest surviving child of William Middleton (d. 1586), gentleman and bricklayer, and Anne (1538?-1602?), daughter of William Snow.

Early Years and Education 

His parents lived, and Thomas was probably born, in a house on the corner of Ironmonger Lane and Cateaton Street. William Middleton had immigrated to London as a young man; on 23 Apr 1568 his coat of arms was certified by the Garter King of Arms, making his son Thomas "a gentleman born". William and Anne were married on 17 Feb 1574; their only other child to survive to adulthood was Avis, baptized 3 Aug 1582. William was a fairly prosperous member of the Honourable Company of Tilers and Bricklayers.

When Thomas was five, his father died (20 Jan 1586). The net worth of his estate was valued at just over L335. On 7 Nov 1586 Anne married Thomas Harvey (1559?-1606?), a young but indigent gentleman Grocer; Harvey had returned to England after "one whole yeare & more in very miserable Case" as chief factor in Sir Walter Ralegh's abortive colony at Roanoke, having "spent or lost whatsoeuer he embarked & shipped" (Chancery 2 Eliz. S16/48). Less than two weeks after their wedding, husband and wife began fighting over the trust Anne had created to protect her children's inheritance. So began fifteen years of lawsuits. Harvey spent years at a time abroad, months at a time in debtors' prison. The struggle for conjugal mastery rippled outward, as neighbours, friends, tenants and relatives joined the tug of war. Thomas Middleton is first named as a party to a lawsuit in 1597; as late as 1606, he was called as a witness by his sister and her second husband over her share of their father's estate, twenty years after that father's death. Middleton's astute satire of the legal profession, from the character Tangle in The Phoenix to "the wilderness of law" in A Game at Chess (2.1), surely has its origin in this extensive early experience of a "law-tossed" world, where "what one court orders is by another crossed" (3.3).

In Apr 1598 Middleton matriculated at Queen's College, Oxford. One of his fellow students there was Thomas Overbury; allusions to Overbury's murder and the resulting trials (1613-16) have been detected in several Middleton plays. Middleton was still a student on 28 Jun 1600, but by Feb 1601 was "in London daylie accompaninge the players" (Req. 2/224/19). He left Oxford degreeless, and it's tempting to read autobiographically his account of a poor scholar who "daily rose before the sun, talked and conversed with midnight, killing many a poor farthing-candle", reading Aristotle, but who "unfruitfully led to the lickerish study of poetry, that sweet honey-poison that swells a supple scholar with unprofitable sweetness and delicious false conceits" eventually became "one of the Poor Knights of Poetry" (Father Hubburd's Tales, 1239-86). But Middleton had enlisted in that bedraggled regiment of poets even before he matriculated.

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First Writings 

Dedicated to the Earl of Essex, the 4166 lines of The Wisdom of Solomon Paraphrased were published in spring 1597. Bullen called this inaugural work "the most damnable piece of flatness" he'd ever read (8, 297). Since it was written by a sixteen-year-old, such defects are hardly surprising; precocious poets are usually precocious in small doses. But isolated stanzas seldom satisfied Middleton. He would later write an epitaph on Richard Burbage (1619) and an encomium on John Webster's "masterpiece of tragedy" The Duchess of Malfi (1623), but he dedicated most of his energy to larger works.

He published two more books while still an Oxford student. Microcynicon: Six Snarling Satyres was publicly burned on 4 Jun 1599, shortly after publication, as part of an ecclesiastical attack on satire. In that genre Middleton's immediate predecessors were Joseph Hall and John Marston, and both influenced his self-consciously little octavo by a young micro-cynic. But the self-deprecating character of its title signals a fundamentally different persona, which must reflect a real difference in its author's personality. Unlike Marston or Hall (or Jonson and Dekker, later), Middleton does not parody the personal or literary habits of fellow writers. Instead, he tells dramatic stories about emblematic sinners (including himself).

In The Ghost of Lucrece (1600) Middleton again took up a major genre of the 1590s, the Ovidian female complaint, epitomized by Shakespeare's then-popular Rape of Lucrece. Like his other early poems, it demonstrates Middleton's command of the rhetorical tropes emphasized by humanist educators, and the tension engendered by the grammar school curriculum between Christian and pagan models of experience. Unlike them, it successfully creates character almost entirely through speech.

After leaving Oxford, Middleton switched from elite to popular genres. On 21 Apr 1601, having come of age, he collected the L25 reserved for him by the City of London since his father's death; with Harvey's final legal victory over his mother, nothing remained of his inheritance, and he needed to earn a living. By 3 Aug, he had sold The Penniless Parliament of Threadbare Poets, made the subject of a Parliamentary inquiry later that year. Unlike his earlier publications (which all died after one edition), this comic pamphlet was reprinted long and often. It initiated Middleton's fascination with almanacs, which also produced Plato's Cap cast at the year 1604 and the greatest English mock-almanac, 1618's The Owl's Almanac.

Pamphlets might make money, but plays made more. By 22 May 1602, he was writing for Shakespeare's chief rivals, the Admiral's Men. With Thomas Dekker, Michael Drayton, Anthony Munday and John Webster, he shared L8 for Caesar's Fall; or, Two Shapes. That tragedy is lost, as is The Chester Tragedy apparently the first play Middleton wrote single-handed, for which he received L7 (3 Oct-9 Nov). On 14 Dec he pocketed 5s for a new prologue and epilogue for a court revival of Robert Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. Young Middleton obviously had absorbed Greene's work: The Ghost of Lucrece borrows material from Ciceronis Amor, and The Black Book takes its title and some of its underworld subject matter from Greene's cony-catching pamphlets.

These first plays, like his first poems, belong to genres pioneered by others, and draw upon classical sources or recent English writers. He shows no familiarity with modern European literature until 1605, when A Mad World, My Masters recasts Pietro Aretino's pornographic classic Gli Ragionamenti for its hilarious sick-room scene; thereafter, his reading became increasingly cosmopolitan (including Cervantes, Machiavelli, Giambattista della Porta, Cinzio, Bandello, and others, not available in English).

By 1602 Middleton had established his credentials as a commercial playwright, working alone or with writers with whom he would collaborate repeatedly throughout his career. All were committed protestants. Middleton was raised in a parish dedicated to the reformed religion, and his own Calvinism is evident throughout his career, from Wisdom of Solomon to A Game at Chess. Indeed, Margot Heinemann characterized Middleton as a "Puritan" dramatist (Puritanism and Theatre, 1980). But none of his closest associates was a presbyterian or separatist, and Middleton often satirized Puritans. Calvinism was compatible with a life in the theatre; Puritanism was not. But with the rise of Arminianism under James I, the Calvinism dominant in the English Church in 1580 or even 1609 was forced onto the defensive. In the 1620s Middleton's religious politics became increasingly oppositional, not because he had changed but because the national church and royal family were moving away from Calvinist positions.

By collaborating with Dekker in 1602, Middleton at the outset of his career alienated, accidentally or deliberately, Ben Jonson. Jonson and Dekker had caricatured each other in Poetaster and Satiromastix (late 1601), the central exchange of fire in the so-called "War of the Theatres"; that dispute was both personal and aesthetic and perhaps also religious, since Jonson was a professed Catholic at the time. Given Middleton's long fruitful association with Dekker, Jonson's persistent hostility is hardly surprising: "a base fellow", he called Middleton in 1619 (Conversations with Drummond), and in 1626 maliciously imagined that "the poore English-play" A Game at Chess was being used for toilet paper (The Staple of News 3.2). Jonson's friend Chapman went out of his way to disparage Middleton as "a poore Chronicler of a Lord Mayor's naked Truth ... Whose Raptures are in every Pageant seen" (The Odyssey, 1614, Ded.). The specific irritant, in each case, was Middleton's popular success, in bitter contrast to the public's indifference toward Jonson and Chapman. Middleton turned the other cheek.

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Marriage and Maturity

Middleton's friend Dekker described 1603 as The Wonderful Year, and it was certainly so for Middleton. The accession of James I created the political and cultural climate in which he wrote all his mature work. Most immediately, it led to his commission to write the speech delivered at one of the seven Arches of Triumph, part of the City of London's Magnificent Entertainment, officially welcoming the new monarch.

The change of reign also inspired Middleton's first surviving play, The Phoenix, successful enough to be "presented before his Majesty" in the new court's first winter theatrical season. Middleton's episodic panorama belongs to a group of disguised Duke plays (including Marston's The Fawn and Shakespeare's Measure for Measure) written for rival companies in 1603-4, which adopt the conventions of the new Italian genre of tragicomedy to comment on English social and political life at a moment of profound but uncertain transition. Middleton's mercenary Captain, who matter-of-factly sells his wife to finance another voyage, has often been taken as a portrait of his stepfather the wannabe pirate-colonist.

The union of England and Scotland under one king coincided, for Middleton, with a more personal union. He married, c.1603, London-born Magdalen (Mary) Marbecke (1575-1628), granddaughter of the famous Protestant musician John Marbecke and niece of the chief physician to Elizabeth I, Roger Marbecke. She was the daughter and co-heir of Edward Marbecke (d. 1581), one of the Six Clerks in the Court of Chancery. Middleton presumably met her through her less distinguished brother, the minor actor Thomas Marbecke (b. 1577), who like Middleton was working for the Admiral's Men in 1602. The couple's only child, Edward (d. 1647), was born between Nov 1603 and Nov 1604. From 1608 until their deaths, they lived in Newington Butts, Surrey, a suburban village not far from the theatres in Southwark, and they may have lived there from the beginning of their marriage. A major outbreak of plague in London in 1603 certainly supplied incentives for leaving the capital; Middleton's sister's first husband (Allen Waterer) and two of her children were among the victims.

Dekker considered 1603 "wonderful", despite the bubonic epidemic, because he survived it. So did Middleton. But although the plague did not kill them, it did imperil their livelihood. In spring 1603, hoping to limit the contagion, municipal authorities closed the theatres, which apparently did not reopen until Apr 1604. Unable to sell their work to theatres, Middleton and Dekker sold it to publishers. Together, they vigorously memorialized the effects of the 1603 plague on Londoners in Dekker's News from Gravesend (which contains c.100 lines by Middleton) and Middleton's The Meeting of Gallants at an Ordinary (which contains c.100 lines by Dekker). Middleton also published in spring 1604 two literary pamphlets, entirely his own. Father Hubburd's Tales uses fable to portray the oppression of the weak and poor; it combines poetry with prose, satire with compassion, literary criticism with social and economic awareness. The Black Book is a sequel to Thomas Nashe's Pierce Penniless (1592), in which Lucifer rises in person to answer Pierce's (Nashe's) supplication to the devil. "It is the best of the imitations of Nashe's grotesque manner," as one modern critic has written, but Middleton's more disciplined intelligence supplies "a clearer narrative and dramatic framework than Nashe" (N. Rhodes, Elizabethan Grotesque, 1980, 57-8). He does so in part by describing Nashe's (Pierce's) down-and-out life. The earlier pamphlet laments Nashe's death: "Thy name they bury, having buried thee; Drones eat thy honey: thou wert the true bee. Peace keep thy soul!" (Hubburd, 278-80). Since Nashe lived till 1601, Middleton almost certainly knew him personally.

But Middleton's compassion and admiration for the older writer was not blind: even Nashe is accused of "bitterness" and "railing", his dispute with Harvey as wastefully vicious as Jonson's clash with Dekker. Middleton did not idealize his own profession. His dramatic portraits of writers George Pyeboard in The Puritan, Lapet in The Nice Valour, the Fat Bishop in A Game at Chess are theatrically appealing and vivacious, but none is innocent or objective. Writers, like other mortals, are sinful and implicated; writing is an inky "black art" (Hubburd 530).

The last of these pamphlets The Black Book was entered for publication on 22 Mar 1604; earlier that month, Dekker and Middleton were advanced L5 for "their play called the patient man and the honest whore" (Henslowe). The result was popular enough to be published within months of its premiere, to inspire a sequel (apparently by Dekker alone), and to remain in print and on stage for thirty years. Middleton's hand is most apparent in the scenes involving Candido, the paradoxically and comically original "patient man", who equates true masculinity with imperturbable non-violence.

Honest Whore was performed by Prince Henry's Men, playing outdoors at the Fortune Theatre; The Phoenix was performed by an all-boy company playing indoors at St Paul's, to a smaller audience paying higher prices for admission. From 1603 to 1606 Middleton wrote for Paul's Boys five brilliant comedies; unlike Jonson, he clearly preferred Paul's to the more aggressive "bitternesse, and liberall invectives" of the rival children's company at the Blackfriars (T. Heywood, Apology for Actors, 1612, G3v). But he was never limited to one company or one genre. While writing for Paul's he sold a comedy to Prince Henry's Men, a tragedy to the Blackfriars boys (The Viper and Her Brood, 7 May 1606, now lost), and three tragedies to the King's Men. Middleton always remained a free agent, working for at least seven acting companies; his plays exploit the varied artistic opportunities offered by different casts, theatres, audiences.Michaelmas Term (1604), the first play Middleton set in contemporary London, is, if not the first, among the earliest English plays explicitly and systematically to represent the present to itself. The result is what Swinburne called "an excellent Hogarthian comedy" (Steen 165), or what Theodore Leinwand characterizes as "profound comic urban sociology" (Collected Works). Its legal title acknowledges the importance, especially in the more elite theatres, of spectators from the Inns of Court (always an important constituency for his work).

A Trick to Catch the Old One (1605) has been the most generally admired of his early comedies; performed at Paul's, the Blackfriars, and at court, it was later plagiarized by Lording Barry, Phillip Massinger, and Aphra Behn. Combining figures from Roman comedy with the prodigal son of morality plays and English literature's first accurate portrayal of a terminal alcoholic, it dramatizes the pursuit of credit, financial and sexual; its clever Courtesan, Jane, uses her status as a seemingly wealthy widow and her precise knowledge of the law to outmaneuvre a greedy suitor, in ways that surely owe something to Middleton's mother. Trick shares with A Mad World, My Masters (1605) a young male protagonist, like Middleton himself, whose father is dead, and whose paper status as a gentleman clashes with his actual lack of cash. In Trick, a rich uncle (Pecunius Lucre) refuses to support the youth's feckless lifestyle; Middleton's well-heeled and well-connected "uncle-in-law" Roger Marbecke died in 1605, bequeathing "his neece Myddletoune" (Thomas's wife) a mere L5 (P.C.C. 62 Hayes).

That same summer, news pamphlets describing Walter Calverley's murder of two of his children inspired Middleton to write A Yorkshire Tragedy. Like Calverley in 1605, Middleton's stepfather in 1595 had allegedly attempted to murder his wife (Middleton's mother), so the playwright had first-hand experience of conjugal violence. The King's Men performed his ten relentless scenes as "One of the four Plays in One". Middleton's brutal domestic tragedy was thus originally only one act of a four-act anthology or variety show, and the subject, genre, and author(s) of the other parts remain unknown; but Middleton's portrayal of the psychotic Husband, maddened by the disparity between his status and his income, seems to have caught Shakespeare's attention. Probably immediately afterwards, Middleton collaborated with the older playwright, writing about a third of Timon of Athens, including the bitterly comic central sequence where Timon's creditors turn their backs on him. Usually the most successful scenes of the play in performance, these apply to classical tragedy techniques and materials developed in Middleton's recent city comedies. Timon lives in an almost entirely male world, like that of Michaelmas Term, where intense homosocial and homoerotic relationships dwarf marriages or families. But the relationship between Shakespeare and Middleton did not last beyond one play.

Having written parts of two tragedies for the King's Men, Middleton was well positioned to sell them The Revenger's Tragedy (1606), his reply to Hamlet, not hesitant but hectic "hurry, hurry, hurry!" ironic and obscene, tragic and blackly comic: "Old Dad dead?" The first English play to be translated into Dutch (by Theodore Rodenburgh in 1618), it is driven by one of the longest, most complex roles in the early modern repertoire, Vindice (almost certainly played by Richard Burbage).

Meanwhile, Middleton was still writing London comedies for boy actors. At Paul's, The Puritan Widow (1606) targeted the mercenary hypocrisy (and gullibility) of separatists. This satire may have had a personal edge: the brother of Avis's first husband was Roger Waterer, active for at least twenty years in the radical Brownist sect, but also accused of having defrauded Avis in the first weeks of her widowhood. In a sermon preached at Paul's Cross on 14 Feb 1608, W. Crashaw denounced Middleton's play for giving "hypocrites" the "names of two churches of God", but also more generally for irreligiously bringing religion on stage especially objectionable when performed by the cathedral's own choirboys. It may have been the company's last play. Certainly, Middleton's next comedy Your Five Gallants (1607) was written for the Blackfriars company.

In the first scene of Gallants, a pawnbroker worries about plague-infected clothing. The authorities kept the theatres closed for all but eight of the thirty-six months from Jan 1608 to Dec 1610. Predictably, Middleton had financial problems: he was in custody for debt (L5) on 23 Dec 1608, sued for debt by another party early in 1609 (L16), and on 18 July 1609 still owed a Westminster innholder L7 9s. During these lean years Dekker again produced amusing pamphlets, but Middleton's two surprising publications were less entertaining; both had different dedications in different extant copies, a trick Middleton never tried elsewhere, and further evidence of financial strain. In Sir Robert Sherley his Entertainment in Cracovia (spring 1609), he translated and adapted a Latin text published in Poland, urging a European alliance with Persia against the Turks the first evidence of Middleton's interest in European politics. Later in 1609 appeared The Two Gates of Salvation, reissued as The Marriage of the Old and New Testament (late 1620), then again as God's Parliament House (1627). An original exploration of Biblical typology, this remarkable text deploys an apparently unique six-column polyphonic layout in the service of a Calvinist reading of scripture. In 1609 its Calvinism was orthodox enough Middleton cited Joseph Hall's passion sermon but by 1627 the same text seemed naturally allied with unprecedented Parliamentary opposition.

From this pamphlet-period only one play survives, The Bloody Banquet (1608-9), co-written with Dekker. A tragedy of adultery and cannibalism, popular enough to remain in the repertory for three decades, the play survives only in a posthumously adapted text. Dekker flunked tragedy, but Middleton's complex and sympathetic portrayal of the Young Queen marks a fundamental shift from all his earlier male-dominanted work.

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Thirty-Something

That new interest in women characters explodes in three plays written in 1611. His finest collaboration with Dekker, The Roaring Girl; or, Moll Cutpurse for the first time gave Middleton top billing. This proto-feminist classic put on the Fortune stage a sympathetic impersonation of a living woman, the determinedly independent cross-dressing Mary Frith (who also made a cameo appearance, perhaps the first Englishwoman to perform on the commercial stage). No Wit/Help like a Woman's premiered at the same theatre a few months later, and was apparently played at court on 29 Dec; James Shirley revived it in 1638 in Dublin, and in 1677 it was adapted (by Aphra Behn, Thomas Betterton, or both). On 31 Oct G. Buc licensed, for the King's Men, an untitled tragedy, based on Cervantes. Buc misleadingly labelled it "The Second Maiden's Tragedy"; Collected Works prefers The Lady's (or Ladies') Tragedy; the complex tragic centrality of its women, and its influence on Webster's Duchess of Malfi, are not in doubt. Either Middleton did nothing in 1612, or what he did is lost. But 1613 was a turning point in his career. A Chaste Maid in Cheapside is now generally regarded as his comic masterpiece. It was performed at the Swan in spring 1613, by Lady Elizabeth's amalgamated company, whose many boy actors enabled Middleton to put eleven speaking female characters on stage simultaneously. Later in 1613 Wit at Several Weapons marked Middleton's collaborative debut with William Rowley, the fat and jolly leading comic actor of Prince Charles' Men (who merged with Lady Elizabeth's company at about this time). The jubilantly oversexed London of these 1613 comedies contrasts remarkably with The Triumphs of Truth, Middleton's first Lord Mayor's pageant, performed that Oct for his wealthy namesake, Sir Thomas Middleton. With Dekker in prison for debt, Middleton beat out Munday for the commission, imagining the most expensive and elaborate Lord Mayor's pageant ever produced (described by the Russian ambassador Alexis Ziuzin). This success in turn led to Middleton's commissions, that year, for the lost The Masque of Cupids and a brief show celebrating completion of the New River project. Thus began Middleton's productive association with the City of London. It was followed by Civitatis Amor (the City's celebration of the investiture of Prince Charles, 1616), and two more Lord Mayor's shows (1617, 1619).

After The Triumphs of Truth, Middleton never wrote another London comedy on his own, though he did collaborate with Rowley on one more and with Webster on another. More Dissemblers Besides Women (1614?) and The Widow (Dec 1615?) are his first comedies since Honest Whore (1604) to be set elsewhere; like his tragicomedy The Witch (mid-1615?), they return to Italy. This change of official residence may have been prompted in part by his new relationship to the governors of London, or by the fact that all three were written for the King's Men (who acted none of his city comedies), but like all stylistic evolution it probably had multiple causes. The city comedies for Paul's were all written in his mid-twenties, with the brilliant surface virtuosity and drive of absolute youth, in exhilarated command of materials within the narrow circle of its own ego and experience. From that center Middleton moved gradually outward, first beyond his own sex, eventually beyond his own neighbourhood to the larger European world. He never lost his lewd, ironic, grounded comic genius, but the later comedies and tragicomedies achieve a wider emotional range and a more complex orchestration of tones. The Widow in particular plays the entire keyboard, and was widely admired from the 17th to 19th centuries. In The Roaring Girl, Middleton had compared "the fashion of playmaking" to alterations in apparel: tastes change. After 1614 audiences rejected Jonson's obdurate city comedies; Middleton stopped writing them.
At about this time, Middleton's sensitivity to the public pulse was acknowledged by the King's Men. He was apparently the only playwright trusted by Shakespeare's company to adapt Shakespeare's plays after his death. In autumn 1616(?) he updated Macbeth, in part by adapting material from The Witch, acted earlier that year but perhaps suppressed (because of its allusions to the Overbury trials). In Oct 1621 he made alterations to Measure for Measure, changing the setting to Vienna, adding the song, and expanding Lucio's role.

Rowley and his company provided a theatrical alternative to the King's Men, and he proved a more flexible collaborator than Dekker. He moved with Middleton into tragicomedy, first with their hit A Fair Quarrel (1614-16??), which was performed at court. There, Middleton's compelling dramatic exploration and critique of the machismo of duelling may have led to a commission to write The Peacemaker (1618). Published anonymously, licensed by James I, that pamphlet rapidly went through five editions. It echoes the King's enthusiasm for international peace and hostility to duelling, but links these to a more general argument for the reformation of manners, imagining a new man whose masculinity is defined by non-violence.

Middleton and Rowley and Rowley's mentor, Thomas Heywood next imagined The Old Law (1618-19), a tragicomedy of euthanasia later adapted by Trollope. It champions the common law over arbitrary prerogative. As one critic facetiously suggested in 1885, if "Shakespeare was Bacon, we can only say that it is quite certain that Middleton was [Edward] Coke" (Steen 149). Perhaps not coincidentally, Middleton's Masque of Heroes was performed at the Inner Temple early in 1619 (with Rowley playing Plumporridge). The legal community's increasing enthusiasm for Saxon precedents may explain Middleton's turn to fifth-century history for his next play. Performed by the King's Men, Hengist, King of Kent (1619-20?) is, in some scenes, a tragic history, which includes a unique and chilling episode of marital rape. But the play was better known in the 17th century as The Mayor of Queenborough, the protagonist of its comic scenes. The confusion over titles accurately reflects Middleton's challenge to genre.

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Final Decade

Middleton began his fortieth year working on commission for both court and city. He and Rowley co-wrote The World Tossed at Tennis for Prince Charles's Men to perform at Denmark House for Prince Charles. But it transferred to the Swan, for the first time successfully bringing "A Courtly Masque" into commercial playhouses for popular audiences. Middleton's relationship with Charles in Tennis reflected the domestic and foreign policy problems created by the outbreak of the Thirty Years War; those issues profoundly affected his work in the 1620s, through the celebration of the White Knight in A Game at Chess to the disappointments of 1626-7.

While collaborating with Rowley for Charles, Middleton was composing for Mayor William Cokayne whose inaugural pageant he had written and produced six months before the first of his ten Honourable Entertainments (Apr 1620-Apr 1621). His appointment as the first salaried City Chronologer (6 Sep 1620) transformed his status, and prompted much of his subsequent work: his lost manuscript Annals (1620+), four more Mayors' pageants, various occasional poems and entertainments, and his lost manuscript Farrago (describing political events, 1625-27). What Jonson was for Jacobean court masques, Middleton was for Jacobean civic revelry: its dominant, and most inventive, practitioner. Unlike Jonson, he was also an historian.

Meanwhile, he kept writing successful plays, alone and in collaboration. Women Beware Women probably belongs to 1621; "Never came Tragedy off with more applause", playwright Nathaniel Richard testified in 1657. In late 1621 or early 1622 Middleton re-joined Webster to produce Anything for a Quiet Life for the King's Men. By 7 May 1622 he and Rowley had finished The Changeling, performed by William Beeston's company at the Phoenix; its title does not signal genre, and although since the 19th century it has been recognized as a tragic masterpiece, in the 17th it was most often remembered for its comic scenes. The Nice Valour (Sep 1622?) contains the period's most popular theatrical song (the beautifully melancholy "Hence all ye vain delights"); a Prologue written for a posthumous revival explains that Middleton hated writing prologues "to a Play well made", and claims that "our Poet ever writ Language so good, mixt with such sprightly wit, He made the Theatre so soveraigne With his rare scenes . . ." For The Spanish Gypsy (9 Jul 1623), Middleton teamed with Rowley, his old partner Dekker, and Dekker's new partner John Ford; performed at the Phoenix, and also at court (Nov 5, for Prince Charles), the play was so popular that it provoked contempt or envy for its "Gipsie Iigges" and "other Trumpery" (Steen 39).

Middleton's greatest theatrical triumph was also his last. The King's Men performed A Game at Chess at the Globe for an unprecedented nine consecutive days (5-14 Aug 1624) before it was closed by the Privy Council after the Spanish ambassador complained. The biggest box-office success and most talked-about dramatic work of its era, Middleton's modern history play survives in more manuscripts than any other play, and was the first single play printed with engraved title-pages. It is sui generis: an allegorical representation of English history in the 1620s and of the origin of modern party politics, a work of astonishing originality in conception, executed with an unsurpassed verbal and theatrical command. Accounts of it were dispatched to Brussels, The Hague, Madrid, Florence, Rome, and Venice. Middleton went into hiding, pursued by a warrant; his son Edward was arrested and brought before the Privy Council; Middleton himself claims, in a poem to King James, that he was imprisoned "in the Fleet". None of his extant plays can be convincingly dated after Aug 1624, and he was probably released on condition that he stop writing for the stage.

His relationship with the City of London also deteriorated, perhaps because he was sick or depressed. Plague prevented a Lord Mayor's show in 1625. He and his usual partner Garrett Christmas were employed to prepare London's official coronation pageant, but what plague delayed was finally aborted by royal indisposition. In Jan 1626 the Court of Aldermen received complaints "of abuses and badd workmanshipp in and about the contrivings and payntings of the pagents" (Rep. 40, f. 84). On 1 Feb, the Common Council resolved to end Middleton's annual salary (of L10) "unless he give this Court satisfaction according as was intended he should do when the said pension was first granted him" (Rep. 41, f. 216-219). On 25 May the Earl of Pembroke ordered the Lord Mayor to "remove the said Pageants" (Remembrancia, vi.86); in June, the Aldermen ruled that "noe further moneys" be paid to Middleton and Garrett for the three Coronation pageants (Rep. 40, f. 256). The Drapers' Company commissioned Middleton and Garrett to produce the 1626 Lord Mayor's show, but on 31 Dec they complained to the Court of Assistants that they had not been paid by the Drapers, who replied that payment had been "putt of<f> in regarde of the ill performance" of the pageant (Robertson, 110); in the end the two were paid, at an unspecified date, L25 (17%) less than in 1623.

Middleton was writing till the end. His (lost) Farrago included an account of "Habeas Corpus 1627" (Oldys); the opening rounds of the historic Five Knights Case began in late June 1627. On 4 July Middleton was buried in St Mary's churchyard, Newington. His impoverished widow survived him by only a year.

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Personality and Achievement

Middleton and Shakespeare were the only writers of the English Renaissance who created plays still considered masterpieces in all four major dramatic genres: comedy, history, tragedy, and tragicomedy. Middleton wrote successful dramatic texts for more theatrical venues than any of his contemporaries. The first anthology of memorable passages from English drama (Cotgrave, 1655) quoted the Middleton canon more often than the works of any other playwright. On and off the commercial stage, Middleton mastered more genres than any English writer of his time.

Hazlitt, who began the resurrection of Middleton's reputation, praised his scenes as "an immediate transcript from life" (Specimens, 1808). What the cultural arbiters of Middleton's lifetime admired in Sidney or du Bartas was aristocratic artifice, consciously modelled upon the monumentality of texts more than a millenium old. Middleton learned to listen instead to the transcience of the vernacular. But to call him a transcriber or as T.S. Eliot did "merely a great recorder" (Selected Essays) is to misrecognize art as artlessness. No English writer before Middleton had ever achieved such complex sustained transparency, such seemingly unconstructed representations of the shifting currents of speech.

This misunderstanding of his life's work originated in ignorance of his life. Eliot's massively influential 1927 essay asserted that Middleton had "no point of view", no "peculiar personality"; "He is merely the name which associates six or seven great plays". The central facts of Middleton's life were not established (by M. Eccles) until four years later, in 1931; the chronology of his work did not begin to be understood until 1937. Middleton's seeming impersonality itself reflects a personality, a decision to reject the selfish rant of battling parents and battling poets. Aged twenty, he called himself "Thomas Medius & Gravis Tonus", punning on his surname (Lucrece 69-70); medius means "in the middle" but also "middling, ordinary" and "neutral, ambiguous" and "central", and "the common good". Gravis teeters, ambiguously, between "impressive" and "base". He yokes opposites. "Was ever such a contrariety seen?" (Old Law, 2.1).

The engraved half-length frontispiece printed in 1657 almost certainly derives from one of the portrait miniatures fashionable in his lifetime, an object of intimacy and vanity, often encased in a jewelled setting. With a finely shaded face, shoulder?length curls, and a trim beard, Calvinist Middleton whom Caroline puritans "seemd much to Adore" (Steen, 54) looks sexier and more stylish than any authenticated likeness of any other early playwright. His dark gown could be legal or academic, classical or modish, masculine or effeminate, warm or swank. His left arm propped akimbo on his hip, he wears his crown of laurel as casually as one might a low-slung feathered hat.

Less egotistical than Jonson, Middleton did not collect his own "Works"; unlike Shakespeare, he was not owned by a single company of actors, who could publish all his plays in posthumous folio. Consequently his work was not collected until 1840, and it took another century and a half of scholarship to define a reliable canon. He was first identified as the adapter of Macbeth in 1869 (by W. G. Clark and W. A. Wright), and his authorship of the anonymously-published Revenger's Tragedy was not recognized until 1926 (by E. H. C. Oliphant), and not generally accepted until the 1980s. His sociable muse long made it difficult to separate him from his collaborators, or to differentiate "Middleton" from "Middleton's workshop". His determined peacefulness left Jonson's hostility unanswered, his modesty let subsequent critics take literally his own self-deprecating remarks about his work. A better estimate is given by an anonymous epigram printed in 1640 (Wits Recreations, B7v): "Facetious Middleton, thy witty Muse Hath pleased all, that books or men peruse." And women, too.

This article on Middleton appears in The New Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004).  All text © 2002 Gary Taylor.