1 - Middleton

Summary

This chapter will examine what is generally regarded as the unaided work of Thomas Middleton. The main focus will be on his dramatic output. The plays participate in debates on current social and political concerns: shifting viewpoints, re-presentation of themes, rewriting of dramatic situations in different genres, and a characteristic mixing of genres suggest a writer who looks at contemporary ideas and issues from a range of perspectives in an attempt to come to terms with a changing world. These features make Thomas Middleton a writer who is recognizably very modern.

Most of Middleton's life was spent in London, and experience of the city informs much of his work. Indeed, he has been called ‘a key voice of London … in the first quarter of the seventeenth- century’. London provides one of two points of focus in this chapter. The other is the world of the court, increasingly the setting for plays after about 1613, and an indication of a growing engagement in political debate at a time when he was writing pageants and entertainments for city employers.

‘A KEY VOICE OF LONDON’

The London about which Middleton was writing in the early years of the seventeenth century was undergoing considerable expansion. Large-scale migration from the countryside brought changes in social relations. The majority of worker migrants were single and had left family units in other parts of the country, thus fracturing family ties. They came to an unfamiliar environment, lacking the identity and support provided by a family in a small rural community. Crowded and unsanitary living conditions led to frequent outbreaks of plague and high mortality rates. Despite this, the continuing influx led to a significant increase in London's population. One of the effects of high mortality was to make remarriage after a short interval very common in order to maintain a family or household, simply as a matter of survival. A widower with children would need someone to look after them while he worked, whilst a widow would often be in need of male protection and economic support. Prostitution might be the only recourse for a woman left to fend for herself.