Five Plays

by Thomas Middleton

Thomas Middleton (1580-1627) was one of the most prolific and fascinating playwrights of the Jacobean era, producing nearly fifty theatrical pieces in a quarter of a century. This collection comprises five of his most powerful plays, from the comedies satirizing city life, A Trick to Catch the Old One, and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, to his later tragedies Women Beware Women and The Changeling, in which Middleton reveals a world dominated by the corrupting power of lust and subject to the futility of human pretensions. Also included is The Revenger's Tragedy, originally ascribed to Cyril Tourneur, a Revenge Play infused with sardonic wit and biting irony.

Genres: Plays, Drama, Classics, Fiction, 17th Century, Renaissance, British Literature

421 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1622

About the author

Thomas Middleton (1580 – 1627) was an English Jacobean playwright and poet. Middleton stands with John Fletcher and Ben Jonson as among the most successful and prolific of playwrights who wrote their best plays during the Jacobean period. He was one of the few Renaissance dramatists to achieve equal success in comedy and tragedy. Also a prolific writer of masques and pageants, he remains one of the most noteworthy and distinctive of Jacobean dramatists.

Reviews

[Wendy · Rating 4 out of 5]

How to describe Middleton? Like Shakespeare, only raunchier, more violent, and with more puns and double-entendres than you can shake a stick at. (No, really. The man can make a discussion of arithmetic bawdy.)

The two comedies in this book, "A Trick to Catch the Old One", and "A Chaste Maid in Cheapside" will amuse, and teach you twenty archaic words for "whore", but what will thrill you are Middleton's tragedies. "Women Beware Women" and "The Revenger's Tragedy" weave complex webs of intrigue and counter-intrigue that wind up with nearly everyone dead in one great climactic blood-bath at the end. "The Changeling" manages to be both wickedly funny, and offer a compelling psychological portrait of a woman's descent into murder and adultery.

This won't be everyone's choice for light reading, but if you're willing to work your way through some slightly archaic prose, it's rewarding.

[Bryn Hammond · Rating 5 out of 5]

I never read the two comedies, but wallowed in these three tragedies of dark psychology.
The Revenger's Tragedy ridiculously bloody; The Changeling most potent.
Beatrice succumbs to De Flores:
This ominous ill-fac'd fellow more disturbs me
Than all my other passions.
Like a steamy version of Othello where Desdemona does the murder, debauched by Iago. With the subplot in a madhouse.

[Yorgos]

[spring cleaning my "currently reading"]
Pretty good edition. Read 4/5, the first 3 i think I read in this edition. Definitely better than the oxford editions of middleton. Great notes & such, good intro iirc. But at this point I have all these plays in more full editions so I'm calling this dropped

[T. Tokunaga · Rating 3 out of 5]

【Five Plays / Thomas Middleton / ed. Bryan Loughrey Taylor / 1988, Penguin Classics】

It's never so pleasant to read a book to confirm one's own view on life, especially if it's a bleak one. And that's my case with Middleton.

As a student preparing for MA in Elizabethan theatrical literature, I am largely intrigued to the theatrics of this Jacobean playwright, but I must say that I was appalled too, especially at his worldview in reducing familial cordiality / friendship to social contracts and power dynamics for money and sexual intercourse.

It's probably a take on families derived from a view of family bond from Old Testament (especially Genesis) mixed up with crude estimate of Elizabethan / Jacobean sexual reality - in which frivolity was often more approved even than in the late 20th century - with a moralist rigor, but you can see debilitated notions of morality depicted in a down-to-earth depictions everywhere in the five plays collected here (A Trick to Catch the Old One, The Revenger's Tragedy, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, Women Beware Women and The Changeling).

--Witgood: here comes one old gentleman, and he'll make her a jointure of three hundred a year, forsooth, another wealthy suiter will estate his son in his lifetime and make him weigh down the widow: (3. 1. 247-9, 'A Trick to Catch the Old One,' p. 33.)

--Lussurioso: It does betoken courage; thou shouldst be valiant
And kill thine enemies.
Vindice: That's my hope, my lord. ('The Revenger's Tragedy,' 4. 2. 165-6, p. 140.)

--Mother. Yes, simple, though you make it. Three has been three
For in a year in't, since you move me on't;
And all as sweet-fac'd children and as lovely
As you'll be mother of; (3. 1. 32-5, 'A Chaste Maid in Cheapside,' p. 288.)

[Marie]

Reading Process so far:

19 August 2020: The Changeling - I saw this play at the Stratford Festival in 2017. Reading this now brought it all back to me. I can't quite figure out why the play is titled for the less important character of Antonio (identified in the character descriptions as "the changeling") unless it's a deliberate misdirect from the main characters who prove themselves to be something other than what everyone knows them to be at the beginning of the play.

[Monique · Rating 1 out of 5]

Read this book for 'The Changeling'. Will have to re-read as I did not wholly understand what was happening due to many breaks reading (for work).