Thomas Middleton, Renaissance Dramatist

Thomas Middleton, Renaissance Dramatist
Author: Michelle O'Callaghan
Publisher:
Total Pages: 214
Release: 2009
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN:

This volume brings together aspects of Middleton's craft through a detailed study of representative plays.

Thomas Middleton, Renaissance Dramatist

Thomas Middleton, Renaissance Dramatist
Author: Michelle O'Callaghan
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2009-03-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0748631690

Thomas Middleton is one of the major English Renaissance dramatists alongside Marlowe, Shakespeare and Jonson. Middleton continues to fascinate audiences and readers with his black humour, his wry and witty treatment of sexuality, morality, and politics. He is a consummate professional dramatist, experimenting with stagecraft in a manner that combines the visual and the verbal to startling effect. This book brings together these aspects of Middleton's craft through a detailed study of his major plays. Middleton experimented with, and helped to shape, a range of dramatic genres: city comedy, tragicomedy, romance, and revenge tragedy. This new guide analyses in detail how the plays work in terms of the early modern theatre and dramatic genres, as well as elucidating the broader cultural issues shaping the plays. It provides an introduction to critical readings of Middleton's works as well as modern performances, demonstrating how modern critics, producers, dramatists and film makers see Middleton's dark, playful and challenging plays as speaking to our times.Key Features*Ideal student guide with its wide ranging introduction to Middleton's city comedies, tragedies, and collaborative plays and its readings of key texts such as The Roaring Girl, Chaste Maid in Cheapside, Revenger's Tragedy, Women Beware Women, and The Changeling*Uses the most recent edition available, the Oxford Middleton (2007)*Provides background contexts guiding readers through criticism of the plays as well as recent work on early modern theatre and culture*Emphasis on Middleton's stagecraft and its assessment of modern adaptations and film versions of his plays

Women Beware Women

Women Beware Women
Author: Thomas Middleton
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 179
Release: 2014-07-03
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1408144603

One of the great Renaissance playwrights, Middleton wrote tragedies essentially different from either Marlowe's or Shakespeare's, being wittier than the former and more grittily ironic than the latter. The genre of 'citizen tragedy' came into its own in the eighteenth century, but Middleton can claim to have created it: Bianca, wife of a middling commercial agent, arouses the lust of the Duke of Florence and becomes his mistress, first secretly, then openly and finally, after her husband has been seduced by the scheming Lady Livia and stabbed by Livia's brother, the Duke's wife. Livia plots her revenge, and the play ends with a banquet and a masque that are a triumph of black farce. Middleton's powerful, psychologically complex female characters and his clear-sighted analysis of misogyny are bound to impress today's audiences, but it is the pervasive irony - cynicism, even - with which he dissects the motivations of both oppressor and victim that makes him so eerily modern.

The Changeling

The Changeling
Author: Thomas Middleton
Publisher:
Total Pages: 104
Release: 1653
Genre: English drama
ISBN:

The Changeling is a popular Renaissance tragedy in which the relationship between money, sex, and power is explored. Frequently performed and studied in University courses, it is a key text in the New Mermaids series.

Five Plays

Five Plays
Author: Thomas Middleton
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 468
Release: 1988
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780140432190

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.

The Selected Plays of Thomas Middleton

The Selected Plays of Thomas Middleton
Author: David L. Frost
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 415
Release: 1978-05-25
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 9780521216982

T. S. Eliot said of the Jacobean dramatist Thomas Middleton (1580-1627) that 'he wrote one tragedy which more than any other play except those of Shakespeare has a profound and permanent moral value and horror': Middleton has increasingly been recognised as one of the most important, if not the most important, Jacobean dramatist after Shakespeare himself. This volume contains The Changeling (of which Eliot gave so high an estimate), together with Middleton's other surviving tragedy, Women Beware Women, his best comedy, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, and a more light-hearted early play, A Mad World, My Masters. Though Middleton is typical of many university-trained writers of the period who eked out a living in popular entertainment, his work has a cold satiric stance, a grimly determinist flavour and a savage economy which make it unique. He wrote plays for the boys' companies in the early 1600s and later for Shakespeare's own company, the King's Men, but seems never to have established himself as more than a jobbing dramatist.

A Game at Chess

A Game at Chess
Author: Thomas Middleton
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Total Pages: 136
Release: 1966
Genre: Drama
ISBN:

Ben Jonson, Renaissance Dramatist

Ben Jonson, Renaissance Dramatist
Author: Sean McEvoy
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2008-04-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0748629912

This new guide to the English renaissance's most erudite and yet most street-wise dramatist strongly asserts the theatrical brilliance of his greatest plays in performance, then and now.The book integrates all of Jonson's major plays into the milieu of the turbulent years which produced them, and analyses the way each work examines the issues and challenges of those years: money, power, sex, crime, identity, gender, the theatre itself. It offers a lucid guide to the competing critical views of a playwright who is far more than the obverse of his friend and rival William Shakespeare, and it explains in detail how the undoubted power and energy of these plays in modern performance should be the touchstone of their quality to both critic and reader. The plays discussed include the early Comedies, the Roman Tragedies (Sejanus and Catiline), Volpone, Epicoene, The Alchemist, Bartholomew Fair and The Devil is an Ass.

A Mad World, My Masters and Other Plays:

A Mad World, My Masters and Other Plays:
Author: Thomas Middleton
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 420
Release: 1998-05-07
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780192834553

Michaelmas term: Cast gender - mixed; number - 19 males, 7 females (total 16); size - large; length - 5 acts, 18 scenes. Elizabethan drama. Property swindling of country landowner by city merchant.

Renaissance Drama

Renaissance Drama
Author: Arthur F. Kinney
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 928
Release: 2005-01-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1405119675

This pioneering collection of non-Shakespearean Renaissance drama has now been updated to include more early material, plus Mary Sidney’s The Tragedy of Antony, John Marston’s The Malcontent and Ben Jonson’s Masque of Queens. Second edition of this pioneering collection of works of non-Shakespearean Renaissance drama. Covers the full sweep of dramatic performances, including State progresses and Court masques. Contains material useful for courses on women playwrights or women in Renaissance drama, including Middleton’s Chaste Maid in Cheapside, Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi and Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s The Changeling. Includes plays and pageants not anthologised elsewhere, such as the coronation entries of Elizabeth I and Queen Anne, and Thomas Heywood’s ‘A Woman Killed with Kindness’. For the second edition more early material has been added, such as Noah and The Second Shepherd’s Play. The anthology now also includes Mary Sidney’s The Tragedy of Antony, John Marston’s The Malcontent and Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Queens.