LI. Middleton's Acquaintance With The Merrie Conceited Jests of George Peele

PMLA ◽  
1935 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 753-760 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mildred Gayler Christian
Keyword(s):  
Thomas Middleton ◽  
George Peele

Thomas Middleton, dramatist (1580–1627), was not by any means the literary discoverer of the rogue's fascination. Even the moral Harman had lost himself, at times, in the romantic appeal of the vagrants he pictured, and Greene, after a perfunctory moral preface to his series of Conny-catching Pamphlets (1591–92), had given himself more and more unreservedly to revealing the adventurous life of rogues.

scholarly journals 'Such Violent Hands'

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 182-199
Author(s):  
William David Green
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Thomas Middleton ◽  
Original Text ◽  
Titus Andronicus ◽  
Revenge Tragedy ◽  
Text Understanding ◽  
George Peele ◽  
New Material ◽  
Selling Point

For many, ‘Titus Andronicus’ exemplifies the extreme visual horror which characterises the subgenre of Elizabethan revenge tragedy. Long recognised as a collaboration between William Shakespeare and George Peele, the play’s notorious denouement – in which a Gothic queen is tricked into eating her slaughtered sons – has often been interpreted as a satire upon the revenge genre itself. Yet the nature of the play has recently been complicated by the claim that an additional banquet scene, only present in the 1623 Folio, may be a later addition written by a third dramatist, probably Thomas Middleton, and incorporated into the play sometime after 1616. This article will consider the implications of this probability further. It will explore how the author was not simply adding new material to ‘Titus Andronicus’ in order to provide a new selling point for a later revival of the work, but was constructing a new sequence designed to mirror and complement the already infamous cannibalistic conclusion of the original text. Understanding this scene as a later addition, we can now better understand how this additional scene serves as an integral turning point in the drama’s narrative, and is far less ‘disposable’ than previous critics have been equipped to realise.

Thomas Middleton at Oxford

1970 ◽  
Vol 65 (4) ◽  
pp. 734
Author(s):  
David George
Keyword(s):  
Thomas Middleton

“Our eyes are sentinels unto our judgments”: Embodied Perception in The Changeling

2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-87
Author(s):  
M. Burdick Smith
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Thomas Middleton ◽  
Sense Perception ◽  
Embodied Perception ◽  
Perceptual Theory ◽  
Dramatic Action

This essay argues that Thomas Middleton and William Rowley's The Changeling (1622) draws on debates about sense perception in the period to interrogate the effects of dramatic representation. After a brief overview of early modern perceptual theory, this essay demonstrates that the play's villain, De Flores, manipulates other characters’ perception through language. In fact, De Flores uses theatrical language to manipulate how other characters perceive their environment, indicating the theater's ability to manipulate audiences. By affecting how characters perceive, De Flores affects other characters’ ability to process and react to their environment, which impedes their judgment. The essay argues that much of The Changeling's dramatic action unfolds through a conflict between two models of perception—presentational and representational—that undergird much of the play's dramatic conflict. In the play, pervasive anxiety about judgment, particularly how perception affects judgment, is structured around the distinction between these two models of perception. Considering the play alongside representational and presentational models indicates how early modern dramatists engage with intellectual theories to consider how representation works and how spaces are experienced. In this way, the theater refracts and dramatizes theories about perception.

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