Five Plays

Thomas Middleton

Penguin, 1988 - Drama - 421 pages

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.

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LibraryThing Review

User Review  - Roger_Scoppie - LibraryThing

Thomas Middleton was one of the most prolific playwrights of the Jacobean era. This collection comprises five of his powerful plays, from the comedies satirizing city life, 'A Trick to Catch the Old ...

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - ryvre - LibraryThing

This volume contains A Trick to Catch the Old One, The Revenger's Tragedy, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, Women Beware Women, and The Changeling. (It doesn't contain A Game at Chess, but other than that ...

Contents

• Introduction: ix
• The authorship of The Revengers Tragedy: xxv
• The works of Thomas Middleton: xxix
• Further reading: xxxi
• Editorial procedure: xxxiii
• A Trick to Catch the Old One: 1
• The Revengers Tragedy: 71
• A Chaste Maid in Cheapside: 161
• Women Beware Women: 239
• The Changeling: 345

About the author

Thomas Middleton, one of the greatest of Jacobean dramatists, was born in 1580, the son of a well-to-do London bricklayer. He went to Oxford but seems not to have gained a degree. Thereafter he pursued the precarious career of a professional writerin London. In a quarter of a century he wrote, either on his own or in collaboration, nearly fifty plays and other theatrical pieces. His greatest contemporary success was A Game at Chess, which was suppressed by the government. He died in 1627.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Five Plays; Classics Series; Penguin books; Penguin classics
• Author: Thomas Middleton
• Editors: Bryan Loughrey, Neil Taylor
• Edition: illustrated, reprint
• Publisher: Penguin, 1988
• ISBN: 0140432191, 9780140432190
• Length: 421 pages
• Subjects: Drama / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh