Middleton,Thomas

Abstract

Best known for tragedies such asThe changelingandWomen beware womenand as the author ofA game at chess, the most famous theatrical cause célèbre of the English Renaissance, Thomas Middleton (1580–1627) was one of the most skilful and versatile dramatists of his day. He was baptized at St Lawrence Jewry in the City of London on 18 April 1580, the son of William Middleton, a wealthy London bricklayer and builder who had a coat of arms and owned property in Shoreditch and Lime‐house, and Anne Snow. His father's death in January 1586 and his mother's remarriage to Thomas Harvey the following November plunged the family into a prolonged series of lawsuits. In April 1598 Middleton entered Queen's College, Oxford, but he seems to have left without completing his degree. In 1601 he was described as being ‘in London daily accompanying the players’, and the records kept by the theatrical entrepreneur Philip Henslowe show that he was writing for one of the London companies, the Admiral's Men, by 1602. Around this time he married Mary Magdalen Marbeck, sister of one of the Admiral's Men and granddaughter of the composer and organist John Marbeck. By 1604 he was writing for the Children of Paul's, one of London's all‐boy theatre companies, and for Prince Henry's Men (as the Admiral's Men had become after the accession of James I). He later worked for the Children of the Queen's Revels, the King's Men, Prince Charles's Men, and the two companies successively patronized by James I's daughter, Princess Elizabeth. Alongside his work for the commercial theatre Middleton wrote a number of non‐dramatic pamphlets and poems, and he was one of the foremost writers of civic pageants in the 1610s and 1620s; he also held the post of chronologer to the City of London from 1620. In August 1624 his playA game at chesswas performed for nine days in a row – a then unprecedented run – by the King's Men. Satirizing current events and contemporary politicians through the metaphor of a chess game, the play caused a scandal which led to the King's Men being called before the Privy Council to explain themselves and, apparently, to Middleton's incarceration in the Fleet prison. His career in the commercial theatre seems to have ended withA game at chess;his last known work was on a lord mayor's show in October 1626. Middleton was buried at St Mary's, Newington Butts, across the river Thames from the City of London, on 4 July 1627.