for more decisive, discriminating judgments. Yet to the modern age, this is the highest kind of morality, and for that reason, Middleton’s reputation will probably endure.

The Roaring Girl

Written in collaboration by Middleton and Dekker, The Roaring Girl centers on a real-life London woman named Moll Frith. Moll was reputed to be a prostitute, bawd, and thief, but the playwrights present her as a woman of great spirit and virtue whose reputation is maligned by a petty, convention-bound society. In the play, as in real life, Moll dresses in men’s clothes, smokes a pipe, and wears a sword. This unconventionality, the play suggests, leads to her spotted reputation. She is a roaring girl—a brash woman-about-town—but beneath this lack of femininity is a courageous, high-principled woman. Moll intervenes in the main plots and is involved in skirmishes with many of the characters, consistently displaying her ability to stand up for the oppressed and mistreated, most eloquently when they are women.

The main plot of The Roaring Girl involves a young man, Sebastian Wengrave, and a young woman, Mary Fitzallard, in love with each other but prevented from marrying because Sebastian’s father, Sir Alexander Wengrave, wants a well-to-do daughter-in-law. Sebastian plots to outwit his father: He will pretend to be in love with the infamous Moll, and when his small-minded father learns this, he will agree to the union with Mary simply to get rid of Moll. The plan temporarily backfires, however, because Sir Alexander at first reacts by employing a false-witted humor character named Ralph Trapdoor, “honest Ralph,” to tempt Moll to theft and have her executed. Moll resists his temptations and instead exposes Trapdoor as a coward, ultimately eliciting a confession and an apology from him. She is also instrumental in helping Sebastian win Mary and even in bringing on a complete conversion of his father, who eventually sees Moll with the eyes of true judgment rather than through his willful prejudices.

Accompanying the main plot are two parallel stories of couples whose marriages are tested by callous gallants. One of these men, Laxton, leads on Mrs. Gallipot until she tricks her supremely gullible husband into giving thirty pounds to him. Ultimately, however, she becomes disgusted with her would-be seducer and denounces him to her husband, whose eyes are finally opened. Similarly, a “gentleman” named Goshawk tries to seduce Mrs. Openwork; her husband, however, is far shrewder than Gallipot. He outmaneuvers Goshawk, and together husband and wife expose Goshawk’s lechery. In both of these plots, marriage survives its attackers, but the differences between the marriages are equally important. Given Gallipot’s blindness and Mrs. Gallipot’s lechery, their marriage survives largely because Laxton prefers money to sex. The Openworks’ marriage, on the other hand, survives because of the intelligence and integrity of the marriage partners.

A major motif in The Roaring Girl is the reversal of gender stereotyping. Moll wears masculine clothes; Mary disguises herself in men’s clothes; Mrs. Gallipot speaks scornfully of her “apron” husband; and Moll several times overcomes male antagonists by means of her sword and the manly art of bullying. These reversals of sex roles are one of the means of uniting the many elements of the play: They reveal that appearances count for little, that the reality of a person’s character shows up only through certain kinds of trials. Such trials or tests are quite frequent in the play. For example, Openwork tests Goshawk’s integrity, Goshawk tests Mrs. Openwork’s virtue, and Laxton tests Mrs. Gallipot’s. Moll’s honesty is tried by Sir Alexander through Trapdoor, and Moll herself tests the courage and integrity of many characters. The play overturns conventional assumptions that men have a monopoly on courage and that all women are the daughters of Eve. Instead, the play implies that men and women must be judged carefully and on their individual merits. Throughout the play, Moll stands as a lively, unconventional, attractive woman—an ancestor of the Shavian heroine. She is the one shining example of integrity in the play and one of the great creations of the period.

A Chaste Maid in Cheapside

In contrast to The Roaring Girl, which was coauthored by Middleton and Dekker, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside was written by Middleton alone. Also, in contrast to the eponymous protagonist of The Roaring Girl, the “chaste maid” of the title is a minor character. The play focuses instead on several men—Allwit, Sir Walter Whorehound, and Yellowhammer—who embody the values of London’s Cheapside district (an area notorious for its unchaste women—and men). The play is admirable for its complex interweaving of many plots and for Middleton’s detached stance, which creates such effective satire.

Yellowhammer, a goldsmith, and his wife, Maudlin, have two children: One is sweet, silent Moll, the chaste maid of the title, and the other is Tim, a foolish young man who is overly impressed with himself for having done well in Latin at Cambridge. The parents’ overriding concern is to “sell” their children to prosperous spouses. They plan to have Moll marry Sir Walter Whorehound (in spite of his last name), and they hope to marry Tim to Sir Walter’s “niece” (even though, as they eventually learn, she is actually his cast-off whore). In the meantime, Allwit (a play on the term “wittol,” a willing cuckold) has been living comfortably without working because he and his wife have been quite willing for wealthy Sir Walter to “keep” Mistress Allwit as his mistress. In fact, Allwit is quite content that Sir Walter has fathered all of Mistress Allwit’s children. The central conflict in the play develops when Allwit learns that Sir Walter might marry Moll: Allwit must prevent this if he and his wife are to remain in Sir Walter’s keep.

A romantic plot runs through the play: Moll and a penniless young gentleman, Touchwood Junior, want to marry, but her greedy father opposes the plan. Another plot involves Touchwood Senior, who is so sexually potent that his wife (and many other women as well) are continually bearing his children. As a result, he and his wife have agreed that they must separate for a time because of the expense of increasing the size of their family. Finally, a related plot involves Sir Oliver Kix and his lady, relatives of Sir Walter, who are miserable because they are childless.

The ways the plots develop and are resolved reveal their related purposes. Touchwood Senior generously fathers a child for Sir Oliver. This of course resembles the Allwit/Sir Walter arrangement but with the important exception that Sir Oliver has no idea that he is a cuckold. Because Sir Oliver and Lady Kix now have an heir, they take the place of their relative, Sir Walter, in line for the family fortune and thus ruin his chances to win Moll. Meanwhile, however, Sir Walter and Touchwood Junior have a sword fight because of Moll, in which Sir Walter is seriously wounded. Thinking that he is dying, Sir Walter undergoes a kind of deathbed conversion and delivers an angry sermon to Allwit, who callously throws his former benefactor out. Then, in a burlesque of a tragicomic ending, the characters assemble for what they believe is the funeral of Touchwood Junior (dead from the sword fight) and of Moll (dead of grief), but in the middle of the ceremony both characters arise from their coffins and reveal that they are married.

In the outcome of the play, a rough poetic justice operates. Touchwood Junior wins Moll, and Tim Yellowhammer finds himself married to Sir Walter’s “niece,” who is almost what he deserves. Although Sir Walter has repented and become a sort of moral spokesman, his rejection by Moll and his loss of fortune are a suitable penance for his earlier lechery. On the other hand, the treatment of Allwit violates the pattern. Throughout the play, he has served as a remarkably detached commentator on morals and manners. For example, in one sharply satiric scene, he delivers the author’s cutting observations about the hypocrisy of the Puritan women when they come to the christening of the Allwit’s child. This uncomfortable intimacy between the audience and such a character complicates the audience’s judgment of him and at least disconcerts the audience as they condemn him. Ultimately, Allwit is left with a comfortable home and has begun to play the role he will adopt thereafter—that of the hypocritically “moral” citizen. At this point, Middleton chooses realism over a too-simplistic moralism: Although comedy demands a degree of poetic justice, life reminds one that degenerate behavior often goes unpunished.

The Changeling

Middleton’s greatest and most frequently read play is The Changeling. Coming near the end of an extraordinary period in England drama, it is often described as the last great English tragedy. The play’s psychological realism makes it particularly appealing to the modern temperament. The Changeling was written in collaboration with William Rowley , and scholars generally agreed that Rowley wrote almost all of the subplot, while Middleton wrote almost all of the main plot and was responsible for the unity of the whole.

Set in Spain, The Changeling centers on a young woman, Beatrice, who falls in love with one young man, Alsemero, whom she first meets five days after she has become betrothed to another man, Alonzo. Beatrice believes that fate has been unfair to her in causing her to find true love five days too late. She is desperate to break off the engagement to Alonzo but feels bound to its because of her father’s insistence and because she would be dishonoring her vow. To resolve this dilemma, she exploits DeFlores, a poor gentleman employed as a servant to her father. Beatrice finds DeFlores physically repulsive, but DeFlores is passionately attracted to her. Noticing this, Beatrice flatters him into thinking that she finds him handsome and then easily persuades him to kill Alonzo. All along, she blindly assumes that payment in gold will satisfy him; she fails to see that DeFlores (whose name suggests “deflower”) expects to have her as his reward.

For his own part, DeFlores, having seen that Beatrice can cold-bloodedly arrange her fiancé’s murder, understandably assumes that she will no longer have scruples about yielding her virginity to him. This radical, but psychologically plausible, misunderstanding creates considerable tension until DeFlores must finally state the payment that will satisfy him. Beatrice is shocked that he would “murder her honor,” at which DeFlores points to her moral blindness: “Push, you forget yourself!/ A woman dipped in blood, and talk of modesty?” DeFlores reminds her that she is now “the deed’s creature,” that her moral innocence is gone now that she has commissioned a murder. Beatrice first becomes furious and then kneels and implores him to spare her, but he stands triumphant over her, grandly declaring, “Can you weep fate from its determined purpose?/ So soon may you weep me.”

Alsemero and Beatrice are soon married, but Alsemero, largely because he is obsessed with being sure of his wife’s purity, proposes to administer a virginity test. Because she has been seduced by DeFlores, Beatrice is able to pass the test only by deception. She realizes that she will fail the next test, her wedding night, and she plots to have her maid Diaphanta take her place in the wedding bed for a few hours. Diaphanta stays too long; she is awakened by a fire in the house, started by DeFlores, who kills her in the ensuing confusion. At this point, Beatrice recognizes that she has come to love DeFlores, revealing, in the psychological terms of the play, that she has been reduced to his level. Finally, Alsemero discovers Beatrice and DeFlores together and confronts her as a whore. As the confessions at last come out, DeFlores kills Beatrice and then himself, and her husband and father are left with the horror of what has happened.

The subplot of The Changeling takes place in an insane asylum, where Alibius, who runs the madhouse, jealously keeps his wife, Isabella, closely guarded. Two inmates who are merely feigning madness, Antonio and Franciscus, and Lollio, Alibius’s subordinate, all try to seduce Isabella. Although she has more of a motive for unfaithfulness than does Beatrice, she remains loyal to her vows and eventually shames her husband into treating her better. This subplot works as a comic contrast to the main action of the tragedy. Lollio unsuccessfully tries to use Isabella’s apparent unfaithfulness to blackmail her into yielding to his lust, and the scene in which this occurs is pointedly placed between the two private meetings between Beatrice and DeFlores. On several occasions, the madmen in the asylum run across the stage shouting out their dangerously uncontrolled desires, provoking their keepers to use the whip on them. This image of uncontrolled human appetite held in check reflects on the main plot: Beatrice and DeFlores—and, arguably, Alsemero, because of his failure to honor Beatrice’s betrothal—fail to check their own libidinous desires.

The main plot of The Changeling was based on a moralistic narrative by John Reynolds called The Triumphs of God’s Revenge Against the Crying and Execrable Sin of Willful and Premeditated Murder (1621); Middleton’s version makes changes that soften the harsh judgment of the original. In the source story, Beatrice is continuously self-possessed, but in the play she is pictured as distracted, out of control, moved by an overwhelming fate. She frequently allows this fate, operating through her willful temperament, to distort her sense of morality. Through a heavy use of the soliloquy and the aside, Middleton reveals the intense inner struggles and desires of his characters, particularly Beatrice and DeFlores. Ultimately, Beatrice is disgusted with her sinful behavior, even though, in contrast to many of the great figures of Shakespearean tragedy, she is not fully enlightened about her errors at the end; a part of her tragedy lies in her moral blindness. DeFlores, by contrast, gains less sympathy but, like Shakespeare’s Macbeth, more stature by always behaving with his eyes open.

Women Beware Women

As in The Changeling, the characters in Women Beware Women are obsessed with lust; like Beatrice, they become totally degraded because of it. Also as in The Changeling, two plots borrowed from two distinct sources are woven together ingeniously, each one commenting on the other. The main plot deals with a marriage that at first seems wholesome, perhaps even romantic. Leantio, a Florentine businessman, has married a Venetian woman, Bianca, who appears not to regret having given up family riches for love. When he leaves her with his mother as her chaperone, the Duke of Florence sees the beautiful, foreign Bianca and desires her. In order to pander to their sovereign, a brother and sister, Hippolito and Livia, plot to bring the two women to their house so that the duke can seduce Bianca. While Livia distracts Leantio’s mother with a game of chess, Hippolito conducts Bianca on a tour of the house. Hippolito suddenly presents the duke to Bianca and leaves her alone with him. Bianca halfheartedly resists the duke but soon yields to his passionate wooing and his promises of wealth. While this is occurring, the chess game below provides brilliant ironic commentary on the seduction above. When Leantio returns, Bianca treats him scornfully and openly flaunts her new lover. Leantio strikes back by becoming the lover of Livia, who has developed a sudden passion for him.

The subplot presents the relationship between Hippolito and his niece Isabella, who at first seem to have a pure, loving friendship. When Hippolito tries to seduce his niece, however, Isabella rejects him in horror. As in the main plot, Livia intercedes to help her brother by telling Isabella a lie—that she is not really a blood relative of Hippolito. Relieved of the threat of incest, Isabella can now express her love for Hippolito. Thus far, Isabella is essentially an innocent victim, but she is not so innocent when she agrees to go ahead with an arranged marriage in order to cover her love affair. She is betrothed to a coarse, stupid man, the ward of a character named Guardiano.

Both plots revolve around women who appear to be virtuous but who quickly reveal their frailty. Isabella at first appears to be a foil to Bianca, but she is scarcely her moral superior. In both plots, Livia schemes to destroy a woman in order to please her brother. Eventually, Hippolito learns about Livia’s relationship with Leantio and, strangely, defends her honor by fighting and killing him. In anguish, Livia retaliates by revealing Hippolito’s relationship with his niece, and this brings on the series of revenges in the denouement. During a masque to celebrate the wedding of the duke to Bianca, fictitious violence turns out to be real revenge and suicide. At the end, death comes to Isabella, Guardiano, Livia, Hippolito, the duke, and Bianca.

As a summary of its plot suggests, Women Beware Women is a play of almost unrelieved horror and baseness. The play’s only decent character, the cardinal, appears late in the action as a commentator on this baseness. Several of the main characters highlight their moral confusion by adopting moral poses in the midst of their depravity; Isabella’s marriage with Guardiano’s ward is an example of this defense mechanism, as is Hippolito’s concern for his sister’s honor even though at the time he is knowingly committing incest. Similarly, the lecherous duke deludes himself that he will become a virtuous person simply by marrying Bianca. At the center of the intrigue stands Livia, outwardly a good-humored, sociable woman but underneath a vastly dangerous person because of her extraordinary indifference to moral standards. Hippolito, as he dies, has some sense of what the tragedy has been about: “Lust and forgetfulness has [sic] been amongst us,/ And we are brought to nothing.” Through this and other reminders near the end, and above all through the many ironies of the play, audiences are able to see the tremendous waste of healthy instincts destroyed by lust and ambition.