Thomas Middleton at the Globe
'A common playhouse to waft company': Middleton's Globe
In the world of Elizabethan theatregoing, there was no such idea as a run of one play. No work, no matter the esteem in which we now hold the playwright, was performed for two days in succession. It seems the rotation of titles was a way of keeping a limited audience interested, to persuade punters away from rival amphitheatres. The practice continued for most of King James’ reign – it did not buckle at the successes of Shakespeare, nor the enduring popularity of Marlowe – and not until August 1624 do we find records of a play acted two days in a row. That play was A Game at Chesse; its author was Thomas Middleton, and the actors of the Globe did not stop at two performances, but played it nine days in succession, each of them to a full house.
Why did the King’s Men flout the firm practices of theatre management? Because they could? Certainly. Perhaps, however, they knew immediately the volatility of the work. Perhaps they recognised the pressing need to squeeze in as many performances as possible before the State realised the play’s satirically subversive power: Anglo-Spanish relations were stylised and made explicit by Middleton, with contemporary figures cast as chess pieces; King James I of England and King Phillip IV of Spain, the White King and Black King respectively. A number of contemporary accounts hold that in some of those nine days, the production was performed twice – another alien concept in its time.
We can only guess at how many times A Game at Chesse would have been played had the authorities not banned the play, imprisoned its author and temporarily closed all theatres. However, we can surmise the extraordinary power of the work. We also know for certain that many copies of the script were written out by hand and today, more of these manuscripts survive than do the printed versions.
It is the existence of these differing copies which ensures that editing the play is a monumental undertaking. With characteristic carefulness and accuracy, Gary Taylor has generated two texts of the play for the new volume The Collected Works of Thomas Middleton, which he edited with John Lavagnino. In the companion volume of textual notes to the Collected Works, the explication of A Game at Chesse occupies almost a quarter of the 1183 pages. Such troubling of editors and scholars, however, should not distract our attention from so important and fine a play and the publishing boom which it effected. When considering the sheer volume of versions, it is hard not to imagine the excitement of the Jacobean theatre lovers, ardently clutching their samizdat copies of the play, eager to recreate in their imaginations that which the authorities had swiftly curtailed on stage.
The relationship between theatre and reading is crucially important, one on which dramatic scholarship relies. It is this relationship which made Shakespeare’s Globe an appropriate venue for the first leg of the launching of the new Collected Works. It is also a vital alliance for the performance element of Globe Education: each year, many pieces which would rarely, if ever, be produced elsewhere, are revived on the stage by reading, as part of the series we call Read Not Dead.
These staged readings are one of the ways in which the reconstructed Globe has rekindled the association between its Elizabethan and Jacobean ancestors and Middleton’s dramatic work. Nine of the playwright’s works have been produced here by actors with scripts in hand. Four more plays will become staged readings in the spring: The Phoenix, Your Five Gallants, A Trick to Catch the Old One and Michaelmas Term. All of these were written for boy actors and prompt a recasting of our education season ‘The Young and Shakespeare’ as ‘The Young and Middleton’. At the two extremes of the dramatic-literary spectrum, the Globe has a history of engagement with Middleton: publications of his plays in the Globe Quarto format are mirrored by full-scale productions of A Chaste Maide in Cheapside (1997) and A Mad World My Masters (1998). Even Middleton's non-theatrical texts are revived here: the narrative poem The Ghost of Lucrece was brought vividly to life in a dramatic setting in 1996.
The conflation of the two playwrights is not unnatural. When John Heminges and Henry Condell were collecting Shakespeare’s plays for their folio edition, Middleton was employed to correct the texts of Macbeth and Measure for Measure. However, the alliance is more notable and more remarkable in that Middleton collaborated with Shakespeare, most extensively on The Life of Timon of Athens. Shakespeare had begun his career in collaboration with many different writers. However, once his position as a sharer in the Chamberlain’s Men was consolidated, he seems largely to have worked alone until he began preparations for retirement. Conversely, Middleton worked with other dramatists throughout his career. The joint effort of Timon, in 1605-6, whilst exceptional for Shakespeare, was commonplace for Middleton. From the textual evidence, it seems that the writers worked together closely, and both had a hand in each of the play’s two distinct parts.
The play is neither writer’s most popular work, but has merits which are often overlooked. It is unusually focussed in its determinate problematising of avarice. Elsewhere, we admire and praise both Middleton and Shakespeare for their complexity and range; here, we must respect their singular ambition and hold their argument in esteem. Both playwrights have the uncommon knack of catching the emotions of audience and reader on hooks of character and phrase. In Timon, however, emotional engagement is not the main concern, rather social argument and moral debate is prioritised. Despite being cast in antiquity, it is a play deeply entrenched in its own time: the nascent mercantile capitalism of Jacobean England is ruthlessly exposed in a tireless iteration of greed. Ideas are foregrounded at the expense of character. This may make the play a difficult one to love, but it is nonetheless impressive in its erudition and its argumentative drive.
For too long scholars and audiences alike have struggled to appreciate the cumulative weight of Timon’s expositions. Too long have we attempted to approach the play with only its near contemporaries, King Lear and Macbeth, in mind as contextual counterpoints. The Collected Works of Thomas Middleton, as Gary Taylor clarifies in his lecture, makes it possible and necessary to read both playwrights in order to understand either. In the case of Timon, we must add to the dramatic context, among others, Middleton’s The Yorkshire Tragedy and The Revenger’s Tragedy. In such company, Timon appears even more starkly composed and yet more cautionary and urgently determined. That there are two major voices contributing towards a play with a singular voice of its own makes the work not less striking but more vital, not less important but more imposing.
The relationship between reading and the theatre remains crucial for lovers of literature and drama alike. Readers have the opportunity to realise this, and so much more, in Taylor and Lavagnino’s work. Audiences this summer will have occasion to reassess Timon here, as the Globe pursues its determination to revive, and to revivify, the plays of Shakespeare and Middleton.
Gwilym Jones is at the University of Sussex, completing a D.Phil. on Shakespeare's Storms and works in the research department of Globe Education.