Thomas Middleton

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  • Altieri, Joanne, "Against Moralizing Jacobean Comedy: Middleton's Chaste Maid." Criticism XXX, No. 2 (Spring 1988): 171-87. (Denies that A Chaste Maid is a critique and parody of the conventions of New Comedy, with their stress on romance and marriage; rather, Altieri claims, the play is "based on the trickster comedy which creates its plot-grounding errors from deceptions as opposed to the recognitions of romance.")
  • Altieri, Joanne, "Pregnant Puns and Sectarian Rhetoric: Middleton's Family of Love." Mosaic 22, No. 4 (Fall 1989): 45-57. (Relates The Family of Love to the Anabaptist religious sect and to the wider linguistic and political debates of the time.)
  • Asp, Carolyn, A Study of Thomas Middleton's Tragicomedies. Jacobean Drama Studies, No. 28. Salzburg: Institut fur Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1974, 282 p. (Provides a general introduction to Middleton's efforts in the genre and gives special consideration to A Fair Quarrel, The Old Law, and The Witch.)
  • Ayers, P. K., "Plot, Subplot, and the Uses of Dramatic Discord in A Mad World, My Masters and A Trick to Catch the Old One." Modern Language Quarterly 47, No. 1 (March 1986): 3-18. (Defines several of Middleton's characteristic comic techniques and argues that Middleton stretches the conventions of comedy and satire.)
  • Ayres, Philip J., Tourneur: "The Revenger's Tragedy." London: Edward Arnold, 1977, 62 p. (Examines several "dimensions" of the play, including the ironic, the comic, the tragic, and the social.)
  • Baines, Barbara Joan, The Lust Motif in the Plays of Thomas Middleton. Jacobean Drama Studies 29. Salzburg: Institut fur Englische Sprache und Literatur, Universitat Salzburg, 1973, 160 p. (Explores the depiction of lust in Middleton's works, specifically with regard to women.)
  • Barker, Richard Hindry, Thomas Middleton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1958, 216 p. (Important biographical and critical overview of the playwright and his work.)
  • Bergeron, David M., "Thomas Middleton." In English Civic Pageantry 1558-1642, pp. 179-201. London: Edward Arnold, Ltd., 1971. (Discusses the "inherently close relationship between the street theater and the regular stage" in Middleton's plays and pageants.)
  • Brittin, Norman A., Thomas Middleton. Twayne's English Author Series. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1972, 176 p. (Overview of Middleton's life and career that attempts to "provide a guide to the whole body of Middleton's work in the light of contemporary scholarship.")
  • Bromham, A. A., "The Tragedy of Peace: Political Meaning in Women Beware Women." Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 26, No. 2 (Spring 1986): 309-29. (Seeks to show "through an examination of verbal and image series and of the use of setting and spatial perspectives, how motif and dramatic effect are integrally related to political viewpoint" in the play.)
  • Brooke, Nicholas, "The Revenger's Tragedy (Tourneur), c. 1605," "The Changeling (Middleton and Rowley), 1622" and "Women Beware Women (Middleton), 1620-25." In Horrid Laughter in Jacobean Tragedy, pp. 10-28, 70-89, and 89-111. London: Open Books Publishing, Ltd., 1979. (Discusses how the comic elements of Middleton's tragedies resist order and thus contribute to tragic horror.)
  • Brooks, John B., "Recent Studies in Middleton, 1971-81." English Literary Renaissance 14 (Winter 1984): 114-25.
  • Brooks, John B., "Thomas Middleton." In The Popular School, ed. Terence P. Logan and Denzell E. Smith. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975, pp. 51-84.
  • Camoin, Francois Andre, The Revenge Convention in Tourneur, Webster, and Middleton. Jacobean Drama Studies 20. Salzburg: Institut fur Englische Sprache und Literatur, Universitat Salzburg, 1972, 141 p. (Places Women Beware Women and The Changeling in the tradition of Jacobean revenge tragedies.)
  • Champion, Larry S., "Middleton: Women Beware Women, The Changeling." In Tragic Patterns in Jacobean and Caroline Drama,* pp. 152-180. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1977. (Discusses the sexual and moral decadence of Middleton's two tragedies.)
  • Charney, Maurice, "Comic Villainy in Shakespeare and Middleton." In Shakespearian Comedy, edited by Maurice Charney. New York: New York Literary Forum, 1980, 308 p. (Shows that there is no firm line between comedy and tragedy in Othello, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, and Women Beware Women.)
  • Cheney, Patrick, "Moll Cutpurse as Hermaphrodite in Dekker and Middleton's The Roaring Girl." Renaissance and Reformation VII, No. 2 (May 1983): 120-34. (Argues that Moll Cutpurse represents a union of contraries, and thus embodies "the spirit of comedy.")
  • Cogswell, Thomas, "Thomas Middleton and the Court, 1624: A Game At Chess in Context." The Huntington Library Quarterly 47, No. 4 (Autumn 1984): 273-88. (From a historian's point of view, asserts that King Charles's court protected the politically incendiary performance of A Game At Chess.)
  • Comensoli, Viviana, "Play-making, Domestic Conduct, and the Multiple Plot in The Roaring Girl." Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 27, No. 2 (Spring 1987): 249-66. (Argues that, taken together, the comedy's three plots "convey the concern at the heart of the play with the degeneration of marriage and the family, a tension sustained in the antithesis between the household … and the city.")
  • Covatta, Anthony, Thomas Middleton's City Comedies. 1944. Reprint. Associated University Presses, 1973, 187 p. (One of the earlier arguments for taking Middleton seriously as an artist, based on his realism.)
  • Covatta, Anthony, Thomas Middleton's City Comedies. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1973, 187 p. (Argues that Middleton's comedies "should be studied not as social documents but as fictions," best seen as "dramatic constructs, put together by a man of considerable intelligence, wit, and dramatic skill.")
  • Dawson, Anthony B., "Women Beware Women and the Economy of Rape." Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 27, No. 2 (Spring 1987): 303-20. (Examines "what rape means in the social and political economy" depicted in the play, specifically its "relationship to sexual blackmail, social institutions, and political power.")
  • de Sousa, Geraldo V., "Thomas Middleton: Criticism Since T.S. Eliot." Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 28 (1985): 73-85.
  • Dominik, Mark, Shakespeare-Middleton Collaborations. Beaverton, Ore.: Alioth Press, 1988, 173 p. (Contends that Timon of Athens, A Yorkshire Tragedy, and The Puritan are all works that "show mixed Shakespearean and Middletonian characteristics.")
  • Donovan, Dennis G., Thomas Middleton, 1939-1965. Elizabethan Bibliographies Supplements, no. 1. London: Nether Press, 1967.
  • Dunkel, Wilbur Dwight, The Dramatic Technique of Thomas Middleton in His Comedies of London Life, 1925. Reprint. New York: Russell & Russell, 1967. (Explores the techniques of plot and the function of plot and other dramatic elements in Middleton's comedies.)
  • Eliot, T. S., "Cyril Tourneur." The Times Literary Supplement (13 November 1930): 925-26. (Asserts that "for closeness of texture … there are no plays beyond Shakespeare's, and the best of Marlowe and Jonson, that can surpass The Revenger's Tragedy." Eliot ascribes the play to Tourneur.)
  • Ellis-Fermor, Una, "Middleton." In her Jacobean Drama: An Interpretation, pp. 128-52. London: Methuen & Co., 1958. (Seeks to identify the essential characteristics of Middletonian drama, finding that the playwright's keen powers of observation were a source of both his strength and his shortcomings.)
  • Ewbank, Inga-Stina, "The Middle of Middleton." In The Arts of Performance in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Drama: Essays for G.K. Hunter, edited by Murray Biggs and others, pp. 156-72. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991. (Examines Middleton's tragicomedies, particularly The Witch, A Fair Quarrel, and More Dissemblers besides Women. Ewbank finds that Middleton's skepticism toward human nature is the source of the "theatrical energy" of these plays.)
  • Farley-Hills, David, "A Satire against Mankind: Middleton's A Mad World, My Masters." In his The Comic in Renaissance Comedy, pp. 81-107. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble Books, 1981. (Analyzes the play as both a realistic commentary on contemporary life and a morality play.)
  • Farr, Dorothy M., Thomas Middleton and the Drama of Realism. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1973, 139 p. (Considers seven of Middleton's plays, including A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, The Changeling, Women Beware Women, and A Game at Chess.)
  • Foakes, R.A., Introduction to The Revenger's Tragedy by Cyril Tourneur, pp. xix-lxix. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966. (Wide-ranging overview of the play that considers such issues as date, text, sources, and authorship, as well as an aesthetic appreciation.)
  • Friedenreich, Kenneth, ed., "Accompaninge the players": Essays Celebrating Thomas Middleton, 1580-1980. New York: AMS Press, 1983, 248 p. (Contains a wide range of recent essays, mostly on individual plays, including an introduction by the editor on "How to Read Middleton.")
  • Gibbons, Brian, Introduction to The Revenger's Tragedy by Cyril Tourneur, pp. xi-xxx. New York: Hill and Wang, 1967. (General survey of the play that includes a discussion of the authorship controversy. Gibbons concludes that "it seems reasonable to ascribe the play to Cyril Tourneur, allowing that it reveals the influence of Thomas Middleton," among others.)
  • Hallett, Charles A., "Middleton's Overreachers and the Ironic Ending." Tennessee Studies in Literature XVI (1971): 1-13. (Scrutinizes what he feels are the failings in Middleton's dramatic technique in his early comedies, citing the playwright's "inability to merge theme, plot, and character into a unified whole.")
  • Hallett, Charles A., Middleton's Cynics: A Study of Middleton's Insight into the Moral Psychology of the Mediocre Mind. Jacobean Drama Studies 47. Salzburg: Institut fur Englische Sprache und Literatur, Universitat Salzburg, 1975, 308 p. (Shows that in Michaelmas Term and Women Beware Women, Middleton reveals profound cynicism about human nature.)
  • Heinemann, Margot, "Drama and Opinion in the 1620's: Middleton and Massinger." In Theater and Government Under the Early Stuarts, edited by J. R. Mulryne, pp. 237-65. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. (Regarding Middleton's A Game At Chess and other plays in the context of government instability and censorship, proposes that his work constitutes a new popular political force.)
  • Heinemann, Margot, Puritanism and Theatre: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama under the Early Stuarts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980, 300 p. (Sets out to examine Middleton's work "in relation to the society and social movements of his time, and, in particular, to trace what connections it may have had with radical, Parliamentarian or Puritan movements and groupings.")
  • Hibbard, G. R., "The Tragedies of Thomas Middleton and the Decadence of Drama." Renaissance and Modern Studies I (1957): 35-64. (Examines Women Beware Women and The Changeling for evidence that Middleton was "a man with fresh intuitions about the nature of tragic experience, seeking to embody those intuitions in dramatic form, trying hard to escape from the shackles of the past and never quite managing to do so.")
  • Hibbard, G.R., "The Tragedies of Thomas Middleton and the Decadence of the Drama." In Renaissance and Modern Studies I (1957): 35-64. (Argues that Middleton's Women Beware Women transforms revenge tragedy into something ordinary and less than completely successful.)
  • Holmes, David M., The Art of Thomas Middleton: A Critical Study. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970, 235 p. (Explores Middleton's belief in a universal justice and the "objectivity and balance" of his moral views in his poetry and pageants as well as plays.)
  • Holmes, David M., The Art of Thomas Middleton: A Critical Study. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970, 235 p. (Proposes to "provide an appreciation of [Middleton's] art and of the point of view and feeling that underlie it.")
  • Holtz-Davies, Ingrid, "A Chaste Maid in Cheapside and Women Beware Women: Feminism, Anti-feminism and the Limitations of Satire." Cahiers Élisabéthains 39 (April 1991): 29-39. (Detects "misogynist tendencies" in the two plays that "cannot be attributed to the depiction of individual characters but only to the sensibility which created these plays.")
  • Hotz-Davies, Ingrid, "A Chaste Maid in Cheapside and Women Beware Women: Feminism, Antifeminism, and the Limitations of Satire." Cahiers Elisabethians,* No. 39 (April 1991): 29-39. (In response to those who claim that Middleton has a favorable view of women, asserts that his most pointed satirical works are also his most misogynistic.)
  • Howard-Hill, T.H., "Political Interpretations of Middleton's A Game At Chess (1624)." The Yearbook of English Studies 21 (1991): 274-85. (Suggests that A Game At Chess was not an instrument of state policy but suited the political temper of its time more broadly.)
  • Jackson, MacD. P., Studies in Attribution: Middleton and Shakespeare. Salzburg: Institut fur Englische Sprach und Literatur, 1979, 228 p. (Applies a number of linguistic, bibliographic, and other tests to a variety of plays known to be by Middleton or attributed to him in an effort to more clearly define the author's canon.)
  • Kirsch, Arthur C., "Middleton." In Jacobean Dramatic Perspectives, pp. 75-96. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1972. (Surveys Middleton's works and explores the theme of sin as its own punishment.)
  • Kirsh, Arthur C., "Middleton." In his Jacobean Dramatic Perspectives, pp. 75-96. Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 1972. (Maintains that, despite the heterogeneity of Middleton's output, all the plays in which he had a hand "reveal an identical and powerful dramatic 'point of view'.")
  • Leggati, Alexander, Citizen Comedy in the Age of Shakespeare. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973, 167 p. (Considers numerous plays by Middleton, including A Mad World My Masters, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, and Michaelmas Term in an investigation of the general characteristics of the genre of comedy set in London's urban milieu.)
  • Marotti, Arthur F., "The Method in the Madness of A Mad World, My Masters." Tennessee Studies in Literature XV (1970): 99-108. (Argues that "because, in this comedy, Middleton expresses the problem of perception through various theatrical means, the relation of illusion to reality comments on the nature of the dramatic art itself.")
  • McElroy, John F., Parody and Burlesque in the Tragedies of Thomas Middleton. Jacobean Drama Studies 19. Salzburg: Institut fur Englische Sprache und Literatur, Universitat Salzburg, 1972, 335 p. (Argues against scholars who view Middleton as a realist, and instead asserts that the playwright exploits dramatic and literary conventions.)
  • Miller, Jo E., "Women and the Market in The Roaring Girl." Renaissance and Reformation XIV, No. 1 (Winter 1990): 11-23. (Asserts that "Moll Cutpurse invites us to reevaluate our responses to her and to understand better the freedom and nobility of the tomboy figure on the Renaissance stage who ignores and disrupts her society's rigid constraint of women's subjectivity.")
  • Mulholland, P., "Let her roar again: The Roaring Girl Revived." Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama XXVIII (1985): 15-27. (Detailed discussion of a modern production of the play.)
  • Mullaney, Peter F., Religion and the Artifice of Jacobean and Caroline Drama. Jacobean Drama Studies 41. Salzburg: Institut fur Englische Sprache und Literatur, Universitat Salzburg, 1977, 184 p. (Argues that religion becomes an increasingly charged path to eliciting emotional responses in the drama of the period.)
  • Murray, Peter B., "The Anonymous Revenger's Tragedy." In his A Study of Cyril Tourneur,* pp. 144-257. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964. (Exhaustive stylistic, structural, and linguistic analysis of the play. Murray maintains that "the great weight of the internal evidence" indicates that Middleton wrote the tragedy.)
  • Rose, Mary Beth, "Women in Men's Clothing: Apparel and Social Stability in The Roaring Girl." English Literary Renaissance 14, No. 3 (Autumn 1989): 367-91. (Examination of Moll Cutpurse that demonstrates how "society's effort to assess the identity of this female figure in male attire becomes the central dramatic and symbolic issue of the play.")
  • Rowe, George E., Jr., Thomas Middleton and the New Comedy Tradition. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1979, 239 p. (This important work argues that "Middleton's plays systematically undermine New Comedy conventions" in order to reject the values which the genre perpetuates.)
  • Schoenbaum, Samuel, Middleton's Tragedies: A Critical Study. New York: Gordian Press, 1970, 275 p. (Influential investigation of Middleton's principal efforts in the genre, divided into two sections: the first offers critical assessments of the plays; the second considers problems of attribution and the canon of Middletonian tragedy.)
  • Shershow, Scott Cutler, "Middleton's Trick." In Laughing Matters: The Paradox of Comedy, pp. 66-85. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986. (Shows that "Middleton evokes a vision of moral and social turmoil which he is unwilling or unable to resolve into coherence.")
  • Simmons, J. L., "Diabolical Realism in Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling." Renaissance Drama n.s. XI (1980): 135-70. (Investigates the play's relation to Renaissance views of human psychology and the belief that alien personalities could invade a person's mind.)
  • Slights, William W. E., "The Trickster-Hero and Middleton's A Mad World, My Masters." Comparative Drama III, No. 2 (Summer 1969): 87-98. (Describes Follywit as a combination of two character types derived from ancient Roman comedy: the adolescent and the witty slave.)
  • Spivack, Charlotte, "Marriage and Masque in Middleton's Women Beware Women." Cahiers Elisabethains, No. 42 (October 1992): 49-55. (Explores how the end of Women Beware Women critiques the conventional marriage bond.)
  • Steen, Sara Jayne, Ambrosia in an Earthen Vessel: Three Centuries of Audience and Reader Response to the Works of Thomas Middleton. New York: AMS Press, 1993, 240 p. (Reprints extracts of commentary on Middleton's plays, from the earliest appreciations by his contemporaries to late nineteenth-century criticism and reviews.)
  • Steen, Sara Jayne, Thomas Middleton: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984, 297 p. (Annotated list of materials relating to Middleton published from 1800 to 1978.)
  • Stilling, Roger, "Thomas Middleton." In Love and Death in Renaissance Tragedy, pp. 247-65. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976. (Exploring Middleton's tragedies as critiques of romantic patterns of tragedy, portraying bad, vain, amoral women and the plight of men in response.)
  • Takase, Fumiko, "Thomas Middleton's Antifeminist Sentiment in A Mad World, My Masters." In Playing with Gender: A Renaissance Pursuit,* edited by Jean R. Brink, Maryanne C. Horowitz, and Allison P. Coudert, pp. 19-31. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991. (Evaluates the "persistent association of woman with lust and the devil" that Middleton exploits in the comedy.)
  • Tannenbaum, Samuel A., Thomas Middleton: A Concise Bibliography. Elizabethan Bibliographies Number 13. New York: Samuel A. Tannenbaum, 1940, 35 p. (Primary and secondary bibliography including sections on Middleton's plays, masques, prose works and poems, collections, and biographies of the author.)
  • Taylor, Gary, "Forms of Opposition: Shakespeare and Middleton." English Literary Renaissance 24, No. 2 (Spring 1994): 283-314. (Regards Middleton, like Shakespeare, as a politically oppositional artist.)
  • Taylor, J. Chesley, "Metaphors of the Moral World: Structure in The Changeling." Tulane Studies in English 20 (1972): 41-56. (Contends that the play is unified by "the Renaissance concept of moral perfection, a concept which offers an implicit alternative to the moral failures of the characters and to the inconstancy which makes them changelings.")
  • Thomson, Leslie, '"Enter Above': The Staging of Women Beware Women." Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 26, No. 2 (Spring 1986): 331-43. (Attempts to resolve several complex problems the play presents in terms of staging.)
  • Tricomi, Albert H., "Middleton's Women Beware Women as Anticourt Drama." Modern Language Studies XIX, No. 2 (Spring 1989): 65-77. (Contends that the play is a "major political tragedy" and explores the ways in which Middleton "sought to deconstruct the symbolism of power and privilege" with this work.)
  • Van den Broek, A. G., "Take the Number Seven in Cheapside." Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 28, No. 2 (Spring 1988): 319-30. (Proposes that the plot of A Chaste Maid enacts the ending of one seven-year "social contract" and the beginning of another. Middleton, Van den Broek states, "depicts Cheapside society at a critical point, following a… period of decadence and depravity. A change is inevitable.")
  • Wolff, Dorothy, Thomas Middleton: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland Publishing, 1985, 138 p. (Divides its entries into book-length works on Middleton and journal articles. Features a section on foreign-language studies.)

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Middleton, Thomas (Literary Criticism (1400-1800))
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