THOMAS MIDDLETON lived and worked in London nearly all his life.1 Born in 1580, he was christened at St Lawrence Jewry on 18 April, and was buried on 4 July 1627 at his parish church in Newington Butts, where he had lived from at least 1609. His father, William, was a bricklayer and gentleman with his own coat of arms; he died in January 1585/86, and in November 1586 his widow, Anne, married Thomas Harvey, who had just returned, impoverished, from a voyage to Virginia. Within weeks of the marriage, Harvey was revealed to be an unscrupulous adventurer, almost solely interested in gaining control of his wife’s estate. A protracted, confusing and ugly series of lawsuits engulfed the family over the next two decades, all beginning with Harvey’s attempt to take over the property which Anne had put in trust for her children before she met him. Allen Waterer, who married Middleton’s sister, Avis, in 1596, immediately became a party to the lawsuits as well. By 1603, when both Anne Harvey and Allen Waterer died, Middleton had spent a good part of his time assisting his mother in the various legal battles. Even after Waterer’s death, Avis and her second husband, John Empson, continued legal action over the family property.

Middleton’s life was early and frequently connected to the professional theatre. A large part of the family property at question in the various lawsuits was ‘the grounde called the Curteyn where now comenlye the Playes be playde’ – that is, the Curtain Theatre (built in 1577). After matriculating at Queen’s College, Oxford (the most popular college of the time) in April 1598, moreover, Middleton was forced in June 1600 to convey his half-share of the Curtain property to his brother-in-law Waterer for money ‘paid and disbursed for my advauncement & preferment in the university of Oxford where I am nowe a student’. Some time during the next eight months, however, he had to return to London to deal with the continuing series of lawsuits, and it was reported, as of 8 February 1600/1, that Middleton ‘remaynethe heare in London daylie accompaninge the players’. In a final twist, Middleton’s brother-in-law Thomas Marbeck was an actor for the Admiral’s Men; Middleton thus may have met his wife through this association. Middleton in any event never graduated from Oxford, and was already a professional playwright at the time he would have been receiving his diploma.

Since his son Edward was aged nineteen in 1623, we assume Middleton was married about 1602. His wife, Magdalen (she is ‘Maria’ or Mary in one document), was the granddaughter of the famous composer and organist John Marbeck; Eccles believes she was probably the Maulyn Marbeck christened on 9 July 1575 at St Dunstan’s in the West. Middleton’s widow petitioned in February 1627/28 for a gift of money from the city of London, which suggests that his estate had been small. She died five months later, in July 1628, and was also buried at Newington.