First
Writings Marriage and
Maturity Thirty-Something
Final
Decade Personality
and Achievement
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. |
