Thomas Middleton, 1570[?]–1627. Born, in London, 1570[?]. Student at Gray’s Inn, 1593[?]. Began to write plays about 1600. Wrote a number of plays and masques. Married (i.) Mary Morbeck, 1603[?]. After her death he married (ii.) Magdalen ——, 1627[?]. Appointed City Chronologer, 6 Sept. 1620. Died, at Newington Butts, July 1627; buried in parish church, 4 July. Works: “The Wisdom of Solomon Paraphrased,” 1597; “Microcynion” (under initials: T. M.; attrib. to Middleton), 1559; “Master Constable Blurt” (anon.), 1602; “The Blacke Booke” (under initials: T. M.; attrib. to Middleton), 1604; “Father Hubburd’s Tales” (under pseud. “Oliver Hubburd”), 1604; “Michaelmas Terme” (anon.) 1607; “The Phœnix” (anon.), 1607; “A Trick to Catch the Old-One” (under initials: T. M.), 1608; “The Famelie of Love” (anon.), 1608; “Your Five Gallants” [1608]; “A Mad World, my Masters” (under initials: T. M.), 1608; “Sir Robert Sherley,” 1609; “The Roaring Girle” (with Dekker), 1611; “The Triumphs of Truth,” 1613; “Civitatis Amor” (anon.), 1616; “The Tryumphs of Honor and Industry” (under initials: T. M.), 1617; “A Faire Quarrell” (with Rowley), 1617; “The Peacemaker” (anon.; attrib. to Middleton), 1618; “The Inner Temple Masque,” 1619; “The Triumphs of Love and Antiquity,” 1619; “The World Tost at Tennis” (with Rowley), 1620; “The Sunne in Aries,” 1621; “The Triumphs of Honor and Virtue,” 1622; “The Triumphs of Integrity,” 1623; “A Game at Chess” (anon. [1624], 3rd edn. same year); “The Triumphs of Health and Prosperity,” 1626. Posthumous: “A Chast Mayd in Cheape-side,” 1630; “The Widdow” (with Jonson and Fletcher), 1652; “The Changeling” (with Rowley), 1653; “The Spanish Gipsie” (with Rowley), 1653; “The Old Law” (with Massinger and Rowley), 1656; “No Wit, No Help like a Woman’s,” 1657; “Two new playes; viz., More Dissemblers besides Women:” “Women Beware Women,” 1657; “The Mayor of Quinborough,” 1661: “Anything for a Quiet Life,” 1662; “The Witch,” 1778. Collected Works: ed. by Dyce, 1840; by A. H. Bullen, 1885–86.

Personal

  Jacconot.  Well said, Master Middleton—a merry devil and a long-lived one run monkey-wise up your back-bone! May your days be as happy as they’re sober, and your nights full of applause! May no brawling mob pelt you, or your friends, when throned, nor hoot down your plays when your soul’s pinned like a cockchafer on public opinion! May no learned or unlearned calf write against your knowledge and wit, and no brother paper-stainer pilfer your pages, and then call you a general thief!

  Was born about 1570, and was the son of a gentleman settled in London, whose wife likewise sprang from a London family. It is highly probable that he was at one time a member of one of the Universities,—Cambridge as it would seem, to whose life and ways he frequently refers in his plays with the easy but not unconscious familiarity of the old University man. He may safely be identified with one of the two Thomas Middletons who were admitted to Gray’s Inn in 1593 and 1596 respectively,—with the former of these for choice. Thus he passed through the social experiences habitual to young gentlemen of his day before settling down to the labours of his life; and, apart from the evidence of his portrait, it will, I think, be allowed that his dramatic works are, notwithstanding their frequent coarseness, distinguished by a general flavour of good-breeding from those of such authors as Jonson, Dekker, or Marston.

A Game of Chess, 1624

  I doubt not but you have heard of our famous play of Gondomar, which hath been followed with extraordinary curiosity, and frequented by all sorts of people, old and young, rich and poor, masters and servants, papists, wise men, &c., churchmen and Scotsmen, as Sir Henry Wotton, Sir Albert Morton, Sir Benjamin Rudyard, Sir Thomas Lake, and a world besides. The Lady Smith would have gone if she could have persuaded me to go thither. I am not so sour nor so severe but that I would willingly have attended her, but I could not sit so long, for we must have been there before one o’clock at farthest to find any room. They counterfeited his person to the life, with all his graces and faces, and had gotten, they say, a cast suit of his apparel for the purpose, and his letter, wherein the world says there lacked nothing but a couple of asses to carry it, and Sir George Petre or Sir Tobie Matthew to bear him company. But the worst is, playing him, they played somebody else, for which they are forbidden to play that or any other play till the King’s further pleasure be known; and they may be glad if they can so escape Scot-free. The wonder lasted but nine days, for so long they played it.

  The literary merits of this dramatic allegory are by no means of a high order, and the political views shadowed forth in it are, so far as it is possible to judge, of that reckless sort which usually result from an endeavour to suit the current humour of popular sentiment. But while the historical student will not fail to observe with what strength public opinion must have run in the direction of the sentiments of this piece, for its author to have ventured upon producing it,—and for it to have passed the censorship of the Master of the Revels,—neither will literary criticism pass by unheeded so singular a composition. This play, which Ben Jonson is hardly unjust in alluding to as “poor,” is in fact the solitary work with which the Elisabethan drama fairly attempted to match the political comedies of Aristophanes. No literary species can spring out of the earth in a single day.

  “A Game at Chess” contains some very caustic satire against Gondomar (the black Knight), whose fair seeming hypocrisy is exposed with masterly power, while his bodily infirmities are ridiculed with provoking persistence. The satirist’s lash falls heavily on the apostate Bishop of Spalato (the Fat Bishop), who is represented as a swag-bellied monster of gluttony—and lecherous withal. There is abundant evidence to show that the satire was keenly appreciated. Three editions—without date, but probably printed in 1624—have come down, and Collier possessed a title-page of an edition dated 1625.

  The play which brought Middleton into prison, and earned for the actors a sum so far beyond parallel as to have seemed incredible till the fullest evidence was procured, is one of the most complete and exquisite works of artistic ingenuity and dexterity that ever excited or offended, enraptured or scandalized an audience of friends or enemies: the only work of English poetry which may properly be called Aristophanic. It has the same depth of civic seriousness, the same earnest ardour and devotion to the old cause of the old country, the same solid fervour of enthusiasm and indignation, which animated the third great poet of Athens against the corruption of art by the sophistry of Euripides and the corruption of manhood by the sophistry of Socrates. The delicate skill of the workmanship can only be appreciated by careful and thorough study.

The Changeling

  The character of De Flores in this play has in it a strangeness of iniquity, such as we think is hardly paralleled in the whole range of the Elizabethan drama. The passions of this brute-imp are not human. They are such as might be conceived of as springing from the union of animal with fiendish impulses, in a nature which knew no law outside of its own lust, and was as incapable of a scruple as of a sympathy.

  Regarded as an artistic whole, “The Changeling” cannot challenge comparison with “The Maid’s Tragedy,” “The Broken Heart,” or “The Duchess of Malfi.” It has not the sustained tragic interest of those masterpieces; but there is one scene in “The Changeling” which, for appalling depth of passion, is not merely unsurpassed, but, I believe, unequalled outside Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies.

Women beware Women

  Livia the “good neighbor” is as real a creature as one of Chaucer’s characters. She is such another jolly Housewife as the Wife of Bath.

  Middleton’s style was not marked by any peculiar quality of his own, but was made up, in equal proportions, of the faults and excellences common to his contemporaries. In his “Women beware Women” there is a rich marrowy vein of internal sentiment, with fine occasional insight into human nature and cool cutting irony of expression. He is lamentably deficient in the plot and dénouement of the story.

  A drama which shows a deep study of the sources of human frailty, considerable skill in exhibiting the passions in their consecutive, if not in their conflicting action, and a firm hold upon character; but it lacks pathos, tenderness, and humanity; its power is out of all proportion to its geniality; the characters, while they stand definitely out to the eye, are seen through no visionary medium of sentiment and fancy.

  Middleton fails to show himself capable of true tragic self-control; and though his aim is undoubtedly moral, he is unable by lofty sentiment to furnish any relief to the grossness of the situations, while the humorous characters are revoltingly coarse. He lacked, in short, both delicacy of feeling and sustained earnestness; and this tragedy, though it has received high praise, seems to me to indicate that his most distinctive dramatic powers lay in a different direction.

  The tragedy of “Women beware Women,” whether or not it be accepted as the masterpiece of Middleton, is at least an excellent example of the facility and fluency and equable promptitude of style which all students will duly appreciate and applaud in the riper and completer work of this admirable poet. It is full to overflowing of noble eloquence, of inventive resource and suggestive effect, of rhetorical affluence and theatrical ability. The opening or exposition of the play is quite masterly: and the scene in which the forsaken husband is seduced into consolation by the temptress of his wife is worthy of all praise for the straightforward ingenuity and the serious delicacy by which the action is rendered credible and the situation endurable. But I fear that few or none will be found to disagree with my opinion that no such approbation or tolerance can be reasonably extended so as to cover or condone the offences of either the underplot or the upshot of the play. The one is repulsive beyond redemption by elegance of style, the other is preposterous beyond extenuation on the score of logic or poetical justice.

  This is no doubt the most powerful single play of Middleton’s. The main plot is worked out with great mastery, the leading characters are most vividly drawn, and, unattractive as they all are, strikingly illustrate what Middleton could achieve by sheer dramatic force.

A Fair Quarrell

  High above all the works yet mentioned there stands and will stand conspicuous while noble emotion and noble verse have honour among English readers the pathetic and heroic play so memorably appreciated by Charles Lamb, “A Fair Quarrel.” It would be the vainest and emptiest impertinence to offer a word in echo of his priceless and imperishable praise. The delicate nobility of the central conception on which the hero’s character depends for its full relief and development should be enough to efface all remembrance of any defect or default in moral taste, any shortcoming on the æsthetic side of ethics, which may be detected in any slighter or hastier example of the poet’s invention.

The Witch

  Though some resemblance may be traced between the charms in Macbeth, and the incantations in this play, which is supposed to have preceded it, this coincidence will not detract much from the originality of Shakespeare. His witches are distinguished from the witches of Middleton by essential differences. These are creatures to whom man or woman, plotting some dire mischief, might resort for occasional consultation. Those originate deeds of blood, and begin bad impulses to men. From the moment that their eyes first meet with Macbeth’s, he is spell-bound. That meeting sways his destiny. He can never break the fascination. These witches can hurt the body, those have power over the soul. Hecate in Middleton has a son, a low buffoon: the hags of Shakespeare have neither child of their own, nor seem to be descended from any parent. They are foul anomalies, of whom we know not whence they are sprung, nor whether they have beginning or ending. As they are without human passions, so they seem to be without human relations. They come with thunder and lightning, and vanish to airy music. This is all we know of them. Except Hecate, they have no names; which heightens their mysteriousness. The names, and some of the properties, which the other author has given to his hags, excite smiles. The Weird Sisters are serious things. Their presence cannot co-exist with mirth. But, in a lesser degree, the witches of Middleton are fine creations. Their power too is, in some measure, over the mind. They raise jars, jealousies, strifes, “like a thick scurf” over life.

  The hags of Middleton are drawn with a bold and creative pencil, and seem to take a middle station between the terrific sisterhood of Shakspeare, and the traditonary witch of the country-village. They are pictures full of fancy, but not kept sufficiently aloof from the ludicrous and familiar.

  The commentators would have everything, in Shakspeare and everybody else, to be borrowed or stolen: they have the genius and the zeal of thief-catchers in ferreting out and exposing all transferences among writers, real and imaginary, of thoughts, words, and syllables; and in the present case, as in many others, their professional ardor seems to have made a great deal out of very little.

  Middleton’s name has of late been revived in connection with the authorship of “Macbeth.” It has been conjectured, on the ground of certain slight coincidences between Middleton’s play and the witch scenes, that Middleton had a hand in the composition of “Macbeth.” The supposition is about as groundless as any ever made in connection with Shakespeare, which is saying a good deal. Even if either author borrowed the words of the song from the other, that is no evidence of further co-operation. The plays are wholly different in spirit. “The Witch” is by no means one of Middleton’s best plays. The plot is both intricate and feeble; and the witches, in spite of Charles Lamb’s exquisite comparison of them with Shakespeare’s, are, as stage creations, essentially comic and spectacular. With their ribald revelry, their cauldrons, their hideous spells and weird incantations, they are much more calculated to excite laughter than fear as exhibited on the stage, however much fitted, to touch the chords of superstitious dread when transported by the imagination to their native wilds. The characters of the play do not treat them with sufficient respect to command the sympathy of the audience for them.

  Has received, owing to its Shakespearean interest, more attention than it deserves on its own merits. It is strangely ill-constructed and is not by any means one of Middleton’s finest works, though uncritical writers have absurdly advanced it to the first place.

  There is poetry enough in “The Witch” to furnish forth a whole generation of poeticules: but the construction or composition of the play, the arrangement and evolution of event, the distinction or development of character, would do less than little credit to a boy of twelve; who at any rate would hardly have thought of patching up so ridiculous a reconciliation between intending murderers and intended victims as here exceeds in absurdity the chaotic combination of accident and error which disposes of inconvenient or superfluous underlings.

General

  He was Contemporary with those Famous Poets Johnson, Fletcher, Massinger, and Rowley, in whose Friendship he had a large Share; and tho’ he came short of the two former in parts, yet like the Ivy by the Assistance of the Oak, (being joyn’d with them in several Plays) he clim’d up to some considerable height of Reputation.

  Humour, wit, and character, though in a degree inferior to that which distinguishes the preceding poets, are to be found in the comedy of Middleton; and, occasionally a pleasing interchange of elegant imagery and tender sentiment. His tragedy is not devoid of pathos, though possessing little dignity or elevation; but there is, in many of his plays, and especially in the tragi-comedy of “The Witch,” a strength and compass of imagination which entitle him to a very respectable rank among the cultivators of the Romantic drama.

  Middleton belongs to this lower class of dramatic writers: his tragedy entitled “Women beware Women” is founded on the story of Bianca Cappello; it is full of action, but the characters are all too vicious to be interesting, and the language does not rise much above mediocrity. In comedy, Middleton deserves more praise. “A Trick to catch the Old One,” and several others that bear his name, are amusing and spirited.

  Middleton partakes of the poetry and sweetness of Decker, but not to the same height: and he talks more at random. You hardly know what to make of the dialogue or stories of some of his plays. But he has more fancy: and there is one character of his (De Flores in the “Changeling”) which, for effect at once tragical, probable, and poetical, surpasses anything I know of in the drama of domestic life.

  Chiefly remarkable for a few striking ideas imperfectly wrought out.

  With less fluency of diction, less skill in fastening the reader’s interest to his fable, harsher in versification, and generally clumsier in construction, the best plays of Thomas Middleton are still superior to Heywood’s in force of imagination, depth of passion, and fulness of matter. It must, however, be admitted that the sentiments which direct his powers are not so fine as Heywood’s. He depresses the mind, rather than invigorates it. The eye he cast on human life was not the eye of a sympathizing poet, but rather that of a sagacious cynic. His observation, though sharp, close, and vigilant, is somewhat ironic and unfeeling. His penetrating, incisive intellect cuts its way to the heart of a character as with a knife; and if he lays bare its throbs of guilt and weakness, and lets you into the secrets of its organization, he conceives his whole work is performed.

  Middleton has not Dekker’s lightness of touch and etherial purity of tenderness, but there are qualities in which he comes nearer than any contemporary dramatist to the master mind of the time. There is a certain imperial confidence in his use of words and imagery, a daring originality and impatient force of expression, an easy freedom of humour, wide of range yet thoroughly well in hand, such as we find in the same degree even in the age of giants in no Elizabethan saving only Shakespeare…. Regarded as wholes, Middleton’s tragedies fall very far short of the dignity of Shakespeare’s. His heroes and heroines are not made of the same noble stuff, and their calamities have not the same grandeur. The characters are all so vile that the pity and terror pronounced by their death is almost wholly physical. But in the expression of incidental moments of passion, Middleton often rises to a sublime pitch of energy.

  The modesty with which Middleton himself appears to have abstained from any endeavour to assert his claims to fame or eminence of any kind pleads in his favour, and it may be asserted without fear of objection that he possessed not a few among the many qualities which constitute a dramatist of the order next to the highest…. More than ordinarily successful in romantic comedy, at times even here very felicitous in his choice of subjects, he seems to exhibit his full powers when in contact with his native soil. His imagination seems to have been strong enough to penetrate into regions of abnormal passion and of impulses such as seem to swallow up the whole being of man; but, upon the whole, his comedies dealing with the national life of his own age seem most congenial to his gifts, while constituting as a whole the truest dramatic representation of the sphere within which they move…. For his whole genius was free from any tendency to exaggeration, while of his moral aim there is no reason whatever to doubt. It may be questioned whether he was cast in a sufficiently strong mould to impress his age with the purpose which animated his satire; but there is no hollowness about his principles as to the conduct of life, and no unreality about his method of enforcing them. In brilliancy and, regarding his works as a whole, in depth of either pathos or humour he falls below many of his fellow-dramatists; but in lightness, vivacity, and sureness of touch it would be difficult—with one exception always—to name his superior.

  There are critics who station poets in order of merit as a schoolmaster ranges his pupils in the classroom. This process I do not intend to adopt with Middleton. The test of a poet’s real power ultimately resolves itself into the question whether he leaves a permanent impression on the mind of a capable reader…. Middleton may be charged with extravagance and coarseness. True: but he could make the blood tingle; he could barb his words so that they pierce the heart through and through. If “The Changeling,” “Women beware Women,” “The Spanish Gipsy,” and “A Fair Quarrel” do not justify Middleton’s claims to be considered a great dramatist, I know not which of Shakespeare’s followers is worthy of the title.

  Middleton has a faculty almost peculiar to himself of carrying, it might almost be said of hustling, the reader or spectator along, so that he has no time to stop and consider defects. His characters are extremely human and lively, his dialogue seldom lags, his catastrophes, if not his plots, are often ingenious, and he is never heavy. The moral atmosphere of his plays is not very refined,—by which I do not at all mean merely that he indulges in loose situations and loose language. All the dramatists from Shakespere downwards do that; and Middleton is neither better nor worse than the average. But in striking contrast to Shakespere and to others, Middleton has no kind of poetical morality in the sense in which the term poetical justice is better known. He is not too careful that the rogues shall not have the best of it; he makes his most virtuous and his vilest characters hobnob together very contentedly; and he is, in short, though never brutal, like the post-Restoration school, never very delicate. The style, however, of these works of his did not easily admit of such delicacy, except in the infusion of a strong romantic element such as that which Shakespere almost always infuses. Middleton has hardly done it more than once—in the charming comedy of “The Spanish Gipsy,”—and the result there is so agreeable that the reader only wishes he had done it oftener.

  There is, unfortunately, too much of Middleton in existence; a single volume might be selected which would give readers an exceedingly high impression of his genius. He had no lyrical gift, and his verse, although it is enlivened by a singularly bright and unexpected diction, is not in itself of any great beauty.

  Unlike his successor, Jonson, Middleton evidently gave high satisfaction in his function of “city chronologer,” and his pageants were admired by his city patrons. He seems also to have been popular with the play going public both before and after the civil war. None of his pieces is known to have failed on the stage. But before the revolution he had fallen, in common with all but one or two of his dramatic contemporaries, into a neglect from which he has been seen among the last to recover. This is partly due to his striking inequality. A facile and inventive writer, he could turn out an abundance of sufficiently effective work with little effort; but he had little sustained inspiration; he is very great only in single scenes…. His habitual occupation with depraved types becomes an artistic method; he creates characters which fascinate without making the smallest appeal to sympathy, tragedy which harrows without rousing either pity or terror, and language which disdains charm, but penetrates by remorseless veracity and by touches of strange and sudden power.

  Few of the lyrics of Middleton are altogether satisfactory; in all his work, like Massinger and some others, Middleton seems to inhabit that dangerous limbo that lies between the realms of the highest genius and the ordinary levels of a work-a-day world; making, it is true, an occasional flight into the former, but more usually contentedly trudging along the highways of the latter.