The Second Maiden's Tragedy

by Thomas Middleton, Anne Lancashire (Editor)

The first important modern edition of Middleton's The Lady's Tragedy or The Second Maiden's Tragedy, although Lancashire stops short of attributing the play to Middleton.

Genres: Plays, Drama, Horror

320 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1978

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

[sasha]

spicy

[ML Character]

Omfk, this cracked me up. I want to stage this so badly -
<<>>
and why no one has names? "The Tyrant" "The Lady"?! I knew things were gonna be bad [read: Amazing] when the Lady dies in act 2 or 3 - only to be around as a ghost sooooo much, and even better be wheeled on stage as a dressed up corpse in act 5 where Govianus, her erstwhile husband, disguises himself as a painter and then paints poison onto her lips so the Tyrant dies upon kissing her? LOVE. And Govianus, our hero, had earlier tried and fainted when she asks him to kill her to escape the Tyrant? So she has to kill herself? so over the top.

[Gill]

A true Jacobean bloodbath. Low on incest, but necrophilia compensates. Middleton reworks a trick from The Revenger's Tragedy of some years before, but with a corpse, not just a skull. A considerable pile-up of corpses onstage adds to the fun, and there's a ghost. Of course there's a ghost.

Read as part of the "Extra Mile" Shakespeare Institute online readathon in the lockdown summer/autumn of 2020.

[Milo]

I don’t buy it for a moment as a work of Shakespeare, even if it could slot into his Problem Play, or better his dubious collaborations period at least in its general shape. I feel the attribution is led far less by likelihood than it is the genuine pleasure of putting the name ‘William Shakespeare’ on an anonymous playscript. That pleasure is perhaps more worthy than is the pursuit of truth. But given that other men have spent it, I can now deny them what they have denied me. Middleton sounds like the right kind of name. One part is a Jacobean rescript of The Curious Impertinent, only much more savage, and much more bloody. I find something in that story is undermined by ending it in a Titus bloodbath. But I can appreciate the talented fingers that arranged a very untheatrical ending into something so stark. The main plot is a little less scrutable. Presumably the extreme virtue of the Lady is put against the extreme flimsiness of the Wife. Both, however, end in mass death. The crucial difference is then the Lady’s fate: she returns in some ghostly, Marian form. She is infinite light. Therefore these scabrous dealings in the metal earth need not concern her; we shall all die, but she will live forever. These two stories do not much touch one another; their interreference is occasional and a little meek. Certain scenes are played well, but I remain unsure about the whole.

[Olívia]

“Oh boy, now that I’m dead the Tyrant can’t sleep w me!” [NECROPHILIA HAS ENTERED THE CHAT]

[Frankie DeGiorgio]

BANGER.

[Molly]

*sigh* born to read silly romances; forced to read obscure early modern drama (I pay £9k for the pleasure of doing so)

[Tom]

Okay, second time through, I'm not sure I would give this play four stars: this is one of those plays where the emotions are of such a high pitch throughout that one wonders how they sustained it: it's like The Revenger's Tragedy turned up to 11, then with a bit more gas underneath, and then a snort of coke.

Apparently it was edited for political content, but any King who thought the Tyrant was based 0n him really shouldn't be allowed near the levers of power: I think I would rather have Putin and Trump's lovechild than this nutjob: as far as I know, even Berlusconi didn't dig up his girlfriend to have sex with her.

....

The Second Maiden's Tragedy (also called The Maiden's Tragedy, or the Lady's Tragedy) is a grand guignol of a Gothic aberration. The men in it are (as in a lot of Middleton) largely human excrement, and to describe their behaviour as extreme doesn't quite do it justice.

The subplot (!) ends with six dead on stage, which is then followed with a necrophile scene prefiguring Psycho.

The men in this play are utterly useless, and the women get caught in their crossfire. But like a large number of these sort of plays, it is addictive, and I really want to see it done live.

[Scott]

Like most of the Shakespeare apocrypha, it's hard to believe anybody believed this was written by Shakespeare. Although nothing really special, this is not unenjoyable, most of the time. However, it's also not particularly memorable. Lije any decent tragedy, however, there's a high body count, so it does have that going for it.