Thomas Middleton

A close reading of "The Changeling", 4.2.89-103. Daalder and Moore focus on Act IV, ii, 89-103, and in particular Jasperino's comment "Like those that challenge interest in a woman" (line 102). The authors explore the possibility that the 'woman' described in this line is Beatrice, not Diaphanta; various interpretations of the passage, in regards to the complex sexual relationships in the tragedy, hinge on confirming the identity of this 'woman'.

In the early seventeenth century, the London stage often portrayed a ruler covertly spying on his subjects. Traditionally deemed 'Jacobean disguised ruler plays', these works include Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, Marston's The Malcontent and The Fawn, Middleton's The Phoenix, and Sharpham's The Fleer. Commonly dated to the arrival of James I, these plays are typically viewed as synchronic commentaries on the Jacobean regime.

Kevin A. Quarmby demonstrates that the disguised ruler motif actually evolved in the 1580s. It emerged from medieval folklore and balladry, Tudor Chronicle history and European tragicomedy. Familiar on the Elizabethan stage, these incognito rulers initially offered light-hearted, romantic entertainment, only to suffer a sinister transformation as England awaited its ageing queen's demise. The disguised royal had become a dangerously voyeuristic political entity by the time James assumed the throne.

Traditional critical perspectives also disregard contemporary theatrical competition. Market demands shaped the repertories. Rivalry among playing companies guaranteed the motif's ongoing vitality. The disguised ruler's presence in a play reassured audiences; it also facilitated a subversive exploration of contemporary social and political issues. Gradually, the disguised ruler's dramatic currency faded, but the figure remained vibrant as an object of parody until the playhouses closed in the 1640s.

This article seeks to resolve the noted ambiguity and confusion that has surrounded Moll Cut-purse, the heroine of Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton's 1611 play, The Roaring Girl. I argue that, beneath the city comedy, the play hides an intermittent allegorical narrative, which has been modelled on Ovid's 'Iron Age'. Moll stands astride these layers and depicts a boisterous 'roaring girl' possessed by the returned spirit of Astraea, goddess of Justice. When recognised, these literal and allegorical elements synergistically combine to offer a Protestant vision of the invisible spiritual battle, fought between angels and demons, for the souls of a fallen humanity.

In Volpone, or the Fox, Ben Jonson conveys a moral message, blending the satirical comedy with the feigning death of the protagonist Volpone, who spreads the false news of his death to the legacy hunters. He uses the themes of avarice and moral corruption to criticise societal degeneration. Volpone, Mosca and the three legacy hunters create their self-deceit with a natural tendency towards greed, hypocrisy and disguise which also reveal their corrupt morality and the dramatic irony in the play. The play conveys serious criticism of society such as Corvino's offering his innocent and chaste wife to Volpone to reach his legacy and, also the bad treatment of women. The trial scene bears a serious portrayal of injustice, slander, false witnesses, and the victimization of the innocent and morally good characters. On the other hand, Jonson demonstrates how a person's greed leads to his downfall. Volpone's inner world and motivations for his actions show that he is initially driven by negative traits; greed, extravagance and deception. The motivation behind the excessive need for pleasure and satisfaction, initially, is his need for more material possessions and his fortune, for which he commits unjust actions and acts out deceptive behaviour. Volpone's realisation of his own negative traits and his fatal flaw eventually bring about his downfall. The play emphasises that the sinners are punished while the innocent are rewarded. In Women Beware Women, Thomas Middleton displays catastrophic consequences that stem from chaos in the tyrannical Duke's court. The play ends with the death of characters at a court masque scene. It functions as a reiteration of the moral and religious order against earthly pleasures and lust. The Duke, who should be the administrative of the order, becomes the source of corruption in the play, therefore he is punished. In both plays, the former a Jacobean city-comedy and the latter a Jacobean revenge tragedy, societal destructions stemming from a lack of morality have been portrayed. This paper aims to discuss the importance of Venetian and Florentine societies' tendencies in Jonson's and Middleton's plays that depict lack of morality and ethical values as a result of which social disorder becomes a reality and characters are portrayed in an endless endeavour to deceive one another, in order either to survive or to make profit out of any specific situation since higher authorities fail to fulfil their responsibilities.

Thomas Middleton’s play The Revengers Tragedy starts with Vindice, the main character of the play, announcing that he wants to get revenge on the Old Duke. With the help of his job as a spy, he is leaded to an opportunity to kill the Old Duke. Even though they could easily got away with murder, Vindice frankly reveals that they were the ones who murdered the old Duke. ''Twas somewhat witty carried, though we say it./'Twas we who murdered him.' (V.3.117) Vindice thought that it is safe to admit the crime now, however, he was wrong and they were executed. Even though the admission of Vindice gives the impression that he basically thought it is safe to admit now, it was not the only reason to advance the story as such. Vindice being aware that he is a revenger, that the thing they have done was “witty-carried” and his revelation of their own crime makes the reader think that he himself is aware of the fact that the story that is being staged is a fictional tragedy, so it is unreal. This leads us to the metathetrical elements of the play. Metatheatre is a type of theatre that draws attention of the audience to the play’s unreality. Such elements do provide humour for the audience and it creates a parodical atmosphere. Parody is a literary composition modelling (or imitating) another work or genre in which characteristic style and themes of that work or genre are satirized or exaggerated for comic effect. In The Revengers Tragedy, however, the parodical elements are achieved not only by exaggerating the characteristic style of a tragedy, but also through making audience aware that the play that is being staged is unreal.

First, I examine the aspects of the political sovereignty on the Shakespearean stage. In the light of Walter Benjamin’s Origin of the German baroque drama (1928) and of Carl Schmitt’s answer to Benjamin in Hamlet or Hecuba (1956), I show that Shakespeare stages the mortality of the political bodies and the new sovereignty of the plotter. Urged to master the art and the tempo of the plot, the prince is nonetheless unable to prevent the decomposition of the state. Then, drawing on the Elizabethan drama, I question the contemporary effort towards order and synchronization within the city. Hobbes’s theory of political and juridical representation breaks with the mystical conception of political unity and with any inspired legislation, whereas the civil scene is dedicated to the peace between individuals in order to ensure the possibility of a real autonomy in the private sphere. Reciprocally, this autonomy must consolidate the solutions to the problems of melancholy and skepticism conceptualized in Leviathan. While endorsing the tragedy of human condition and of knowledge already put on stage by Shakespeare, Leviathan prevents Schmitt’s exaltation as well as the « pure » violence which, according to Benjamin, lies in the subject’s state of exception. Yet, through the ghosts that Leviathan cannot tolerate within the public sphere, the Shakespearean stage unravels the mechanisms of perpetual order and synchronization without rejecting the law and the project of autonomy.

Keywords : Melancholy – Skepticism – Law – Discipline – Elizabethan drama – Shakespeare – Walter Benjamin – Carl Schmitt – Hobbes – Leviathan – Behemoth

This feminist-materialist study contributes towards a critique of the modern nuclear family in Western Europe by looking back at its cultural constructions and negotiations in early modern England. Connecting the traces of the past to the politics of today, the book offers further bricks to the building of a cultural history of the meanings and practices of family life in their continuity as well as discontinuity. The family is here defined as a discursive field that provides the framework for the analysis of the following interrelated concepts and categories, each being itself constituted by an ensemble of discourses: subjectivity, sex, gender, sexuality, love, marriage, motherhood, fatherhood and childhood, the public and the private, and the nation. While participating in postmodernity's deconstruction of these narratives, the author also dialectically links them to the non-discursive or material reality at the time of their initial production; i.e., to the historical specificity of the socio- economic and political fabric, in particular to the rise of possessive individualism, capitalism and the nation-state.

This article aims to analyse the figure of Diego Sarmiento de Acuña, the first  Count of Gondomar, who served as Spanish Ambassador to London from 1613 to 1622. Through a very brief assessment of Gondomar's collection of English books and  images, this article aims to provide a more nuanced historical understanding of  Gondomar’s relationship with Britain and propose some reasons, of a cultural nature, for his success in London. I will first provide a short summary of the English documents that were used at the time  to create a subversive reading of Gondomar and will later present arguments commonly shared by recent scholars (with a more positive understanding of this ambassador’s role in Jacobean London). This article will later on conclude with the contention that  this diplomat, contrary to the English accounts of the times (who deeply vilified him),  was actually an agent with deep knowledge and appreciation for British culture and local affairs. In doing so, Gondomar was surely following personal affinities, but he was also taking into account the diplomatic treatises of the times, which recommended ambassadors to become acquainted with the culture of the country of  diplomatic mission.

Inspiracją do powstania jednej z najsławniejszych postaci teatru elżbietańskiego, Falstaffa, było najprawdopodobniej zatrudnienie przez zespół nowego clowna. Podział sztuki na akty został wymuszony koniecznością przycinania knotów. Teksty angielskich dramatów były przysłowiowo niestabilne –  ingerowali w nie cenzorzy i aktorzy, a nawet widzowie, poeci byli proszeni o komponowanie nowych wersji i poprawianie prac kolegów. Do dziś zachowały się na przykład trzy bardzo różne wersje Hamleta. Autorzy rzadko dostarczali do teatru ostateczne kopie sztuk. Premiera była próbą generalną, po której pytano widownię o zdanie. Teatr elżbietański to instytucja komercyjna, nastawiona na zysk. Teksty sztuk nie były zaliczane do literatury. W takich mało stabilnych warunkach powstały dramaty, uznawane powszechnie za jedno z największych dokonań ludzkości. W brudnym i hałaśliwym Londynie narodziły się arcydzieła o wartości globalnej i uniwersalnej. Jak to było możliwe? Zastanowię się nad tym dylematem w referacie.

This article centres its attention on the propaganda produced after the failure of the Spanish Match: the marriage negotiations between Spain and England from 1614 to 1623. More specifically, this essay wishes to analyse Thomas Scott's Second Vox Populi through its images and assess their influence on Middleton's A Game at Chess. One of the purposes of this article will be to address Middleton's use of Scott's iconography and, to a certain extent its prose, to more clearly identify this playwright's rhetorical strategies in the creation of the myth of the Black Knight: a subversive reading of the figure of Gondomar that was pervasive in English historiography for centuries.

Music of all kinds in any play demands collaboration. It requires that a composer, or at least a tune, be supplied
from elsewhere to complete the moment; further collaborations then sometimes become necessary, with a dance
master, a singing teacher, or a set of professional musicians. By looking at who creates the words for music in
Middleton's plays, and how these then circulate, larger questions emerge: How possessive was Middleton about the
music and song passages of the plays he wrote – and, by extension, about other passages? Were ‘ditties’ (the
words to songs) seen as being permanent parts of Middleton's text – and, if not, what does that suggest about his
plays as literature? To what extent was Middleton reliant for his emotional affect on music; and what can surviving
words reveal of the theatrical concerns of the moment? This article examines specific songs in four plays
stretching along the length of Middleton's writing, performing, and publishing career: A Mad World, My Masters
(performed 1605 by Paul's Boys, printed 1608); A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (performed 1613 by Lady Elizabeth's
Men, printed 1630); The Witch (performed 1615–16 by King's Men, printed 1778); and The Widow (performed
1615–17 by King's Men, and printed 1652).

William Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton's Timon of Athens is not only a co-authored play but also a play about co-authorship. Timon contrasts the stultifying effects of artistic patronage with the exchange of alienated labor, explaining in the process both the peculiarities of the Alcibiades subplot and the significance of Middleton's comedy. Engaging and assessing recent scholarship of collaboration, this article argues that Renaissance theatrical collaboration represents not an original state prior to the imposition of individualist Romantic ideology, but rather an innovative result of newly flexible, complex, and capitalist theatrical economies. Thinking of collaboration in economic terms foregrounds its links to alienation and to exploitation, accounting for inequalities and asymmetries between writers. Timon charts the collapse of patronage relations and the emergence of a newly impersonal, capitalist basis for exchange.

This book examines early modern drama's depiction of non-standard forms of masculinity grounded in superficiality, inauthenticity, affectation, and the display of the extravagantly clothed body. Practices of extravagant dress destabilized distinctions between able-bodied and disabled, human and non-human, and the past and present, distinctions that structure normative ways of thinking about sexuality. In city comedies by Ben Jonson, George Chapman, Thomas Middleton, and Thomas Dekker, extravagantly dressed male characters imagine alternatives to the prevailing modes of subjectivity, sociability, and eroticism in early modern London. While these characters are situated in hostile narrative and historical contexts, this book draws on recent work on disability, materiality, and queer temporality to rethink their relationship to those contexts in order to access the world-making possibilities of early modern queer style. In their rich representations of life in London around the turn of the seventeenth century, these plays not only were, but also remain, uniquely sensitive to the intersection of sexuality, urbanization, and material culture. The attachments and pleasures of early modern sartorial extravagance they depict can estrange us from the epistemologies that narrow current thinking about sexuality's relationship to authenticity, pedagogy, interiority, and privacy.

Marlowe and Middleton are both demystifiers.  Central demystifying motives in Marlowe's plays tend to be oedipal: throwing off the yoke  of convention and the dead hand of the past.  Central motives in Middleton's plays tend to be mimetic: participating without inhibiting illusions in an ongoing economy of attention and desire.

This essay emphasises the significance of the dramatic appropriations of cosmetic signifiers that are potent in Renaissance revenge tragedies, signifying the genre as the suitable means to convey and instruct women on their social conduct. First I provide a context for early modern cosmetic culture and practices by examining some of the main anti-cosmetic arguments that are reflected in the revenge tragedies. Then I expand on these findings by exploring the stage device of the cosmetic corpse — a curious beautification ritual that goes against the traditional cosmetic scenes of tragedies, where cosmetics are usually applied on the living self causing monstrous ramifications to their health. Instead, female chaste corpses are grotesquely revamped into weapons to depose necrophiliac tyrants, who die from kissing the cosmetically enhanced poisonous corpses of the women who were painted by the revengers. Despite, the device being recycled from Thomas Kyd’s The Tragedy of Soliman and Perseda (c.1591), this essay focuses on the richest representations of the cosmetic corpse found in Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607) and The Lady’s Tragedy (1611) that gave the fullest readings.

This paper provides a feminist critique of theories of liberty in two of Thomas Middleton's city tragedies. Expanding on the neo-Roman theories of liberty presented by Quentin Skinner in Liberty Before Liberalism, I connect Middleton's city tragedies to feminist critiques from Mary Nyquist and Ellen Mieksins Wood. Close readings of Women Beware Women and The Revenger's Tragedy reveal connections between Middleton's radical critiques of tyranny in later theories of liberty of the English Civil War. Because Middleton's critiques are explored through both the state and marriage relations, I argue that Middleton exposes the same contradictions of liberty in the institution of the family, providing insight into notions of slavery, servitude, and coercion under the public rule of the sovereign and in the privacy of the home. Reading such contradictions back through Middleton, can, I argue, allow for a better understanding of feminist critiques of such theories of liberty.

In 2008, two British productions of The Revenger’s Tragedy, one in London, the other in Manchester, reintroduced twenty-first-century theatre audiences to the savage satire of Middleton’s play. Critical responses to both versions were mixed. For some, these productions proved too self-consciously modern in their overt representation of sexual and social depravity. Heavy-handed moralizing effectively subsumed the play’s subtle undercurrents of infectious humor. In consequence, both the National Theatre and the Manchester Royal Exchange stood accused of sensationalized and salacious “overkill”. Such “overkill” was blamed on directors unwilling to trust the narrative, or overly eager to highlight the corrupt decadence of male authority at the play’s core. These readings were not surprising in the context of an economic crisis that, since late 2007, was already triggering public mistrust in institutions of social and financial control. Revenge and corrupting revenue represented the contemporary keys to interpretation.

In contrast, a London fringe theatre production of 2015 consciously avoided the extremes of moral discourse, despite its equally modern-dress design choices. Lazarus Theatre’s Revenger’s Tragedy focused more on the stylized attractiveness and reality of removed violence, and its effect on characters that suffer from, or glory in, its execution. The play’s director, Gavin Harrington-Odedra, justified this relaxed attitude to violent extreme by referencing the early modern acceptance of public execution as family entertainment. Blood and horror sold plays far better than cathartic moralizing. An immediate effect of this directorial “underkill” was a surprising elevation of the female characters in the play. No longer shallow archetypes that pandered to traditional readings of sexual desire, virginity, and femininity, the Duchess, Gratiana, and Castiza instead represented complex feminist commentators on the worlds they inhabit. Castiza might be commoditized by the lust of Lussurioso and the apparent insensitive greed of her mother, but in the Lazarus production, this complicated commercial exchange became less a cipher for moral decay, and more an opportunity for individual self-justification. The Duchess and Gratiana, in particular, both offer surprisingly honest, non-moralizing analyses of their actions. This detailed self-analysis seemed lost because of recent mainstream “overkill” performance choices. Including interviews with Harrington-Odedra, and the Artistic Director of Lazarus, Ricky Dukes, this chapter explores the representation of commodified women in The Revenger’s Tragedy, and considers how twenty-first century interpretations can offer radical new feminist readings when directors offer more nuanced views of the play's female characters.

In early modern London, rising consumer culture and rising tension about gender roles generated a heated discourse around the commodification of beauty, its definition, and the gendering of its production and consumption. The conceptualizations of beauty at the time privileged the male gaze and revealed cultural anxieties about the legibility of gender and the female subject/body. These ideas empowered women in the public sphere while also enforcing moral norms upon them, as well as constituting a sexual/marriage market of social and actual capital that women both participated in and were victimized by. At the same time, contemporary dramatists were involved in this ever-moving debate as both participants and commentators. Possibly because playhouses and popular drama performances themselves also partook of these morally debatable activities of deception and face painting, they sometimes represented power for women in the commodification of beauty and cosmetics-ironically, contemporary drama performances could use no women onstage. Indeed, two important plays, both of which have cross-dressing title characters, focus on these issues of beauty, body, and gender: Epicene and The Roaring Girl. Both plays show how theories of beauty and commodification can both empower and disempower women.

Middleton’s last two surviving plays, The Spanish Gypsy  (1623) and  A Game at Chess (1624), seem to belong to different universes, aesthetically and politically, discouraging any notion of Middleton’s “late style” or “late period.” One was written before, one after, the failure of negotiations for a dynastic marriage that would have united Habsburg and Stuart interests. Analysis and comparison of the two plays
challenges the theoretical assumptions about “the temporal constant” in the work both of New Historicist and of Presentist critics.

The 'European Women in Early Modern Drama' seminar takes place as part of the European Shakespeare Research Association conference in 2015 (University of Worcester, UK - 29 June - 2 July 2015). The seminar is convened by Dr Edel Semple and Dr Ema Vyroubalová.

Readings of Middleton’s A Game at Chess have tended to focus on its political and historical implications, viewing the chess game itself as an allegorical device that simply presents itself for decoding. Using some insights from Clifford Geertz, this essay makes the game central to a
reading of the play. It asks how the game of chess, serving as a fictional space within which characters gamble and cheat for high stakes, operates in relation to its vehicle, Middleton’s play, itself a high-risk enterprise in a political field where art has a stake, but one whose value is never entirely quantifiable. The implicit distinction between a ‘real’ world of political machinations and rivalries where playwrights can be put in prison for commenting on public affairs, and the play-world that occupies the stage or the chessboard is not as straightforward as it appears, since games also take up space in the world, a contested space with ill-defined boundaries. By putting the resources of early modern theatre and its assembling of theatrical publics to use in
representing Anglo-Spanish political conflicts, Middleton’s play even anticipates some of the charged, tension-laden atmosphere of a face-off between two opposed ‘sides’ that is characteristic both of modern sport and of modern politics. In both, cheating and gambling have important roles to play.

Contributors: Celia R. Caputi Daileader;  Rob Carson;  Danielle Clarke;  Darragh Greene;  Tracey Hill;  Brett Hirsch;  Lisa Hopkins;  Jean Howard;  William Ingram;  Christopher Ivic;  Rebecca Lemon;  Rory Loughnane;  Christina Luckyj;  Benjamin Minor;  Andrew J. Power;  Thomas Rist;  Edel Semple;  Adam Smyth;  Ayanna Thompson. 
Website: http://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?pid=686879

My edition is a new, online, elaborate modernised and annotated online publication of an important but insufficiently recognised play jointly written by Thomas Dekker (1605 or 1606). I have edited both Part 1 and Part 2, and here present a summary of the content of Part 2 from the third edition of *The Oxford Companion to English Literature*: in Part 2 "we find the converted Bellafront as the devoted wife of the worthless Matheo, who, to get money for his vices, is prepared to see her return to her old way of life. Hippolito, now falling in love with her, tries to seduce her. She stoutly resists temptation, and is finally rescued from misery by her father, Orlando Friscobaldo. The painful character of the play, one of the great dramas of the age, heightened by Dekker's powerful treatment and by the scenes in Bedlam and Bridewell is somewhat alleviated by the admirable character, Orlando Friscobaldo, and by the comic underplot, dealing with the eccentricities of the patient husband, Candido the linen-draper."

NOTE: this publication is online as a digital resource. Open access is available through this link: https://digitalrenaissance.uvic.ca/Library/Texts/2HW/ or by googling 'The Honest Whore Part 2 : Digital Renaissance Editions'.

La storia della novella e quella del comico sono unite da uno strettissimo legame, consacrato dal Decameron, e mantenuto per i tre secoli – dal XIV al XVI – di massima fioritura del genere novellistico. La diffusione del modello decameroniano, e in particolare della novella di beffa, induce i pochi trattatisti rinascimentali che si occupano di novellistica a prediligere la codificazione del racconto comico su quello tragico. Se la teoria si rifà al modello trecentesco, la pratica rivisita la beffa boccacciana spostando l’asse dal comico al grottesco, dalla risata alla punizione. La tendenza del comico ad includere il suo contrario è riscontrabile anche in altri generi letterari tra Cinque e Seicento, in particolare il teatro.
Alla luce di queste considerazioni si propone un’analisi comparata di due testi appartenenti a contesti culturali diversi: un racconto tratto dalle Duecento novelle di Celio Malespini e Women Beware Women, opera teatrale di Thomas Middleton ispirata ad alcune novelle malespiniane. Si osserverà come le caratteristiche tipiche della produzione del novelliere italiano – autobiografia e cronaca – agiscano decostruendo dall’interno il modulo di beffa tradizionale in una novella che si presenta come il racconto di un «avvenimento ridicoloso in materia di spiriti succeduto nel giardino di Bianca Cappello». All’analisi della fonte verrà accostata una lettura del dramma a essa ispirato, che si concentrerà sul significato della comicità grottesca del masque nel quinto atto della domestic tragedy.