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This is In Our Time, from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website.
If you scroll down the page for this edition, you'll find a reading list to go with it.
I hope you enjoy the programme.
Hello, the Londoner Thomas Middleton, 1580 to 1627, was one of the most energetic, varied and innovative playwrights of his time, working both alone and with others, from Decker and Rowley to Shakespeare.
Middleton's range included raucous city comedies such as A Chase Made in Cheapside and chilling revenge tragedies like The Changeling and The Revenge's Tragedy.
Some were child actors playing the scheming adults.
He seemed to be everywhere on the Jacobean stage, mixing warmth and cruelty amid laughter and horror, and even Macbeth's witches may be his work.
With me to discuss Thomas Middleton are Emma Smith, Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College University of Oxford, Lucy Munro, Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature at King's College London, and Michelle O'Callaghan at the University of Reading.
Michelle O'Callaghan, we've placed him in London.
What should we know about Middleton's early life there?
Well, Middleton, as you've said, was born in 1580.
His parents were Anne and William Middleton.
His father was a gentleman.
He had a coat of arms and he was also a citizen.
He was a member of the Tylers and Bricklayers Company.
Middleton was the eldest child, the eldest surviving child, and he had a younger sister Avis, who was younger by about two years.
William Middleton really prospered as a member of the bricklayers' company during the building boom that you see in London as London rapidly expanded.
He was able to acquire properties in Hertfordshire and in London, and the Middleton family lived in quite a well-to-do part of the city.
Not wealthy, but they were a very comfortable family.
But it all changes in 1586 when Middleton's father dies when Middleton is about five or six.
And what he leaves is Anne, who is a wealthy widow in her 40s.
She marries again within the year.
She marries Thomas Harvey, who's a young gentleman grocer, but he's also an adventurer.
He has just returned penniless from from the failed expedition to Roanoke, which was led by Sir Walter Raleigh, with the intent of establishing a settlement in the Americas.
She must have some awareness of the fact that he's an adventurer, because before the marriage she tries to protect the children's property by tying it up in trusses.
And he is fine with this until after the marriage.
And he goes to court with Anne to try and get hold of the property.
So the marriage is very fractious.
In 1595, he's in prison for trying to poison Anne.
And so she gives him money to go over the seas.
He's away for three years.
They think he's dead, but no, he returns in 1598 and they're back in the courts again.
Can we ask what sort of education he was given?
He seems to have been a very bright boy.
He went to grammar school.
He must have been very precocious, because in the last year of his education at grammar school he publishes The Wisdom of Solomon, Paraphrased.
Now, a paraphrase is a schoolboy exercise, but Middleton is ambitious enough to have it printed.
And he not only has it printed, he dedicates it to Robert Devereaux, Earl of Essex.
So he then goes up to Oxford.
He attends Queen's College, Oxford.
And during his time at Oxford, he's also continuing to publish.
So he publishes a book of satires micro-synacons, six snarling satires which is really attempting to hit society, the craze for satires amongst university and inns of court men.
So he's aiming for an educated market.
And then he follows that with The Ghost of Lucrece, which is an imitation of Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece.
Thank you very much, Emma.
Emma Smith, there was so much energy. in the theatre in London at this time, at this period.
Can you tell us who was performing and where?
That's absolutely true.
I mean, Middleton is... We talk now, don't we, about digital natives.
I mean, Middleton is really a theatre native.
You know, the theatre is an established part of the London into which he is born.
But by the 1590s the London theatre scene is really dominated by two major companies the Lord Admiral's Men who are at the Fortune Theatre in the north-west of the city, and the Chamberlain's Men who are performing at the Globe on the South Bank.
And in a way the theatre seems as if it's fallen into a more mature phase of the sort of industrial development.
But there is an amazing disruptive energy at the end of the 1590s and that's the return of the Boys' Companies.
These are companies which are really choral schools or choral outfits, who extend into this very precocious sort of talent show kind of performance at Blackfriars, the Children of the Queen's Chapel, and in Paul's Cathedral, the Children of Paul's.
And it's this wave of a new possibility that middleton really serves.
These are the little iases that hamlet talks about having disrupted theater, grown-up theater in the capital and middleton.
Although he goes on to write for an extraordinary number of different theaters and different companies and in different genres, i think it's with these boys companies, particularly the children of paul's, that he really establishes himself in the first years of the jacobean period.
What are the works that are being done then?
So the works that he is writing then are, for example, Michael Musterm establishes really this very satirical knowing, ironic version of the city, the so-called city comedies, A Mad World, My Masters moving through to Chase, Made in Cheapside that you mentioned.
These are very knowing works. plays, teeming with life, teeming with the amorality of the city.
They're all about money, really.
They seem to be about sex, but sex is also about money.
That's really what Middleton has.
And maybe he's learnt it from this extraordinary childhood that Michelle's just explained.
Maybe that prompted this particular kind of imagination.
Lucy, Lucy Munro, let's look at The Roaring Girl.
What's the story there and why do you think it's an important play?
So The Roaring Girl comes after a run of the city comedies that Emma's been talking about.
The Middletons have been writing for the children's companies, but also for the Fortune Playhouse as well.
And The Roaring Girl's performed at the Fortune around 1610.
So it's a collaboration with Thomas Decker, who's a contemporary of Middletons, who he writes with quite regularly.
And it adds a new facet to the city comedy by putting a real-life figure at the heart of it.
So the roaring girl of the title is Mary Frith, also known as Mole, Mole being a diminutive of Mary, also known as Mole Cutpurse.
And Mole is this extraordinary figure in Jacobean London seems to be well-known for dressing in men's clothing and for dressing in a kind of hybrid clothing.
There's somebody who's quite difficult... What's hybrid about it?
So women's clothing on the bottom half and men's clothing on the top half.
So wearing things like a men's doublet with a woman's safeguard, which is the kind of lower garment that you wear if you're riding, that protects your clothes.
And it's actually something that becomes very fashionable later in the 16-teens.
So James, I's wife, Anna of Denmark, appears in some portraits in these fashions which are very masculine on the top half, with kind of big shoulders and a kind of male-looking doublet and a hat, and it becomes really contentious.
Amol, of course, is transgressing.
So wearing men's clothing if you're a woman, or somebody who would be defined by society as a woman, is very transgressive.
Jacobian society, early modern society is obsessed with the idea that power lies in masculinity and power lies in male clothing.
And so disputes over which sex has authority will often be figured as a quarrel over the breeches.
So who's going to get to wear the trousers?
And Mol is wearing the trousers, basically.
Is that where it comes from?
The origins of it, I think, must be yeah, the idea that the trousers or the breeches are in some way a symbol of male authority and that it's in some way transgressive for women to be wearing them.
And so Moll gets into trouble for this.
So there's a record of the... Why did she get into trouble?
Because early modern society polices clothing in certain contexts.
So when James comes to the throne, they're no longer quite as obsessed with what kind of fabrics you wear or what kind of colours of clothing you wear.
But they are interested in making sure that women wear women's clothing and men wear men's clothing.
They police this?
Well, we have records of people being up before the Bridewell Court, and one of the misdemeanours they're accused of will be wearing clothing that belongs, in the terms that they'd use, to the opposite sex.
So men wearing women's clothing, women wearing men's clothing.
And so Moll is brought before the Consistory Court of London... and supposedly makes a confession.
And a record of the confession actually survives.
So Moll is supposed to have confessed that, in the habit of a man, resorted at ale houses taverns, tobacco shops and also to playhouses to see plays and prizes.
And Moll apparently confessed that they'd been at a play at the Fortune about three quarters of a year before this.
The confession is from 1612, so...
They're at the fortune around 1611 and said to be in their own men's apparel, in her boots and with a sword by her side.
She told the company there present that many of them were opinion that she were a man.
But if any of them would come to her lodging, they would find she's a woman and some other immodest and lascivious speeches.
And then Moll is also supposed to have sat on the stage and played a lute and sung.
And a more contemporary thinking has positioned Moll as maybe an ancestor of drag kings, as a kind of trans forebear as well.
So Moll is very difficult to pin down in gender terms.
They're somebody who, if they were around today, may well have really appreciated the broader range of gender identities that 21st century society offers.
Was Middleton chastised for using this person?
Not as far as we know.
And the relationship between the mole of the play and the mole of real life is very interesting, I think, because we have this record of mole's confession in the consistory court.
Talking about, you may think I'm a man, but if you come to me in private you'll see I'm a woman.
But the mole of the play is much more chaste.
In many ways is also even more ambiguous in gender terms.
So the mole of the play is referred to as Mole and Mary, but is also called Jack at various times and also wears fully male clothing at certain points in the play.
And there's some wonderful hostile descriptions of Mole in the play of being like a monster with two trinkets, so actually being a sort of hybrid figure.
Well, that was a tour de force.
Thank you.
Michelle, let's talk about him as a collaborator.
What kind of a collaborator was he?
He was a very good collaborator.
As Lucy was saying, he collaborated with Decker and that was his first collaboration.
Decker was an older playwright and so you can see that relationship at the start being like a kind of apprenticeship.
So Middleton, as the younger playwright, learning his craft from the more senior playwrights.
Is he finding it easy to get on?
Is he making money from it?
Is he making an early reputation?
He is making some money.
He engages in a range of theatrical trades.
He's writing for the public theatres, but he's also writing for the city companies and writing their city pageants.
And later on he'll also get a wage as a city chronologer.
So when he's collaborating with Rowley and Decker, let's leave Shakespeare till later when he's collaborating with them.
Have we any idea what percentage he did?
They did how they worked together.
It's quite difficult to figure out, to parse out the different sections of the play, and collaboration probably worked quite flexibly in the period.
You can, even though playwrights are collaborating, you do get a sense of their different styles.
So you get a sense of what Decker brings to the roaring goal, which is this really warm, jolly feeling, festive city comedy.
And what middleton brings are the darker notes, so the the really sort of predatory nature of the city and the more vicious characters, but i think also the slipperiness of mole who likes to lie on both sides of the bed, and characters like laxton who has a problem with his masculinity.
So So I think that you know the light and dark that you get in The Roaring Girl is a very successful element of their collaboration.
With Rowley, it's slightly different.
With Rowley, Rowley is a similar age as Middleton.
He's probably about five years younger than But, unlike Decker and unlike Middleton, he's actually an actor.
And he's not just an actor, he's a clown.
So he brings that exuberant form of comedy to their collaborations.
And so, for example, as we'll see in The Changeling, he is thought to be responsible for the comic parts.
But what he also brings... to that collaboration, is an association with Prince Charles's men.
Thank you very much.
Let's stick to the changeling.
Go to you, Emma Hammersmith.
How did that come about and what part did he play in that?
As Michelle's been saying, the changeling is a great collaboration between Middleton and Rowley.
We've got this, what's sometimes called the castle plot, with This extraordinary, morally ambiguous figure at the centre.
We've talked about Mole Cutpurse as a comic version of this.
In The Changeling, we have Beatrice Joanna.
I mean, she's got two names.
She's already a slippery kind of figure.
Is she Beatrice, with all the associations that that name has in the kind of ideal, love poetry and so on?
Or is she Joanna?
She's this hyphenated creature.
She's a brilliant, troubling depiction of self-destructive desires.
And that's Middleton's part of the play where Beatrice Joanna is in part trapped by a patriarchal world that wants to marry her off and in part trapped by her own sort of repulsion and desire for these different men around whom she has some element of choice, but not really.
And Rowley, we think, wrote this under note, an underscoring, which is in The Madhouse.
And the critics in the 20th century who recovered Middleton's reputation, T.S.
Eliot, probably first among them.
They all felt well, this comic part is a wonderful tragedy.
But this comic part's a bit embarrassing.
It was kind of helpful to say it's by someone else and we can get rid of it.
But in fact, now we look at collaboration a bit differently.
I think we can see, not only is Rowley using his comic genius, but it's very, very closely woven in with, as it were, the main plot.
The Rowley plot has a character called Isabella, who is the sort of opposite really, of Beatrice Joanna.
She, too...
And she Isabella, also has these suitors and men around her, but she's able to manage them and keep them at bay.
There are lots of linguistic parallels and overlaps.
So these two plots are very, very closely interwoven, so that I mean it's a little bit flattens out what's so wonderful about it.
But we do get a sense desire is a madhouse.
We're all mad.
You know, the most sane people in this world are in the madhouse, not in the palace.
Is it unusual to have so many plays with so many women in them?
I think it is unusual.
Is this Middleton?
This is Middleton.
This is Middleton in comedy and in tragedy.
I think it partly comes from articulating a version of these plays which is different from what other people are doing.
I think it's part of Middleton's ambition.
It may be part of his own biography.
I mean, his mother sounds a pretty strong woman to me.
And it may be part of what's available to him in the acting companies that he's writing for.
So, for example, in A Chase Made in Cheapside there's a wonderful chaotic scene of the immediate aftermath of a birth, with all the gossips and the godmothers and so on.
There are 11... speaking parts for women in that scene.
Now that's an extraordinary thing.
If you were to look at Shakespeare's Say as our comparison, where I think Much Ado About Nothing, where you've got sort of three women talking together, that's really pushing it for what he's able to manage or able to even conceive of.
Whereas Middleton's Ensemble plays.
They do have these central female characters, but really they get their energy from an ensemble.
They're not vehicles.
I don't think for a major character or even for a major actor in the way that Shakespeare develops.
But women tend to be at the centre both of comedy and tragedy.
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Lucy, are there recurring themes in his plays?
Because they do seem to vary from north to south to east to west.
I think there are recurring themes.
We've mentioned a few already.
So Emma's talked about the fact that these are plays that are full of sex and money and aren't always sure quite what is sex and what is money.
It's difficult to entangle them.
He's interested in commodification a lot of the time, so the ways in which people become things, and things almost take on a kind of life of their own.
So there's a play called Your Five Galants, for example, where particular bits of costume, particular bits of jewellery kind of appear in scene after scene and get moved between characters and almost become characters kind of in themselves.
I think he's also interested in intention and the extent to which...
People can actually act out their intentions.
He's interested in choices and whether people have choices or not, whether people have agency.
And it's possible, I think, to link that to one of the major religious frameworks of the day, which is Calvinism.
And Calvinism holds that judgment has already been passed on you before you were born, a thing that's known as double predestination.
So it's been decided before you're even born whether you'll be one of the elect and eventually go to heaven, or whether you'll be one of the damned and eventually go to hell.
And that leaves you as an individual with very little room to manoeuvre.
All you can really do is scrutinise yourself and work out whether your life choices indicate that you're one of the elect or one of the damned.
And it's been argued by some critics that that is what produces some of the things that look to us like psychological realism in Middleton.
It's that kind of dividedness, that hyphenatedness that Emma mentioned, that comes through a lot in Middleton.
Michelle, what use does he make of his settings?
Some plays are set in Italy, some in Spain.
The settings of his plays give his plays a real energy.
So, for example, you have Catholic Italy in Revenge's Tragedy and Women Beware Women.
And Catholic Italy looms very large in the Protestant English imagination as this place of decadence and decay.
It's also made famous by Castiglione's Book of the Courtier, which celebrates the gracefulness of Italian court life.
But as Thomas Nash warned the English traveller and I'm paraphrasing here Italy maketh a man an excellent courtier, which is another word for a fine, close lecher, a glorious hypocrite.
And this is very much the glittering decadent court that you get played across the Revengers tragedy, and also Women, Beware Women.
And we need to remember that Italy was also home to Machiavelli.
So it's associated with political treachery.
It's also associated with revenge.
And the favoured weapon of the Italian is said to be poison because it's so sneaky, and there's also something very unmanly about it.
Emma Smith, let's turn to Shakespeare.
What did Middleton bring to Shakespeare?
I think in some ways Middleton brought to Shakespeare that same darkness that we've heard about.
What do you mean by darkness?
So I mean the kind of moral shades of grey, the sense of the depraved urban environment, the sense of commodification and sex and money.
So, for example, we've already talked about city comedies and that looks like a genre that is very far from Shakespeare's model of romantic comedy, except we might say For Measure, For Measure, which is set in an urban Vienna.
It has its stock of prostitutes and young gallants and so on.
What we now think is that Measure for Measure is at least in part by Thomas Middleton.
So it isn't an exception to the Shakespearean norm.
It's a Shakespeare play, most people think, overwritten later by Middleton.
When you say overwritten, you mean spoiled?
Well, we don't know, do we, whether it's spoiled because we don't have the solo Shakespeare measure for measure.
And given how important those elements of city life have been to our understanding of the play, it's really hard to think what it would be like, stripped back.
So there's a group of plays that we think that Middleton worked on for stage revivals, probably after Shakespeare's death or certainly after his retirement.
There's one play that we think they worked on together, and that's the play Timon of Athens.
And there's another play, Titus Andronicus, where we think Middleton wrote an additional scene.
What attracted you to Timon of Athens?
It's a great thought what attracted them both to Timon of Athens.
If you see this as the sort of crossing point in the X of the two careers, we've tended to think of Timon as a disappointing part of Shakespeare's career.
So it's not a tragedy like King Lear or something.
But if we look at it from Middleton's point of view, he's written a great comic work about.
One of the things I love about Middleton is these nominative deterministic names that Shakespeare doesn't do.
So all Middleton's characters are called what they are.
Penitent Brothel is one of my favourites, is in Mad World, My Masters.
And also in that play we've got a grand and generous person, a bit like Tymon at the beginning of his play, who's called Sir Bounteous Progress.
And Middleton has been thinking about the values, the old style values of hospitality, how they butt up against this modern urban world of getting and begetting that's so teeming with life in the city comedies.
So I think they collide around Timon of Athens in ways which may not be absolutely successful is one of the places where I think we can see the different ways they come at it.
One recent editor of the play has made this brilliant observation that this is a play all about money.
Middleton's framework for thinking about money is debt.
So a set of complicated financial instruments that interweave people.
Shakespeare's frame for thinking about money is gold, a stuff of fairy tale.
And we've got a kind of fairy tale versus a kind of contemporary complex world smashing up together in Timon.
Let's keep with Shakespeare, Lucy.
Lucy Munro, what would you say about his work with Shakespeare?
I think Middleton's work with Shakespeare is a really, in some ways, really exciting example of the ways in which theatre in this period is collaborative.
You know we have a sort of post-romantic model of Shakespeare as a kind of individual genius.
But the early modern stage isn't really like that.
It's all about people working together in various ways and working cooperatively.
So he doesn't write anything on his own?
And actually, once you've sold it to those actors, they can do what they want with it.
So Shakespeare would have had no control, or maybe a bit more control than most, because he's an actor in his own company.
But he would have had comparatively little control compared with certainly later 20th century theatre makers.
And I think one of the exciting things is, you think about the relationship between Shakespeare and Middleton, you can see a whole range of these different kinds of collaborative interactions.
So you can see a play like Measure, for Measure, which is probably eventually rewritten by Middleton but in its original moment around 1604, is drawing quite heavily on one of Middleton's earliest plays, which is called The Phoenix, which is about a young man who's the heir to the throne, who disguises himself and goes out among his people and spies on them.
And Measure for Measure picks up on that disguised ruler motif.
And then, of course, with plays like Timon, you get a direct collaboration between them.
But around the same sort of time, Middleton writes The Revenger's Tragedy, which is probably performed at the Globe by the King's men, who also perform Shakespeare's play, and which starts with a man holding a skull.
And that man is Vindici, who's the central revenger of the play.
His name suggests that he's the personification of revenge.
And The Revenger's Tragedy is this extraordinary satiric take on revenge tragedy which in the end, culminates in the scene where you have multiple revenges, dukes who rule for successively shorter periods of time, the last of them just for, I think, half a line at the end before he's topped off.
But it starts probably with Richard Burbage, the man who played Hamlet, standing there holding a skull.
So there's a kind of impertinence about the way that Middleton responds to Shakespeare.
And I think Middleton would have thought of himself as Shakespeare's equal, not as a subordinate.
And that maybe explains the ways in which he's able then to take on Shakespeare's works in the 16-teens and seemingly to revise them and, I think, reinvigorate them for what a later Jacobean audience actually wanted.
Emma, can we talk about Shakespeare in relation to Macbeth?
This is a brilliant unfolding, I think, area of scholarship.
We've known for a long time that two songs from a Middleton play called The Witch are cued in Shakespeare's Macbeth.
There's long been a question about one of the scenes in Act Three where the Queen of the Witches Hecate, who we've never seen before or heard of, comes in and seems to take the witchcraft plot in a slightly different direction.
And people have wondered why Macbeth is quite short relative to other Shakespeare tragedies.
So there's a lot of space for potentially a post hoc rewrite of And many scholars now believe that that is a rewrite by Middleton and that at least The witches from the beginning are just the witches there.
Well, that's the million-dollar question.
Did Middleton do a bit more witches?
Did he start with the witches?
Yeah, that's right.
Exactly.
Were there witches already?
And Middleton is brought in to do a bit more.
I mean we've seen the ongoing history of this play in the theatre is that the witches have taken over.
If you go to any performance now, you will see the witches are a really major part of the play.
So Middleton may have been responding to that and amplifying it.
But there is just a possibility that the witches are all Middleton.
And I say this because we have very few reports of anybody going to the theatre and telling us helpfully what they saw or what they thought about in this period.
And we have an unreliable roguish witness called Simon Foreman, who is a sort of quack astrologer who goes to see Macbeth in 1610.
So it's not the very first performance.
But he talks about Macbeth encountering these nymphs.
And nymphs is the word for the sort of witches in Holinshed's Chronicles in the source for the play.
But mostly the witches that we have got in the text now don't seem very nymph-like.
And that has given rise to a question about whether the version of Macbeth that Foreman saw might have been a pre-Middleton version of the play, in which maybe the prophecy is given by a different kind of oracular figure, like a nymph, rather than these witches.
So perhaps the most famous bits of Shakespeare's Macbeth are not Shakespeare's.
Michelle, one recurring theme in Middleton is the young against the old.
What's going on there?
That theme.
We've talked about how Middleton's comedies have a certain darker edge to them, and where this darkness really comes through in a number of plays is in the way that the young treat the old.
Emma was talking about a play, Mad World, My Masters.
The grandfather figure is called Sir Bounteous Progress and His grandson is called Follywit.
And Follywit is upset with Sir Bounteous Progress because he's spending all his inheritance.
He keeps this really open, lavish house.
He keeps a mistress, and he's an old man.
Maybe a rich old man, no?
LAUGHTER
Is he a rich old man?
He is a rich old man, but he's spending his money and he's spending his money fast.
And Follywit, his grandson, is penniless.
He's not only penniless, he's so poor he's fallen in with a criminal gang, which he leads.
And so he wants to get his inheritance before it's all spent.
So he and his criminal gang stage this robbery on their grandfather's house.
So in disguise, he ties up his grandfather, and he's doing so really quite harshly, really quite cruelly.
And all the time he's taunting him with the fact that he's just an impotent old man.
And why this is so cruel is that you get uncles, you know, blocking figures in other plays that are cheating their nephews or cheating their relatives.
But that's not, Sir.
Bounteous Progress.
You know, he might be foolish, but he's kind and he loves his grandson.
And there's another play, a tragicomedy that takes this a step further, because The old law is a decree that all fathers over the age of 80 and all mothers over the age of 60 have to be put to death.
They've served their purpose.
They have to make way for the young.
So the central part of the play is this complete, as the young men are so gleeful that they're finally able to get rid of their parents and spend all the money.
And you do have this tragicomic ending where you know the old law is revealed to be a trick and it's just really to test and to punish the errant young.
But the kind of anarchic energy just kind of takes over the play.
Can I come back to you Emma, just to dig away a little bit more at the distinctiveness of Middleton's voice.
Can we go back to Shakespeare and maybe give us an example or two?
Sometimes, when we're doing that disaggregating work, the focus is on very small words that don't seem very important.
So it's not on usually now on big phrases or phrase making or poetry, but more on habits of speech which nevertheless are completely distinctive.
And in the difference between Middleton and Shakespeare.
It's interesting that this too is generational the 16 years difference between the two of them.
And also Middleton, as you began with, is a Londoner.
And Shakespeare.
You know you can take the boy out of a Midlands market town, but you can't.
You can do the rest.
And Shakespeare continues through his life to prefer forms of speech which are syntactically grammatically, old-fashioned.
So he would prefer hath over has.
He would prefer thou over you.
And he would prefer a form like I did go over. over I went.
And, in each of those cases, the more modern form, the form that's completely recognisable to us, is the form that Middleton would prefer.
So sometimes, when we can see clusters of these different forms, that's one clue to a distinction between these two writers.
Thank you.
Lucy, can you sum up what you say Middleton's main strengths were as a dramatist?
So if we're thinking about Middleton as a dramatist, we're thinking, I think, in a large part about how he uses theatrical resources.
So we might think about the way that he uses actors.
If we look back at The Roaring Girl, I think that Middleton is exploiting the talents of a particular boy actor in the role of Mole.
And one of the reasons I think that is that there's a very similar role in a play called No Wit, No Help, Like a Woman's, performed by the same company around the same time, in which you have a woman called Kate who disguises herself as a man, tricks everyone around her, helped out by her rather inefficient, ineffective husband.
And so I think these roles are designed for a particular boy actor with a very particular set of skills.
But Middleton's also a writer who uses the theatres that are available to him.
So he uses things like trapdoors, he uses the fact that they have multiple exits and entrances.
He's very keen on manoeuvring large numbers of actors around relatively confined spaces at indoor playhouses like the Blackfriars, like the theatre in St Paul's Cathedral.
And actually at the Blackfriars in a play called Your Five Gallants.
He uses a very particular aspect of performance practice there, which is the fact that performances are lit by candles.
And you have to tend to the candles every now and again.
You have to make sure they're burning properly.
And so indoor playhouse plays have act breaks.
And one of the reasons for the act breaks, as well as being a classical convention, is that you can look after the candles.
You can make sure they're burning properly.
You can replace them.
And the companies that use these indoor playhouses would have music playing in the act breaks to entertain the spectators while the candles are being looked after.
And what Middleton does is he blurs the boundaries between the act break and the main action.
So in Your Five Galants he has a sequence of dialogue that takes place during an act break while the music's going on and really kind of transgresses that convention.
Finally, another thing that I think is really distinctive about Middleton is some of the ways in which he uses dialogue.
He's very good at the way he uses asides, so moments where characters take themselves out of the situation and speak to themselves or speak to an audience differently.
And he'll have scenes in plays like The Changeling where two characters speak more in a side than they do to each other.
And so they're really speaking past each other as much as they're speaking to each other.
And again, I think that possibly comes out of a training in writing for these small indoor playhouses where everything's very intense and where the attention is extra focused on the actors.
Thank you.
Michel, we should end with a game at chess.
It was an enormous success for him.
It was his greatest success.
Anyway, it was an enormous success.
And then he stopped writing after that.
Why was it such a success and why did he stop writing?
It was such a success because it was just so scandalous.
1624, England is once again at war with Spain.
So it's very heated on the streets.
It's summer of 1624 and a game at chess is out, this conflict between Spain and England through the chess game.
And the chess game is, of course, it's a game of war and it's a game of stratagem.
So it's playing to packed houses at the Globe for nine consecutive days.
James doesn't know about it because King James is away on his summer progress.
How he hears about it is that the Spanish ambassador writes to him very angry about the way that...
This play claims to reveal the secrets of state, but more than that, it is impersonating royal personages on the stage, members of the court, most famously Count Gondomar.
They manage to get a suit ready. of his clothing.
He was the former Spanish ambassador.
They managed to get hold of his sedan chair.
So a lot of energy has gone into impersonating the Spanish court on stage, so the audience know exactly who they are.
And, of course, that incenses the Spanish ambassador and it also incenses James.
And I'll just give you a sense of how utterly explosive the play was from quoting the complaint, part of the complaint of Coloma.
And he's talking about this sensational final scene.
And he says the action was set forth so personally that they did not even exclude royal persons.
The last act ended with a long, obstinate struggle between all the whites and the blacks.
And in it, he who acted, the Prince of Wales, that's Charles.
Prince Charles heartily beat and kicked the Count of Gondma, that's a Spanish ambassador, into hell, which consisted of a great hole, which was probably the trapdoor, and hideous figures signifying hell.
And the white King James drove the black King Philip of Spain and even his queen, Donna Maria, into hell most offensively.
And there's other reports that talk about how these figures were stomped on on stage.
So it's a deliberately offensive play.
It's a deliberately sensational play and it's just brilliant in all kinds of ways.
So you can see how it was just so incredibly popular, but also how it was just so incredibly dangerous.
Emma, can you say this was one of the more innovative parts of his writing?
I think it was innovative, definitely.
It's interesting hearing about it after the conversation we've had, because you can see that putting Mary Frith, a contemporary figure, on the stage was also, you know, sort of anticipated this 10 years previously.
But yes, we can absolutely see Middleton as someone who is pushing what's possible in terms of topical or contemporary politics or contemporary comment, and he pushes it perhaps a little bit further than it can go.
These nine days of performances are absolutely unprecedented.
But the Privy Council do set up a suit against him and Middleton goes into hiding.
So it's a pyrrhic victory, if you like.
I mean, it's a success which he can't really capitalise on following that.
You said when he did Hiding, he did sort of disappear after that.
Was it Hiding that disappeared him?
I think we don't know that, absolutely.
But from being quite a prominent and active member of the theatrical community, Middleton is definitely off the radar and has one more Lord Mayor's show, but not much else in his career.
And I think it's worth knowing that he has a series of setbacks.
There's Plague in 1625, which closes the theatres.
And also his longtime collaborator, William Rowley, also dies in 1626, and Middleton himself dies the following year, in 1627, and he leaves his wife a poor widow.
So there is just the sense that everything is going wrong for Middleton at that stage, and there is also a sense that he's out of favour.
He seems to be rising on a tide, he seems to be in favour with Prince Charles, and then that all comes to and end with the game at chess.
So what do you think cuts through today about Middleton's writing?
Lucy?
I think it's a lot of what we've been talking about.
So it is that ambivalence, it's that darkness.
I think it's really symptomatic that Middleton comes back into theatrical and critical consciousness in the 1920s, a time of upheaval, a time when things that had seemed quite certain morally were suddenly being questioned a lot more.
What's such as?
Ideas around the state, ideas around the relationship between the individual and the state, ideas about relationships between families are suddenly a lot more uncertain, and you've had obviously a huge loss of life during the First World War and society is reconfigured in many ways on the back of that.
And Emma mentioned earlier the fact that T.S.
Eliot is a very important figure in the revival of Middleton.
There's barely any theatrical production of Middleton in the 19th century.
He's not very much written about.
Why is that, do you think?
I think like a lot of Jacobean dramatists, he's just a bit too strong for the Victorians.
And you see the same thing happen with John Fletcher as well that they're too sexually explicit and they're also too indecorous in the way that they write generically as well.
So they're writing plays that don't fit into neat categories.
They don't quite fit into what the Victorians thought tragedy should be, what the Victorians thought comedy should be.
And by that point in the 19th century, ideas around what an early modern play should be are starting to be really fixed by what Shakespeare was doing.
And Johnson actually mostly disappears from the stage in this period as well.
So there's a concerted reappraisal of a lot of these dramatists in the early 20th century.
But the theatrical revival of Middleton really takes hold after the Second World War.
And I think, again, it's a theatrical community that is disillusioned in various ways.
It's audiences who are looking for things that are more disillusioned, more ambivalent.
So we see revivals of the Revengers tragedy for the first time in hundreds of years.
Plays like The Changeling, Women Beware Women become quite prominent.
We see dramatists like Edward Bond, Joe Orton being influenced by Middleton.
Howard Barker adapts Middleton, for example.
And so these things, I think, have continued into our present moment.
But I think at the moment, we're also very interested in gender.
We're interested in plays like The Roaring Girl.
Figures like Moll Frith, for this reason.
A few years ago at Shakespeare's Globe there was a piece by S Grange, a contemporary theatre maker, called A Note to Mary Frith, responding directly to Mary Frith in the same way that Middleton and Decker had kind of 400 years ago.
Well, thank you very much.
Thanks to Lucy Munro, Emma Smith and Michelle O'Callaghan.
Next week the down-to-earth question of what it's actually like to live in the world, as explored by the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
Thank you very much for listening.
And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now, with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.
Thank you.
Now then, we'll do more for the podcast if you don't mind.
Starting with you, Michelle, what would you like to have said that you didn't have time to say?
I would have liked to have picked up on the question of women in Middleton's plays.
There's no doubt that Middleton's plays are very misogynistic, but they are also full of these witty courtesans and there's a real sense that Middleton energises people, his female characters, in a way that I don't think you see in Shakespeare.
They're not so dangerous.
They're not so dirty as you get in Middleton.
And one of my favourite characters is the character Frank Goleman, who's in Mad World, My Masters.
And she is quite something.
She's a thief.
She's a prostitute.
She quite happily is a board to her neighbor.
She prostitutes her to penitent brothel.
As I said, she is the mistress of Sabantius Progress.
They told her maidenhead like 15 times or something.
So can we do it another time?
Well, it's also her mother.
Her mother is a board.
So you would think that within a moralising comedy, you know, with names like Penitent Brothel and What's her name, is it?
Yes!
And Frank Goldman, you would think that she's ripe for a punishment.
You know, she's going to be carted in some way in the play...
And she's not.
I mean, she marries the kind of putative hero that isn't really a hero.
That's folly wit.
And, as I said, the grandfather and she is his mistress sort of toasts the marriage by sort of saying well, I'll drink off the first half because I already have.
And I'll put gold in the bottom.
And here, grandson, you can drink the rest as you take my former...
But I think that in these witty courtesans what you get is a real sense of the way that Middleton, at least in his comedies, is just not interested in ethical questions.
Not in the way that Shakespeare is.
There's a real carelessness.
He's really interested in what you can do with the opportunistic, with improvisation.
Yeah, that's so true, isn't it?
I mean, if we discovered Desdemona really had been unfaithful or Hermione had been unfaithful in the Shakespeare plays, the plays would collapse.
I mean, they're absolutely built on the idea that these women are pure and that that's the only way you can get a kind of happy ending.
And Middleton's not interested in that at all.
No.
It's itty.
Yeah, I think that's really, really fascinating.
And it's also the way that...
Women, these courtesan figures, instead of losing value through the process of being exchanged, through the process of being transacted, the emphasis is on how they gain value.
So in the final scene of Chase Made in Cheapside, when Tim is really upset at being married to Sir Walter Whorehound's mistress.
Poor Tim's been to Cambridge, so we have to feel sorry for him.
He goes everywhere with his Cambridge tutor, which is also not the least funny thing about it.
Yes.
She makes a joke that talks about how she actually brings more value to the marriage.
And he kind of says, oh, yeah, that's fine then.
That's OK.
And it all ends happily.
Anna, do you want to say what you had in time to say?
I mean, I'm really, really sort of enjoying this part of the conversation.
I think Middleton's, which are not quite forgive and forget, but they are sort of We've all been round the block a time or two and it's probably best We don't.
You know, full disclosure doesn't help anybody really.
Let's just, you know, what happens in Act 3 stays in Act 3.
There's a sort of There are lots of contingencies about Middleton's moral universe, which is a bit more yeah, pragmatic.
We've got what we've got.
You know, what...
In some ways, we've had plays about sort of have what you want or how have what you want works.
And it's sort of, well, you know, come to want what you have, I guess.
So I think the moral endings, or the morally questionable endings, are a really fascinating part of Middleton's world.
And I was so interested in what Lucy was saying about Calvinism.
And whether there's a way.
I mean one of the sort of theological potential problems with Calvinism is if it's already set, do you worst?
I mean, how bad can it get?
You know, the stakes are very low because I'm already damned, so I may as well have a great time.
And if that's a Middletonian inheritance, that's quite interesting to play it out.
Anything you want to add?
I think I'd always want to talk about the weirdness of some of the moments in Middleton's play.
So a play like A Mad World by Masters, which we've been talking about as a city comedy, which is absolutely right.
It's a play that's set in contemporary London.
It's full of these types of London figures.
But it also has a scene in which a demon comes on stage.
A succubus comes on stage.
And when I'm teaching that play, there's always a question of, OK, what's with the succubus?
What is going on in that moment?
And it's so strange because Middleton isn't a playwright who I mean?
There's plays like The Witch, there's an interest in the supernatural, but the way in which those two things are brought together is really weird.
And it's not like a Johnson play like Devil is an Ass which orients the whole thing around the idea that a devil has come to London and actually is worse at being demonic than the citizens of London.
You know, and that idea is stretched out across the whole play.
It's just this one scene where suddenly we're in this universe in which devil's succubuses can come and talk to Penitent Brothel, in fact, isn't it?
It's why Elliot is I mean Elliot says Middleton's a great recorder, as if what he gives us is a snapshot of contemporary London.
And it's so...
I mean, Eliot's so important in bringing Middleton back.
But I think what he said, I think that's just so wrong.
I mean, that's not a play about a record.
That's something much stranger, as you say.
And it's like somebody in 400 years time looking at EastEnders and saying that's what 20th century, 21st century, London was like.
And there's bits that are familiar, but it's heightened, it's exaggerated, it's weird.
A succubus in East London.
But then in Middlesex's case, you've got a succubus as well.
Yes.
Well, thank you all very much.
Very much.
That'll be much enjoyed.
Thank you very much indeed.
Thank you.
Thank you.
In Our Time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson and it's a BBC Studios audio production.
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