Author Description

THIS VOLUME CONTAINS: The Roaring Girl, a city comedy depicting the exploits of Mary Frith (1611); co-written with Dekker The Witch, a tragicomedy (1616) A Fair Quarrel, a tragicomedy (1616). Co-written with Rowley Hengist, King of Kent, or The Mayor of Quinborough, a tragedy (1620) The Widow (1615–16) Middleton wrote in many genres, including tragedy, history and city comedy. His best-known plays are the tragedies The Changeling (with William Rowley) and Women Beware Women, and the cynically satirical city comedy A Chaste Maid in Cheapside. Earlier editions of The Revenger's Tragedy attributed the play to Cyril Tourneur,[6] or refused to arbitrate between Middleton and Tourneur. However, since the statistical studies by David Lake[8] and MacDonald P. Jackson,[9] Middleton's authorship has not been seriously contested, and no further scholar has defended the Tourneur attribution.[10] The Oxford Middleton and its companion piece, Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture, offer extensive evidence both for Middleton's authorship of The Revenger's Tragedy, for his collaboration with Shakespeare on Timon of Athens, and for his adaptation and revision of Shakespeare's Macbeth and Measure for Measure. It has also been argued that Middleton collaborated with Shakespeare on All's Well That Ends Well. However, these latter collaborative attributions are not universally accepted by scholars. Middleton's work is diverse even by the standards of his age. He did not have the kind of official relationship with a particular company that Shakespeare or Fletcher had. Instead he appears to have written on a freelance basis for any number of companies. His output ranges from the "snarling" satire of Michaelmas Term (performed by the Children of Paul's) to the bleak intrigues of The Revenger's Tragedy (performed by the King's Men). His early work was informed by the flourishing of satire in the late Elizabethan period, while his maturity was influenced by the ascen