Thomas Middleton - The Collected Works

Thomas Middleton

The Collected Works

General Editors Gary Taylor & John Lavagnino

Published by Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007. Hardback. 1^st.  Approx 25.5cm H x 19.5cm W. vii, 2016pp.

Book condition: Used. Very Good++. No tears, annotations, or markings. Cover is also in VG condition and under a protective mylar cover. Note this is a large heavy book.

Thomas Middleton (1580-1627) - 'our other Shakespeare' - is the only other Renaissance playwright who created lasting masterpieces of both comedy and tragicomedy. He also wrote the greatest box-office hit of early modern London (the unique history play A Game at Chess ). He was the only playwright asked or allowed, by Shakespeare’s fellow actors, to revise Shakespeare’s plays, and his early adaptations of Macbeth and Measure for Measure are the versions known to readers and audiences ever since.

Middleton’s range extends beyond these traditional genres to masques, street theatre, literary journalism, experimental fiction, epigrams, and Biblical and political commentaries. He collaborated with Shakespeare on Timon of Athens, and his other collaborators included Webster, Dekker, Ford, Heywood, and Rowley.

Compared by critics to Aristophanes and Ibsen, Racine and Joe Orton, he has influenced writers as diverse as Aphra Behn and T. S. Eliot. Though repeatedly censored in his own time, Middleton is now particularly admired for his courageous, psychologically complex, verbally-compelling portraits of men and women pursuing each other, money, power, and God.