THOMAS MIDDLETON (c. 1570–1627).
Thomas Middleton was a Londoner and of a gentle family. The date of his birth can only be roughly conjectured from the probability that he was one of two Thomas Middletons who entered Gray’s Inn in 1593 and 1596, and of his earlier education nothing is known. His first work was The Wisdom of Solomon Paraphrased (1597), and he may be the T. M. of The Black Book (1604) and other pamphlets in prose and verse. He appears as a dramatist, possibly as early as 1599 in The Old Law and certainly in Henslowe’s diary during 1602, writing an unnamed play for Worcester’s men, and for the Admiral’s Caesar’s Fall or The Two Shapes with Dekker (q.v), Drayton, Munday, and Webster, and by himself, Randal Earl of Chester, and a prologue and epilogue to Greene’s Friar Bacon (q.v.). This work is all lost, but by 1604 he had also collaborated with Dekker for the Admiral’s in the extant Honest Whore. From 1602, if not from 1599, to the end of their career in 1606 or 1607, he was also writing diligently for the Paul’s boys. I think he is referred to with their other ‘apes and guls’, Marston and Dekker, in Marston’s Jack Drum’s Entertainment (1600), IV. 40:
How like you Musus fashion in his carriage?
O filthilie, he is as blunt as Paules.
Brabant, the speaker, represents Jonson, who told Drummond in 1619 that he was ‘not of the number of the Faithfull, i. e. Poets, and but a base fellow’ (Laing, 12). Occasional plays for several companies and the beginnings of employment in city pageantry occupied 1607–16, and to later periods belong a fruitful partnership with William Rowley for Prince Charles’s men, and some slight share in the heterogeneous mass of work that passes under the names of Beaumont and Fletcher. He also wrote a few independent plays, of which A Game at Chess (1624) got him into political trouble. At some time before 1623 a few lines of his got interpolated into the text of Macbeth (cf. Warwick edition, p. 164). In 1620 he obtained a post as Chronologer to the City. He married Maria Morbeck, had a son Edward, and dwelt at Newington Butts, where he was buried on 4 July 1627.
Collections
1840. A Dyce, Works of T. M. 5 vols.
1885–6. A. H. Bullen, Works of T. M. 8 vols. [Omits The Honest Whore.]
1887–90. H. Ellis, The Best Plays of T. M. 2 vols. (Mermaid Series). [Includes Trick to Catch the Old One, Chaste Maid in Cheapside, Widow, Roaring Girl, Mayor of Queenborough, and later plays.]
Dissertations: J. Arnheim, T. M. (1887, Archiv, lxxviii. 1, 129, 369); P. G. Wiggin, An Inquiry into the Authorship of the Middleton-Rowley Plays (1897, Radcliffe College Monographs, ix); H. Jung, Das Verhältniss T. M.’s zu Shakspere (1904, Münchener Beiträge, xxix).