Middleton, Thomas

Middleton, Thomas (1580–1627), English dramatist, who worked mainly for Henslowe, writing often in collaboration with other play-wrights of the time. Many of the plays in which he had a hand are now lost, but he is known to have worked with Dekker on The Honest Whore (1604) and The Roaring Girl (1610); with William Rowley on A Fair Quarrel (c.1615), The Changeling (1622), one of the plays by which they are chiefly remembered, and The Spanish Gipsy (1623), based on two plays by Cervantes. Among the more important of Middleton's own plays are A Trick to Catch the Old One (1604), to which Massinger may be indebted for the plot of his A New Way to Pay Old Debts (c.1623); A Mad World, My Masters (1607); A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1611); Women Beware Women (1621), showing that mingling of fine poetry, melodrama, and insight into feminine psychology which characterize the best of Middleton's work; and finally A Game at Chess (1624). This last was a political satire dealing with the fruitless attempts being made at the time to unite the royal houses of England and Spain, and may have earned Middleton a short spell in prison on the complaint of the Spanish Ambassador. Middleton is credited by some critics with The Revenger's Tragedy (1606), formerly attributed to Tourneur, but the question so far remains undecided. A prolific and versatile writer, Middleton was also responsible for the text of a number of masques and pageants, now lost.