Middleton, Thomas

(1580-1627)

   English dramatist, a younger contemporary of William Shakespeare. He often wrote in collabo-ration with other playwrights such as William Rowley and Thomas Dekker. He also produced many masques and pageants for public oc-casions. Educated at Queen's College, Oxford, he began his literary career as a poet in 1597 and soon became an active writer for the flourishing London theater. He wrote comedies, both romantic and realistic, and tragedies. His works include The Changeling (1622), which was his most famous tragedy; The Roaring Girl (ca. 1610); and Women Beware Women (1621). In his own time, the most noticed of his plays was his savage attack on Spain and the Spanish ambas-sador in London, A Game at Chess (1624), written at a time when the king was considering a Spanish princess as a bride for the future King Charles I. The drama played to packed and enthusiastic houses nine consecutive days until the government closed it down. Modern quan-titative analysis of Jacobean plays has also identified Middleton's probable authorship of some passages in two Shakespearean plays, Macbeth and Timon of Athens, and has identified him as the probable author of a very influential play, The Revenger's Tragedy (1607).