If William Shakespeare is the bard next door that our parents want us to love, then Thomas Middleton, on the other hand, is the villain whom our parents hate us to discover.
Thomas Middleton was an English playwright and poet during the Jacobean Era. His works are often identified as the realistic reflections of life and emphasis on the more lurid features of contemporary London.
I came across reading this interesting article from The Time Magazine and want to share with all of you about Thomas Middleton. And I believe this article does do a very brief comparison between his works and Shakespeare’s’.
To love him or hate him, and I’ll let you be the judge. ;D
Thomas Middleton: For Adults Only
Thomas Middleton was the rebel of English Renaissance drama. Audiences adored how his plays went right to the limits — his sex was dirty, his violence grisly, his politics risky. His work was so popular in his time that it broke box-office records at London's Globe theater. But over the centuries, thanks to censorship and Victorian prudery, he fell out of fashion. By the time the world was ready again for Middleton's R-rated brand of theater, Shakespeare reigned as the undisputed heavyweight champion of English literature, knocking everyone else to the margins of the curriculum and away from center stage.
But now Middleton (1580-1627) may finally win the reputation he deserves. On Nov. 22, Oxford University Press publishes Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, the first time all his plays, poems and manus have appeared in a single volume. The timing of this 2,016-page monument couldn't be better. Academic interest in Middleton has burgeoned since the 1900s as scholars have discovered that the more time passes, the more relevant his work becomes. "When you read Middleton, you get the sense that the world he wrote about is the world we live in now, with all the moral dilemmas we face and the things that shape our identities," says Gary Taylor, a leading Shakespeare scholar at Florida State University and co-editor of the new Middleton collection. "He's a great writer, who reaches out from the past and punches you in the stomach."
Until now, though, only a handful of Middleton's plays have been in print at any one time; English teachers could slip one into a course on Shakespeare's contemporaries, and theaters could dust a few of them off every couple of years, but nothing more. Taylor was convinced that the only way to get Middleton his groove back was to collect everything he ever wrote in one book, giving people the choice they never had before. He was so convinced that, along with co-editor John Lavagnino and 73 other contributors — who helped edit the texts and wrote critical essays — he's spent much of the last 20 years putting it together. "Now people can do what they've been straining at the bit to do for decades," he says, "which is dedicate themselves to writing about and performing Middleton, with this edition as a solid foundation."
Taylor, who previously co-edited The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, is part of a growing cohort of critics who regard Middleton as Shakespeare's equal in wordplay and storytelling. "His is a darkly comic and unsparing view of human nature," says Gail Kern Paster, director of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington. "He has a witty and inventive spirit, and several of his plays are as great as any plays that Shakespeare wrote," she adds, citing The Changeling, Women, Beware Women and The Revenger's Tragedy as examples. The idea now is to push him as a grittier, edgier alternative. Middleton knew that sex sells, and he filled his plays with it: sometimes nasty, often funny, and always about who comes out on top. Taking advantage of Middleton's raging literary libido, Taylor is promoting the book with a lecture tour on sex in Middleton's plays — he'll kick things off at the Nov. 21 book launch at Shakespeare's Globe theater in London, a working replica of the theater where several Shakespeare and Middleton works were originally performed.
In many ways, Middleton speaks to today's audiences on a level Shakespeare cannot. While country boy Shakespeare set his plays in faraway lands of long ago, using language that was old-fashioned even then, Middleton, born and raised in London, wrote about urban life in a dialogue that's more familiar to the modern ear. A latter-day Scorsese, he walked on the dark side of the street, where you couldn't tell the good guys from the bad. "Part of the appeal of Shakespeare is that he takes you back to some imagined, glorious past," says Taylor. "But Middleton is overwhelmingly modern. He writes about a world that we immediately understand, in terms of money, politics, sex. Read a Middleton play and it's like it was written yesterday."
Middleton was as much a journalist as a playwright, documenting the politics and society of 17th century London. He saw it transformed by immigration, and witnessed the rise of a middle class struggling to cling on to morality amid a flood of new wealth. "It was a time of incredible ferment and change, both economic and intellectual," says Laurence Boswell, who directed Women, Beware Women for Britain's Royal Shakespeare Company last year. "Middleton was freaked out and excited by it all."
Sometimes this enthusiasm got him into trouble: a 1624 production of his play A Game at Chess, which satirized the tense Anglo-Spanish relations at the time, was the biggest box-office hit of the era — but it landed him in prison on charges of attempting to provoke public unrest. Unlike some of his fellow playwrights, Middleton dared to write about actual people and current events. This willingness to court controversy led some of his works to be banned or burned, which has made it all the harder for later scholars to reconstruct his oeuvre. There were several attempts in the 20th century to put together his complete works, all of them failures. Shakespeare had a definitive anthology only seven years after he died, when his friends published what became known as the First Folio, giving scholars centuries to study and interpret his work. To do the same for Middleton, Taylor and co. had to start from scratch, first picking through the writer's 30-year career to figure out which works were his, then making sense of the cultural references that run through almost every line. "We've been practicing how to read Shakespeare for centuries," says Taylor. "But we don't, as a culture, have a sense of how to read Middleton. You can't read Middleton as though he were Shakespeare. That would be like reading Shakespeare as though he were Dickens."
Once decoded, though, any one of Middleton's plays tells us more about the London of centuries ago than Shakespeare's entire catalogue could. Shakespeare was a dreamer; he made heroes of kings and princes. Middleton's work was more rooted in reality. His heroes (or, rather, antiheroes) are regular folk in extraordinary situations: merchants, con men and lonely housewives. Nowhere is that more evident than in the way he treats women. In Shakespeare, they tend to be "neatly categorizable as virgins or sluts or Madonnas or monsters," says Celia Daileader, a professor at Florida State University who annotated the comedy A Mad World, My Masters for The Collected Works. By contrast, the women in Middleton are as complicated as they are in real life. "He gives you a view of female sexuality that's very complex," says Daileader. "And he has some very sympathetic women who commit adultery — something inconceivable to Shakespeare." Things happen to Shakespeare's women; Middleton's make things happen. Characters like The Roaring Girl's Moll Cutpurse, who flaunts social rules by wearing trousers and refusing to marry, and The Changeling's Beatrice Joanna — whose plan to hire a servant to kill her fiancé backfires when the hit man blackmails her into bed — are the architects of their own destiny, for better or worse.
Taylor hopes The Collected Works will allow others to discover what he's long believed: that Shakespeare may be the king of English drama, but Middleton, more than anyone else, deserves a throne of his own. Some aren't so sure. "Yes, Middleton wrote some great plays: The Changeling is a better play than many of Shakespeare's," says Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate. "And there's no doubt he's been unluckily marginalized. But I object to the idea that he alone is Shakespeare's equal. Christopher Marlowe was as good at tragedy as Middleton. And the best comedies of the age are probably Ben Jonson's The Alchemist and Philip Massinger's A New Way to Pay Old Debts." Taylor welcomes the debate: "That's the way scholarship works: people disagreeing with each other. Now that we have this edition, everyone can go to work." After 400 years as English drama's dirty little secret, Middleton is at last poised for his comeback.
