Book description
One of the great Renaissance playwrights, Middleton wrote tragedies
essentially different from either Marlowe's or Shakespeare's, being
wittier than the former and more grittily ironic than the latter. The
genre of 'citizen tragedy' came into its own in the eighteenth century,
but Middleton can claim to have created it: Bianca, wife of a middling
commercial agent, arouses the lust of the Duke of Florence and becomes
his mistress, first secretly, then openly and finally, after her husband
has been seduced by the scheming Lady Livia and stabbed by Livia's
brother, the Duke's wife. Livia plots her revenge, and the play ends
with a banquet and a masque that are a triumph of black farce.
Middleton's powerful, psychologically complex female characters and his
clear-sighted analysis of misogyny are bound to impress today's
audiences, but it is the pervasive irony - cynicism, even - with which
he dissects the motivations of both oppressor and victim that makes him
so eerily modern.
