Middleton published one book of verse. The Wisdom of Solomon Paraphrased (1597), before he entered Oxford, and two more, Micro-Cynicon (1599) and the Ghost of Lucrece (1600), while presumably still a student. In 1602 Henslowe recorded that he was working on three plays: a collaboration with Dekker, Munday, Drayton and Webster on Caesar’s Fall (now lost); Randal, Earl of Chester (also lost); and an unnamed play. Two years later, in 1604, he published two satiric prose pieces, The Black Book and The Ant and the Nightingale. His earliest surviving play, The Family of Love (c. 1602–3), also dates from this period. If the quality of these early works is debatable, it is clear that, after he left Oxford, Middleton was both an active and a highly productive writer. Beginning in 1613 and continuing until his death, he also wrote a number of civic pageants and entertainments; as early as 1604, he had written a speech given as part of Dekker’s The Magnificent Entertainment for King James’s official entry into London. Middleton was appointed City Chronologer in 1620, to record the memorable acts and occurrences of the city; he was succeeded in this position by Ben Jonson.

Middleton wrote in a variety of genres, but his greatest achievements came in two distinct dramatic forms: (1) city comedies, including Michaelmas Term (c. 1605), A Mad World, My Masters (c. 1605), A Trick to Catch the Old One (c. 1606) and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (c. 1611–13); and (2) tragedies, including The Revenger’s Tragedy (c. 1606–7), Women Beware Women (c. 1621) and The Changeling, with William Rowley (1622). Middleton’s accomplishments in tragicomedy – The Witch (c. 1615), A Fair Quarrel (c. 1615–17) and The Old Law (1618), among others – were also substantial. In 1624 he wrote the political satire A Game at Chess, which had the longest consecutive run of any play in the Jacobean period (indeed, the first long run in English theatrical history), nine days at the Globe, and caused a sensation in London; the play was finally suppressed by the government, though it had been properly licensed. Middleton and the players were summoned before the Privy Council (his son Edward answered for him, as Middleton seems to have been lying low), but no action was taken.

Middleton wrote for the children’s companies of Paul’s and Blackfriars, and after they disbanded, for Prince Henry’s (formerly the Admiral’s) Men, the Lady Elizabeth’s company, and for Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men. He collaborated on plays with many other dramatists of the period, possibly with Shakespeare himself on Timon of Athens, and seems to have revised Shakespeare’s Macbeth some years after its first performance.2 From his inheritance in The Curtain to his pageants for the city, Middleton’s whole life traces the arc of the recently invented career of the professional playwright.

WILLIAM C. CARROLL

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