MIDDLETON, THOMAS

With a prolific writing career that almost exactly spanned the Jacobean era, Thomas Middleton is perhaps the most representative figure of Jacobean drama. Born into a middle-class London family, Middleton was educated at Oxford. There he wrote his earliest poems, marked with Elizabethan stylistic exuberance. They also demonstrate a strong satiricial impulse that was to become the hall­mark of his drama. Two satirical pamphlets about London life followed, showing Middleton's advance along the road of realism.

His career as a playwright began with collaborations with Thomas Dekker* and John Webster,* marked by keen interest in citizen life and the portrayal of living historical characters.The most famous of these isThe Roaring Girl(1611), whose title character was London's own Mary Frith, a celebrated cross-dresser. Middleton's reputation as a dramatist was established through his bril­liant city comedies, composed for the fashionable boys' companies. After their closure, Middleton went on to write moral comedies for adult companies. From 1613 on, he devoted much time to writing and producing civic entertainments informed by the militant Protestantism that marked the rest of his work. In 1620 he was appointed London's chronologer, a position he held until his death.

Middleton's tragicomedies from 1614 to 1616 (TheWitch, A Fair Quarrel) and tragedies (Women Beware Women, c. 1621, andThe Changeling, 1622) share the moral concerns of his comedies, but humor here has turned sinister. His last work for the theater was the most controversial political play of the era,A Game of Chess(1624). The play's expression of the English hatred of Spain and Catholicism ensured it a phenomenal consecutive nine-day run before it was closed after vehement protests by the Spanish ambassador. Middleton avoided arrest by discreetly disappearing. For one last time, the playwright whose plays were produced at court, the man whom King James* accepted as his ghostwriter, demonstrated his attraction for politically self-conscious theater.

M. Heinemann, Puritanism and Theatre: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama un­der the Early Stuarts, 1980.