Ñàéò ïîå糿, â³ðø³, ïîçäîðîâëåííÿ ó â³ðøàõ :: Thomas Middleton :: Êðèòèêà

Thomas Middleton :: Êðèòèêà

Middleton is considered one of the finest English playwrights of the Jacobean period, ranked by some critics behind only William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. A productive writer and frequent collaborator, he composed some thirty plays, as well as poetry, prose pamphlets, masques, and pageants with such contemporaries as Thomas Dekker, William Rowley, and John Webster. Some scholars argue that he even collaborated with Shakespeare on Timon of Athens and was the anonymous reviser of Macbeth (which includes two songs from Middleton's The Witch). Middleton's plays are noted for their intricate plotting and moral complexity. His comedies, including most notably The Roaring Girl (1611) and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (c. 1613), are among the first so-called "city comedies" about middle-class London life. His greatest tragedies, including The Revenger's Tragedy* (c. 1606), Women Beware Women (c. 1621), and The Changeling (1622), confront contemporary corruption and depravity. Middleton's early poetry was unsuccessful, but as a playwright his range included popular comedies, satires, tragicomedies, and tragedies. His early comedies, unlike Shakespeare's romantic comedies, were "citizen comedies" set in contemporary middle-class London. Constructed around schemes and intrigues typically involving money and marriage, plays like A Trick to Catch the Old One (1605), A Mad World, My Masters (1606), The Roaring Girl, and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside are indebted to New Comedy, a genre derived from Plautus and Terence in which father-son conflicts are resolved through trickery. They depend on farcical action and allegorical characters with exaggerated virtues and vices. At the same time, the world of Middleton's comedies is one in which there are no moral absolutes; the ostensible heroes are often merely the most effective schemers, the villains may go unpunished, and supposedly virtuous characters often emerge as fools or hypocrites. Middleton's great tragedies are also set in morally ambiguous worlds that corrode the virtue of the principal characters. Like Shakespeare's Hamlet, they derive from the tradition of revenge tragedy, in which the hero tries to resolve moral conflict by resorting to violence that usually results in his own death. Vindice in The Revenger's Tragedy, Beatrice and De Flores in The Changeling, and virtually all of the figures in Women Beware Women (1621) capitulate to the pervasive moral corruption of society. With penetrating psychological insight, Middleton shows these characters to be self-conscious victims of desire in a world insufficiently governed by social restraints.