No Wit, No Help Like a Woman's

by Thomas Middleton, Lowell E. Johnson (Editor)

Presents the seventeenth-century English dramatist's comedy about disguise and romantic intrigue

144 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 1611

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

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.