Five Plays

This is probably the best available collection of Middleton's wonderful plays. It includes the interesting "city comedies": "A Trick to Catch the Old One" and "A Chaste Maid in Cheapside," which reveal so much about 17th century London culture. The highlight of this collection, however, is undoubtedly the 3 great tragedies "The Revenger's Tragedy," "Women Beware Women" and "The Changeling." Modern movies have nothing on Jacobean drama when it comes to sex and violence. Incest, adultery, murder, and poison are all the order of the day here. The female leads are fascinating psychological studies. These are disturbing plays! Unlike the Oxford editions of Middleton, the editing here never gets in the way of your enjoyment of the text. Footnotes are used to aid with the occasionally unfamiliar language, but they are never obtrusive. The introduction is insightful and interesting. If you like Shakespeare, you will probably enjoy Middleton also. While his poetry is not as consistently sublime as Shakespeare's, Middleton is fully comparable with the other great English Renaissance playwrights Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and John Webster. The only really significant play by Middleton which is missing here is "A Game at Chess," an anti-Catholic satire which is historically fascinating.

First, there's an irritating mistake in the blurb, which says: "'In this play,' T.S. Eliot wrote of Women Beware Women, 'Middleton is surpassed by one Elizabethan alone and that is Shakespoeare.'" First of all, Eliot was writing about The Changeling; and second, he qualified his statement with "in the moral essence of tragedy" and remarked that Middleton's plays were inferior to Webster's great tragedies in poetry and dramatic technique. Another inaccuracy is the Introduction's claim that Middleton received "little approving attention" in the first half of the 20th cent. -- though T.S. Eliot praised him highly both as a comic and a tragic writer (not to mention his repeated praise of The Revenger's Tragedy, which he thought was by Tourneur), and William Empson treated the subplot of the Changeling in Some Versions of Pastoral. The trouble with the introduction otherwise is that it ignores the verse, the characterisation, the handling of individual scenes -- in short, everything that makes these plays worth reading -- and talks entirely about Themes instead. The development of Middleton's verse style is something that should be mentioned at least in passing in a selection of his plays; and maybe some attention should have been paid to the details of the Middleton-Rowley collaboration in The Changeling. The plays are well worth reading, though, especially the three tragedies. The comedies have their moments, certainly, but I find them less immediately enjoyable than Jonson's, Shakespeare's or Massinger's.

This edition contains what can be argued to be Middleton's most famous plays: A Trick to Catch the Old One, The Revenger's Tragedy, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, Women Beware Women, and The Changeling. I always appreciate it when a collection contains "greatest hits" without being interspersed with more obscure works. Penguin Classics also includes a nice introduction.As for the actual plays, they are classic Renaissance drama. There is plotting, marriage, and revenge. Fans or students of Jonson, Massinger, Marston, and Shakespeare are likely to be interested in these as well.