First
Writings Marriage and
Maturity Thirty-Something
Final
Decade Personality
and Achievement
Middleton and Shakespeare were
the only writers of the English Renaissance who created plays
still considered masterpieces in all four major dramatic genres:
comedy, history, tragedy, and tragicomedy. Middleton wrote
successful dramatic texts for more theatrical venues than
any of his contemporaries. The first anthology of memorable
passages from English drama (Cotgrave, 1655) quoted the Middleton
canon more often than the works of any other playwright. On
and off the commercial stage, Middleton mastered more genres
than any English writer of his time.
Hazlitt, who began the resurrection of Middleton's
reputation, praised his scenes as "an immediate transcript
from life" (Specimens, 1808). What the cultural arbiters
of Middleton's lifetime admired in Sidney or du Bartas was
aristocratic artifice, consciously modelled upon the monumentality
of texts more than a millenium old. Middleton learned to listen
instead to the transcience of the vernacular. But to call
him a transcriber or as T.S. Eliot did "merely a great
recorder" (Selected Essays) is to misrecognize art as
artlessness. No English writer before Middleton had ever achieved
such complex sustained transparency, such seemingly unconstructed
representations of the shifting currents of speech.
This misunderstanding of his life's work originated
in ignorance of his life. Eliot's massively influential 1927
essay asserted that Middleton had "no point of view",
no "peculiar personality"; "He is merely the
name which associates six or seven great plays". The
central facts of Middleton's life were not established (by
M. Eccles) until four years later, in 1931; the chronology
of his work did not begin to be understood until 1937. Middleton's
seeming impersonality itself reflects a personality, a decision
to reject the selfish rant of battling parents and battling
poets. Aged twenty, he called himself "Thomas Medius
& Gravis Tonus", punning on his surname (Lucrece
69-70); medius means "in the middle" but also "middling,
ordinary" and "neutral, ambiguous" and "central",
and "the common good". Gravis teeters, ambiguously,
between "impressive" and "base". He yokes
opposites. "Was ever such a contrariety seen?" (Old
Law, 2.1).
The engraved half-length frontispiece printed
in 1657 almost certainly derives from one of the portrait
miniatures fashionable in his lifetime, an object of intimacy
and vanity, often encased in a jewelled setting. With a finely
shaded face, shoulder?length curls, and a trim beard, Calvinist
Middleton whom Caroline puritans "seemd much to Adore"
(Steen, 54) looks sexier and more stylish than any authenticated
likeness of any other early playwright. His dark gown could
be legal or academic, classical or modish, masculine or effeminate,
warm or swank. His left arm propped akimbo on his hip, he
wears his crown of laurel as casually as one might a low-slung
feathered hat.
Less egotistical than Jonson, Middleton did
not collect his own "Works"; unlike Shakespeare,
he was not owned by a single company of actors, who could
publish all his plays in posthumous folio. Consequently his
work was not collected until 1840, and it took another century
and a half of scholarship to define a reliable canon. He was
first identified as the adapter of Macbeth in 1869 (by W.
G. Clark and W. A. Wright), and his authorship of the anonymously-published
Revenger's Tragedy was not recognized until 1926 (by E. H.
C. Oliphant), and not generally accepted until the 1980s.
His sociable muse long made it difficult to separate him from
his collaborators, or to differentiate "Middleton"
from "Middleton's workshop". His determined peacefulness
left Jonson's hostility unanswered, his modesty let subsequent
critics take literally his own self-deprecating remarks about
his work. A better estimate is given by an anonymous epigram
printed in 1640 (Wits Recreations, B7v): "Facetious Middleton,
thy witty Muse Hath pleased all, that books or men peruse."
And women, too.
* This article on Middleton appears in The New Dictionary
of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004). All
text © 2002 Gary Taylor.
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