Thomas Middleton

The life and work of Thomas Middleton was multifaceted and prolific, as only a brief glance at his oeuvre reveals: he wrote poetry and prose as well as drama across all genres; his plays were set in urban as well as courtly contexts; he wrote political satire and civic pageants for the city of London, as well as masques for performance at court. He was also not averse to collaboration, as the plays he composed with Thomas Dekker and William Rowley, but also with William Shakespeare (with whom he collaborated on Timon of Athens) demonstrate. Middleton’s creative intermingling of settings and styles and his straddling of high and low genres, as well as of the personal and the political, makes it difficult to pin him down, be