Trick to Catch the Old One

by Thomas Middleton

Trick to catch the old one. New Mermaid Series.

Genres: Plays, Theatre, Classics, Fiction, 17th Century, Read For School, Drama

Paperback

First published January 1, 1605

About the author

Thomas 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.

Reviews

[jules · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. jacobean urban comedy is NOT my genre because the characters tend to be so two-dimensional and insincere but this is my favourite i’ve read yet — i don’t know if it’s meant to be a response to r&j but i had a great time reading it that way. society if those stupid old men’s rivalry got defeated by clever young people’s trickery and the new urban economic system or something.

[Matthew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Seventeenth-century drama was certainly a period when writers saw the world in very grey tones. It is not as if the dramatists were necessarily astute when it came to understanding human nature. Many of the characters in their works were essentially stock figures from fiction – dissolute heroes, miserly relatives, prostitutes etc.

What I mean rather is that the heroes are sometimes not much better than the villains, both in comedies and tragedies. We are encouraged to identify with the heroes not because they are moral exemplars but because they are wittier and wilier than the other characters.

This is true of the hero of Thomas Middleton’s drama, A Trick to Catch the Old One. Theodorus Witgood is a penniless young man whose fortune has been appropriated by his greedy uncle. Such qualities ought to make a sympathetic hero, and Middleton certainly passes Witgood off as one.

Yet Witgood possesses many of the qualities that would make him a fop or a fool in another play. He is only sympathetic here because he is presented as the play’s hero, and he manages to outwit the other characters.

At the start of the play, Witgood has run through his money by gaming, visiting brothels, and keeping a courtesan. There is some confusion about whether the courtesan has only slept with Witgood or is a common prostitute.

Middleton gives his female characters short shrift in this play. Neither the courtesan nor the niece are given a name, even though one is Witgood’s lover, and the other is the woman he plans to marry.

Witgood is similarly cavalier. He is quite ready to drop the courtesan who has been loyal to him in order to marry the niece of Walkadine Hoard, a London merchant who is a rival to Witgood’s uncle. He possibly loves the niece, but is clearly calculating that marriage to her will free him from his debts.

The moral implications of this are lost on Middleton. The courtesan is set up to marry Hoard, which will make her wealthy, and Witgood will marry money, so everyone is happy with this arrangement it seems. Hoard will not be, but the courtesan pledges loyalty to him, so presumably he will get over that.

In order to get his money back off his uncle, Witgood passes himself off as wealthy with plans to marry a rich widow (the courtesan). This leads Hoard to seek her for himself, while Witgood’s uncle Pecunius Lucre is prepared to give Witgood his own money back purely to score points off against Hoard.

There is no great substance here. Middleton mocks usury and creditors, but that might be because he had debts of his own, and did not like paying them. Vice is certainly punished, but lesser vice is rewarded. Only a few ironic statements of repentance at the end of the play are supposed to convince us that these characters will behave better in future.

Still while there is no great depth in A Trick to Catch the Old One, it is certainly amusing enough. It may not be great art, but it is good comedy.

[Richard Rogers · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the first Thomas Middleton play I've read, and it's okay. A little up and down. Parts of it are quite entertaining, and it's not too hard to understand (comparatively speaking), but a lot of the action is annoying and hard to get behind, so started off by giving it a 3. However, I'm talking myself into a 4 as I review the story and realize it's pretty good, actually. :)

A young man--Witgood--has been messing around, wasting money gambling and paying for prostitutes, and just generally being irresponsible. His rich uncle (Uncle Lucre) has taken advantage of him when he needed a loan instead of helping him out and has taken control of his property. (Before the play, even.) I'm not sure how he did that, but it's part of the setup. But through the course of the play, Witgood gets his property back, has his debts wiped out, marries a good girl, and foists his prostitute/mistress off on his uncle's worst enemy, another usurer named Hoard. It's all tricks; they make everyone think that the courtesan is actually a rich heiress, and from that point just let all the greedy gold-diggers drive the action.

I was put off by the attitude everyone took toward the poor woman who had been Witgood's mistress. She's clearly a decent person, seems very kind, and yet she's spoken of as if she's monstrous. Witgood, who we are meant to be very sympathetic to, helps her out by setting her up with a husband, but Lucre is a horrible person. It's treated like a great joke on the greedy old man, but I'm imagining the poor girl having to be stuck with him. Witgood, meanwhile, has moved on from her to another girl who he marries, because you don't marry your mistress, right? One of Lucre's friends, invited to his wedding feast, is furious when he recognizes his wife and starts to leave like everyone else. As he's going, he says to Lucre:

"Fie, fie! A man of your repute and name!
You'll feast your friends, but cloy 'em first with shame."

Anyway, I get it. That's the attitude of the time. Can't really blame the author. But their hate toward one of the few sympathetic characters in the play was kinda shocking. (She very carefully never lies to Lucre. She says she has no money or property. He just thinks she's being secretive and doesn't believe her. In the end, it's his greed, not her statements, that makes the scheme work.)

The tricks were good, getting revenge on greedy money guys, getting Witgood out of trouble and setting his mistress up for life (hoping, I suppose, that the rich old guy she tricked into marriage doesn't last long). There are happy endings all around. Pretty solid story, all told.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Sharon Healy-Yang · Rating 5 out of 5]

Witty and clever. I couldn't wait to see how it wrapped up. Primo Jacobean comedy.

[Anneliese Gato · Rating 4 out of 5]

Funny. Enjoyable. I really liked this one.

[Robbie Amelie]

I see.

[Yorgos · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really makes you appreciate Shakespeare more when you read his non-Marlowe contemporaries.

This is a competent play in the New Comedy tradition (various editors argue it's a fusion of New Comedy and medieval Prodigal son plays; I felt like the former was much more prominent). Middleton's poetic chops aren't really inspiring but he writes in a very direct, lay style which has a kind of attraction. It's fun to see EME in a less elevated register. Lots of jokes/wordplay about aunts (prostitutes) and the million innocent words that also mean 'to have sex with.' (Mulholland is usually polite in his glosses but Loughrey & Taylor are hilariously direct: e.g, glossing knows in V.ii.96 ("he that knows a woman to be a quean must needs be a knave"), the footnote reads "knows: punning on knows = fucks")

Let's just get out of the way that the Mulholland edition is a REFFERENCE edition for scholars. Almost every page of the actual play-text itself is over 50% footnotes, even though they're set in a much smaller font than the play-text. The introduction goes into absurd detail about the compositors who worked on the quarto and various textual problems; several appendices; etc. I usually like to read books cover to cover but I had to make an exception here, and generally I'm kind of over the Revels editions. These notes are COPIOUS. Mulholland has actually put up a production of this play, so it's nice reading his perspective sometimes, and he also has the most coherent stage directions, but it's way too much and tbh it's why this is 3 and not 4 stars. On the other hand the Loughrey & Taylor edition (Five Plays by Middleton) has slightly too few notes, so I by the end I was bouncing back and forth. If it weren't so massive (one reviewer on goodreads writes "This book literally injured by wrist while I tried to read it") I'd recommend the Lovagnino & Taylor Collected Works; best notes and a nice intro.

All characters are a bit flat: maybe there's something to be said about Witgood (the protagonist), but maybe I just really liked Alan Rickman's sleek, slimy, melodramatic portrayal on the BBC radio adaptation (easily found on Alan Rickman fan pages). Nobody else is interesting, even Dampit which the editors claim I'm supposed to like. The whole plot offers kind of an interesting case study in sexual-economy and the law surrounding it in EM England, but it's not really moving, and the Courtesan (who's at the heart of the plot) isn't quiiiite given enough room to shine, though she could have.

Plot design is competent but not amazing; subplot is bad and the main action is coherent but on the whole nothing too special.

Started this basically right after Othello and MAN is that a contrast. Let's see what else Middleton has to offer. Wish I could give this 3.5 but since I found reading it a bit of a chore I'm giving it 3.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Gill · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The Old One" is just an elderly man, not a devil. An entertaining City comedy.

Read as part of the Shakespeare Institute 2019 readathon, #Websterthon

Re-read as part of the REP online readathon of the repertoire of the Jacobean Children's companies. A little slow to take off, but well-plotted and some excellent smaller roles and subplots.

[Michael P. · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of Middleton's great comedies.

[Michael P. · Rating 5 out of 5]

A good starter edition of this great and cynical comedy.

[Bettie · Rating 3 out of 5]

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