Word: middleton
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Taylor, who previously co-edited The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, is part of a growing cohort of critics who regard Middleton as Shakespeare's equal in wordplay and storytelling. "His is a darkly comic and unsparing view of human nature," says Gail Kern Paster, director of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington. "He has a witty and inventive spirit, and several of his plays are as great as any plays that Shakespeare wrote," she adds, citing The Changeling, Women, Beware Women and The Revenger's Tragedy as examples. The idea now is to push him as a grittier, edgier...
...many ways, Middleton speaks to today's audiences on a level Shakespeare cannot. While country boy Shakespeare set his plays in faraway lands of long ago, using language that was old-fashioned even then, Middleton, born and raised in London, wrote about urban life in a dialogue that's more familiar to the modern ear. A latter-day Scorsese, he walked on the dark side of the street, where you couldn't tell the good guys from the bad. "Part of the appeal of Shakespeare is that he takes you back to some imagined, glorious past," says Taylor. "But Middleton...
...Middleton was as much a journalist as a playwright, documenting the politics and society of 17th century London. He saw it transformed by immigration, and witnessed the rise of a middle class struggling to cling on to morality amid a flood of new wealth. "It was a time of incredible ferment and change, both economic and intellectual," says Laurence Boswell, who directed Women, Beware Women for Britain's Royal Shakespeare Company last year. "Middleton was freaked out and excited...
...production of his play A Game at Chess, which satirized the tense Anglo-Spanish relations at the time, was the biggest box-office hit of the era - but it landed him in prison on charges of attempting to provoke public unrest. Unlike some of his fellow playwrights, Middleton dared to write about actual people and current events. This willingness to court controversy led some of his works to be banned or burned, which has made it all the harder for later scholars to reconstruct his oeuvre. There were several attempts in the 20th century to put together his complete works...
Once decoded, though, any one of Middleton's plays tells us more about the London of centuries ago than Shakespeare's entire catalogue could. Shakespeare was a dreamer; he made heroes of kings and princes. Middleton's work was more rooted in reality. His heroes (or, rather, antiheroes) are regular folk in extraordinary situations: merchants, con men and lonely housewives. Nowhere is that more evident than in the way he treats women. In Shakespeare, they tend to be "neatly categorizable as virgins or sluts or Madonnas or monsters," says Celia Daileader, a professor at Florida State University who annotated...