THOMAS MIDDLETON
FIVE PLAYS
A TRICK TO CATCH THE OLD ONE
THE REVENGER'S TRAGEDY
A CHASTE MAID IN CHEAPSIDE
WOMEN BEWARE WOMEN
THE CHANGELING
EDITED BY BRYAN LOUGHREY AND
NEIL TAYLOR
In this play,' T. S. Eliot wrote of Women Beware Women, 'Middleton is surpassed by one Elizabethan alone and that is Shakespeare?
This collection of plays shows Middleton experimenting with the classical genres of tragedy and comedy as he develops his own individual dramatic voice. In his early comedies, characterized by an almost Terentian delight in ingenious plotting, love and marriage are merely counters in an elaborate game. But the game is governed by greed, as is the whole world of The Revenger's Tragedy, a Senecan revenge play imbued with biting, almost comical, irony. In his later plays Women Beware Women and The Changeling, Middleton gives the conventionally comic subjects of love and sex profoundly tragic treatment, revealing a world dominated by the corrupting power of lust but subject to the futility of human pretensions.