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Thomas Middleton

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During his career Thomas Middleton (1580-1627) produced a pretty spectacular canon of plays: spectacular in quantity, quality, and scope. It's no surprise that Middleton excelled at plays of social intrigue, given that it was part of his life from a young age. He was baptised in 1580, the son of Anne and William Middleton; his father was part of the guild of tilers and bricklayers, and had a certified coat of arms, making young Thomas Middleton a gentleman. In 1586 Middleton's father died, and his mother married the grocer Thomas Harvey. Two weeks into the marriage Harvey tried to claim the Middleton children's inheritance for his own, and fifteen years of legal battles between husband and wife ensued. Middleton appeared in court to testify multiple times between 1597 and 1606. It's no wonder, then, that his characters meddle in equivocation and social wrangling. Middleton entered The Queen's College, University of Oxford in 1598, but left university to become an actor and a playwright. Etching for Vizetelly...
Read the essay: Thomas Middleton: No Wit, No Help like a Playwright's by Kate O'Connor
# Title Description Contributor
1 A Chaste Maid in Cheapside: Thomas Middleton

This lecture discusses comedy, fertility, and all those illegitimate children in this play about...

Emma Smith
2 The Roaring Girl: Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker

Based on a contemporary scandal of a woman who dressed in male clothing, this play of topsy-...

Emma Smith
3 The Revenger's Tragedy: Thomas Middleton

A blackly camp tragedy - Hamlet without the narcissism - set in a court corrupted by lust and...

Emma Smith
# Essay Title Description Contributor
1 English Renaissance Timeline: Some Historical and Cultural Dates

This list offers an overview of some historical and cultural dates from the English Renaissance...

Kate O'Connor
2 Thomas Middleton: No Wit, No Help like a Playwright's

During his career Thomas Middleton (1580-1627) produced a pretty spectacular canon of plays:...

Kate O'Connor
3 Renaissance Theatre

When John Brayne built the Red Lion Theatre in London’s Whitechapel in 1569, he could hardly...

Emma Smith
# Title Description Author
1 The Roaring Girl or Moll Cutpurse

ebook version of The Roaring Girl or Moll Cutpurse

Dekker, Thomas and Middleton, Thomas
2 The works of Thomas Middleton (Vols 1-8)

Vol I: Introduction; Blurt, master-constable; The Phœnix; Michaelmas term.
Vol II:...

Thomas Middleton
3 The works of Thomas Middleton.. (v 4)

... collected, with some account of the author, and notes, by A. Dyce.
Volume 4. A...

Thomas Middleton
4 The works of Thomas Middleton.. (v 3)

... collected, with some account of the author, and notes, by A. Dyce
Volume 3: The...

Thomas Middleton
# Resource Title Description Contributor
1 Thomas Middleton 1887 etching

Portrait of Thomas Middleton from his selected plays (1887). By My scan; etching for Vizetelly...

# Resource Title Description Contributor
1 Science of Middleton (images)

Diagrams showing various ways of illustrating speaker turns, speech lengths, speaker...

Patrick Lockley