Thomas Middleton

Abstract

Middleton’s two best tragedies, The Changeling (1622) and Women Beware Women (c. 1621–5), are domestic, unheroic, low-toned. They reveal an intense fascination with the process of evil working quietly, and with devastating effect, in prosaic people in everyday situations and settings. Although they are profoundly sociological in their orientation, their conception of society is simple - a group of individuals knit together by the bonds of family and neighbourhood. The evil which corrodes those bonds is not something which can be traced to the vices of the great and the abuses of political power. Rather, Middleton’s world is a moral democracy where ruler and subject, master and servant, parent and child, and male and female are all marked in varying degrees with the same flaw: a blind determination to get their own way.