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Thomas Middleton

Thomas Middleton (1580-1627) was a poet and playwright of the English Renaissance, who flourished during the Jacobean Era (1603-1625). One of the most successful dramatists of his time, he often collaborated with other playwrights, including John Webster, Thomas Dekker, and most notably, William Shakespeare (1564-1616) – indeed, Middleton is thought to have co-wrote Timon of Athens (circa 1606) with Shakespeare and provided revisions for Macbeth and Measure for Measure. Middleton was a prolific writer, who penned masques, pageants, and plays, excelling in both genres of tragedy and comedy. His best-known works include The Revenger's Tragedy (1606), The Changeling (1622), and A Game at Chess (1624).

Early Life

Thomas Middleton was born in London in the spring of 1580 and was baptized on 18 April. His father, a bricklayer, died when he was only six years old, leaving behind an estate valued at £335, a substantial amount. His mother, Anne, soon took a second husband, a gentleman grocer named Thomas Harvey. Harvey had invested in Sir Walter Raleigh's ill-fated Roanoke Colony, which was mysteriously abandoned by its colonists in 1587. Having lost a lot of money in the venture, Harvey was unable to pay back his debts and spent much of his marriage either hiding from creditors or serving stints in debtor's jail. In his desperation, Harvey eventually tried to access the inheritance left behind by Middleton's late father, which Anne had placed in a trust for her two children. This initiated a frustrating, 15-year legal battle that played out over the course of Middleton's childhood. This experience likely led to his later satirical critiques of lawyers and the legal system.

In 1598, Middleton left the family drama behind to attend Queen's College, Oxford, though he only studied there for a few years before dropping out, without having obtained a degree. Around this time, Middleton made his first attempt at writing poetry – his work The Wisdom of Solomon Paraphrased was an ambitious first project, coming in at 4,166 lines, which, as scholar Stanley Wells points out, is longer than the longest text of Hamlet. The poem was dedicated to the Earl of Essex, likely in an effort to secure his patronage, though it is unlikely that Essex ever read it; indeed, the poem was unsuccessful and was hardly read at all. Undaunted, Middleton tried again with the much shorter (only 539 lines) poem, The Ghost of Lucrece (1600). This poem was inspired, both narratively and stylistically, by William Shakespeare, whose own poem, The Rape of Lucrece, had been published several years earlier to great acclaim. Middleton meant for his poem to be a kind of sequel to Shakespeare's, using much of the same imagery and composing it in the same rhyme scheme.

It is clear that, by the time he started writing poetry, Middleton had become fascinated with Elizabethan theatre and had already begun to idolize some of its major figures like Shakespeare. In February 1601, a witness in one of the family's lawsuits testified that Middleton was "in London daily accompanying the players," which confirms that he was at least going to the theatre every day, if not already working as an apprentice writer (quoted in Wells, 169). A few months later, he inherited £25, which was all that was left to him from his father's estate after the exhaustive legal battle. With a pressing need for money, Middleton turned to writing satirical pamphlets. These did well enough to earn him the attention of Philip Henslowe, the leading impresario of public theatre in London, who was soon commissioning him to write plays.

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