Thomas Middleton - Böcker

Thomas Middleton (1580-1627) was one of the most prolific and fascinating playwrights of the Jacobean era, producing nearly fifty theatrical pieces in a quarter of a century. This collection comprises five of his most powerful plays, from the comedies satirizing city life, A Trick to Catch the Old One, and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, to his later tragedies Women Beware Women and The Changeling, in which Middleton reveals a world dominated by the corrupting power of lust and subject to the futility of human pretensions. Also included is The Revenger's Tragedy, originally ascribed to Cyril Tourneur, a Revenge Play infused with sardonic wit and biting irony.

As the Elizabethan era gave way to the reign of James I, England grappled with corruption within the royal court and widespread religious anxiety. Dramatists responded with morally complex plays of dark wit and violent spectacle, exploring the nature of death, the abuse of power and vigilante justice. In Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy a father failed by the Spanish court seeks his own bloody retribution for his son's murder. Shakespeare's 1603 version of Hamlet creates an avenging Prince of unique psychological depth, while Chettle's The Tragedy of Hoffman is a fascinating reworking of Hamlet's themes, probably for a rival theatre company. In Marston's Antonio's Revenge, thwarted love leads inexorably to gory reprisals and in Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy, malcontent Vindice unleashes an escalating orgy of mayhem on a debauched Duke for his bride's murder, in a ferocious satire reflecting the mounting disillusionment of the age. Emma Smith's introduction considers the political and religious climate behind the plays and the dramatic conventions within them. This edition includes a chronology, playwrights' biographies and suggestions for further reading.

This volume contains the four plays by Thomas Middleton which have most impressed the modern world: "A Chaste Maid in Cheapside" is the most complex amd effective of the city comedies; "Women Beware Women" and "The Changeling" (with William Rowley) are two of the most powerful Jacobean tragedies outside of Shakespeare -- studies in lust, power, violence, and self-delusive psychology; "A Game at Chess" was the single most popular play of the whole Shakespearean era, a satirical exposé of Jesuit plotting and Anglo-Spanish politics which played tp pacifist houses at the Globe until King James and his ministers banned it. The best-value collection available with the most officially up-to-date introduction; all the play texts are newly edited with richly informative annotation. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Thomas Dekker: The Shoemaker's HolidayGeorge Chapman, Ben Jonson, John Marston: Eastward Ho!Ben Jonson: Every Man In His HumourThomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker: The Roaring GirlOxford English Drama offers plays from the sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries in selections that make available both rarely printed and canonical works. The texts are freshly edited using modern spelling. Critical introductions, wide-ranging annotation, and informative bibliographies illuminate the plays' cultural contexts and theatrical potential for reader and performer alike.'The series should reshape the canon in a number of significant areas. A splendid and imaginative project.' Professor Anne Barton, Cambridge University ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Thomas Middleton (1580-1627) was a writer of great versatility, and his career as a London dramatist spans the most productive, innovative, and exciting period of theatrical activity in the history of English drama. Best known for his tragedies, he also wrote many successful comedies of city life. This volume brings together the greatest among them: A Mad World, My Masters, Michaelmas Term, A Trick to Catch the Old One, and No Wit, No Help Like a Woman's. The first three plays, written between 1604 and 1606, are witty and rambunctious satires on the predatory life of the aspiring London citizen. Sex and money are the characters' obsessions; their caustic exposure Middleton's. In the later play, No Wit (1612), satire shades into romance, prose into verse. Together the four plays reveal the range and exuberance of Middleton's writing for the comic stage. Under the General Editorship of Michael Cordner of the University of York, the plays have been newly edited and are presented with modernized spelling and punctuation. In addition, there is a scholarly introduction and detailed annotation. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Published in 1993: The first modern scholarly edition of the author's  play, not published until 1778. Sebastian reclaims his betrothed from Antonio; the Duchess avenges herself on the Duke for making her drink from her father; and Abberzanes and Francesca have an illicite affair. The witches are credible forces of evil.

Published in 1993: The first modern scholarly edition of the author's  play, not published until 1778. Sebastian reclaims his betrothed from Antonio; the Duchess avenges herself on the Duke for making her drink from her father; and Abberzanes and Francesca have an illicite affair. The witches are credible forces of evil.

This Norton Critical Edition of Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker’s The Roaring Girl is based on the text from English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology. It is accompanied by generous explanatory annotations, five illustrations, and a detailed introduction.“Contexts” is thematically arranged to include almost all known documents from the period concerning Mary Frith (aka Moll Cutpurse), among them records of her court appearances, letters recounting the same, and her last will. Also reprinted are significant passages from her purported 1662 “autobiography,” The Life and Death of Mrs. Mary Frith. While of dubious veracity, the “autobiography” is useful for comparing the play’s portrayal of Moll with later developments in Moll Cutpurse lore, which the Norton Critical Edition traces through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Perhaps most engaging for classroom discussion are substantial excerpts from the 1620 cross-dressing pamphlets—Hic Mulier; or, The Man-Woman and Haec Vir; or, The Womanish Man—which appear in annotated, modern-spelling versions. Together they give insight into how gender-bending trends in clothing, similar to those practiced by Moll, were understood in the early seventeenth century. A related passage from A Sermon of Apparel adds another perspective on cross-dressing practices.Fourteen critical essays chart the development of scholarly interest in The Roaring Girl, from the first half of the twentieth century, when the play received only passing reference, through the work on city comedy in the 1970s and 1980s, to the explosion of analyses in the late 1980s and 1990s, when the play became a major focus for early modern gender studies. The more recent critical essays move beyond a strict focus on gender and cross-dressing to explore The Roaring Girl’s depiction of other aspects of early modern London, including consumer culture and the contemporary fascination with the language of the criminal underworld. Contributors include, among others, T. S. Eliot, Alexander Leggatt, Mary Beth Rose, Jonathan Dollimore, Jean E. Howard, and Jonathan Gil Harris.A Selected Bibliography is also included.

The Witch (1615/16?), categorised by its author as 'a tragi-comedy', pits the intrigues of a group of Italian aristocrats against the malevolent practices of Hecate and her witches' coven, leaving the audience with the impression that human malevolence is by far the fiercer and more effective. This edition sets the play into its dramatic and literary contexts, ranging from Shakespeare's Macbeth and Middleton's own later tragedies to Reginald Scot's sceptical Discovery of Witchcraft and King James's virulent Daemonologie. It also argues that Middleton wrote it as a topical satire to capitalise on the scandal involving Frances Howard, who obtained a divorce from the Earl of Essex on the grounds that he had been sexually incapacitated by witchcraft; she was also rumoured to have tried to poison him. Middleton exposes his noble characters precisely by letting them get away with murder.

Written for the adult players at the open-air Swan theatre in 1613, this master-piece of Jacobean city comedy signals its ironic nature even in the title: chaste maids, like most other goods and people in London's busiest commercial area, are likely to be fake. Money is more important than either happiness or honour; and the most coveted commodities to be bought with it are sex and social prestige. Middleton interweaves the fortunes of four families, who either seek to marry their children off as profitably as possible, to stop having any more for fear of poverty, or to acquire some in order to keep their property in the family. Most prosperous is the husband who pimps his wife to a rich knight and lets him support the household with his alimony. Like many early modern critics of London's enormous growth, this play warned: the city is a monster that lives off the money the country produces.

One of the great Renaissance playwrights, Middleton wrote tragedies essentially different from either Marlowe's or Shakespeare's, being wittier than the former and more grittily ironic than the latter. The genre of 'citizen tragedy' came into its own in the eighteenth century, but Middleton can claim to have created it: Bianca, wife of a middling commercial agent, arouses the lust of the Duke of Florence and becomes his mistress, first secretly, then openly and finally, after her husband has been seduced by the scheming Lady Livia and stabbed by Livia's brother, the Duke's wife. Livia plots her revenge, and the play ends with a banquet and a masque that are a triumph of black farce. Middleton's powerful, psychologically complex female characters and his clear-sighted analysis of misogyny are bound to impress today's audiences, but it is the pervasive irony - cynicism, even - with which he dissects the motivations of both oppressor and victim that makes him so eerily modern.

This Jacobean city comedy is a curiosity in that it presents a real-life character, the notorious cross-dresser Moll Frith, who probably was among the first audiences of 'her' play before she was taken up for public misconduct. Middleton and Dekker's 'roaring girl' may outrage her society with her pipe, bluster and swagger, but she turns out to be the moral centre of the play. Her code of honour leads her to call the bluff on rogues and conspicuous consumers, to thrash a hypocritical gallant in a duel, and to act as go-between for the young lovers thwarted by parental tyranny. This wry dramatisation of female deviancy exposing male ineffectuality is as much to the point today as it was in King James's England. An appendix helps the modern reader to appreciate the canting terms used by the low-life characters.

A changeling is a fickle person, a waverer, a person posing as another person, or an idiot. The Changeling portrays them all. The play interchanges not only characters, but authors, too. Written in 1622, it is one of the most successful collaborations in the history of the theater.Two plots, each the work of one playwright, interweave and collide. Words, lines, episodes, and scenes mix double meanings. Rowley's tragic plot combines hypocricy and love. Middleton's comic plot mixes madness and educated fools. Deceits tie things together, suspicions tear them apart.

The Changeling is a powerful psychological tragedy of the moral degeneration of a highborn Spanish girl through a crime prompted by obsessive love. Thomas Middleton was probably responsible for the tragic plot, and William Rowley for the comic subplot concerning the antics of a young rake who contrives to have himself committed to an insane asylum for love of the proprietor's handsome wife.