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A Mad World, My Masters and Other Plays
Thomas Middleton (1580-1627) was a writer of great versatility, and his career as a London dramatist spans the most productive, innovative, and exciting period of theatrical activity in the history of English drama. Best known for his tragedies, he also wrote many successful comedies of city life.
This volume offers the best of these A Mad World, My Masters; Michaelmas Term; A Trick to Catch the Old One; No Wit, No Help Like a Woman's.
This volume offers the best of these A Mad World, My Masters; Michaelmas Term; A Trick to Catch the Old One; No Wit, No Help Like a Woman's.
416 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1995
About the author
Thomas Middleton
693 books58 followersThomas Middleton (1580 – 1627) was an English Jacobean playwright and poet. Middleton stands with John Fletcher and Ben Jonson as among the most successful and prolific of playwrights who wrote their best plays during the Jacobean period. He was one of the few Renaissance dramatists to achieve equal success in comedy and tragedy. Also a prolific writer of masques and pageants, he remains one of the most noteworthy and distinctive of Jacobean dramatists.
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January 17, 2024
Middleton is one of those writers who has specific styles: his "sex tragedies" are vicious, showing (like Webster or Ford) the very worst in men (and sometimes women). His comedies, on the other hand, are pieces of fluff. Absolutely nothing wrong with that, and they bump along amusingly, getting lots of laughs with their extreme, venal and venereal characters.
A Mad World, My Masters is one of the latter: the scene where the husband is overhearing his wife cheating on him and thinks she's sobbing over her dying friend is a brilliant piece of comic conceit. The scenes where Follywit continues to gull his granddad are very amusing: basically, the man will do anything for a member of the peerage, including give him £200 just cause he asks for it.
And the central character of The Courtesan (Lady Frank Gullman) is a fabulous creation, with a commentary on the early-seventeenth century escort business from her mother: she is significantly the cleverest character on stage, and outwits everyone.
There is an interesting scene where the Pimp is haunted by the Devil in the form of his lover, and I have no idea if this is supposed to be serious or not. If not, I don't quite get the joke. If so, it's out of kilter with the rest of the play.
I saw Michaelmas Term performed by the Edward's Boys last year, and it was superb. The play still works magnificently: very funny, like a cross between The Sting and Volpone, but without the morality of either.
Yeah, I mean, the bad people are punished at the end, but no one (certainly among the men: the women slightly different) is worthy of any respect. All the men are shallow, venial-venereal, self-centred, and in disguise for most of the play.
The end seems to be from a damaged copy: it feels like it could do with another page, but this is a stonker of a play. Well worth reading.
A Trick To Catch the Old One is a lot of fun: wastrel Witgood and his now ex-girlfriend (called Courtesan in the text, though she clearly has a name, Jane) plan to trick his rich, mean uncle Lucre into supplying him into giving him back his mortgaged property and passing on some more money, and, when she poses as a rich widow, every man in London is after her, with comical results. She is a great character, though frankly why any woman would want Witgood is hard to guess: he's a bit of a shit.
There are a couple of subplots that don't really go anywhere (though the lawyer Dampit's use of insult puts most of Shakespeare's to scorn - "you bibliaminy, you unfeathered cremitoried quean, you cullisance of scabiosity" anyone?) and what happens to the Revenge of Lucre's wife and stepson, who knows?
But this would certainly be performable, and fun to watch.
No Wit, No Help Like A Woman's is one of those plays that goes off in about five directions at once, and at no point do you quite know where it's going. It's got some transvestitism, some clear references to female masturbation, some phenomenal sexist bullying, some incest, and some lost children discovered, but Middleton wants us to read it as a comedy. I could see this play being performed in a bleak, nasty way, and I could also see it being done like a Terry Johnson version of a Carry On film.
At places, he seems to be piling on the pain, and then undercutting with a gag.
This is Middleton at his (?) best. Bleakly funny.
A Mad World, My Masters is one of the latter: the scene where the husband is overhearing his wife cheating on him and thinks she's sobbing over her dying friend is a brilliant piece of comic conceit. The scenes where Follywit continues to gull his granddad are very amusing: basically, the man will do anything for a member of the peerage, including give him £200 just cause he asks for it.
And the central character of The Courtesan (Lady Frank Gullman) is a fabulous creation, with a commentary on the early-seventeenth century escort business from her mother: she is significantly the cleverest character on stage, and outwits everyone.
There is an interesting scene where the Pimp is haunted by the Devil in the form of his lover, and I have no idea if this is supposed to be serious or not. If not, I don't quite get the joke. If so, it's out of kilter with the rest of the play.
I saw Michaelmas Term performed by the Edward's Boys last year, and it was superb. The play still works magnificently: very funny, like a cross between The Sting and Volpone, but without the morality of either.
Yeah, I mean, the bad people are punished at the end, but no one (certainly among the men: the women slightly different) is worthy of any respect. All the men are shallow, venial-venereal, self-centred, and in disguise for most of the play.
The end seems to be from a damaged copy: it feels like it could do with another page, but this is a stonker of a play. Well worth reading.
A Trick To Catch the Old One is a lot of fun: wastrel Witgood and his now ex-girlfriend (called Courtesan in the text, though she clearly has a name, Jane) plan to trick his rich, mean uncle Lucre into supplying him into giving him back his mortgaged property and passing on some more money, and, when she poses as a rich widow, every man in London is after her, with comical results. She is a great character, though frankly why any woman would want Witgood is hard to guess: he's a bit of a shit.
There are a couple of subplots that don't really go anywhere (though the lawyer Dampit's use of insult puts most of Shakespeare's to scorn - "you bibliaminy, you unfeathered cremitoried quean, you cullisance of scabiosity" anyone?) and what happens to the Revenge of Lucre's wife and stepson, who knows?
But this would certainly be performable, and fun to watch.
No Wit, No Help Like A Woman's is one of those plays that goes off in about five directions at once, and at no point do you quite know where it's going. It's got some transvestitism, some clear references to female masturbation, some phenomenal sexist bullying, some incest, and some lost children discovered, but Middleton wants us to read it as a comedy. I could see this play being performed in a bleak, nasty way, and I could also see it being done like a Terry Johnson version of a Carry On film.
At places, he seems to be piling on the pain, and then undercutting with a gag.
This is Middleton at his (?) best. Bleakly funny.
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