Martin White

‘The Atheist’s Tragedy or The Honest Man’s Revenge’

Very little is known of the life of Cyril Tourneur. He was born sometime between 1570 and 1580, after which virtually no record of him exists until 1614, when he is referred to in a letter as ‘one Cyril Turner, that belongs to General Cecil and was in former times Secretary to Sir Francis Vere’. Cecil took Tourneur with him as Secretary of the Council of War when he sailed to raid Spanish treasure ships in Cadiz in 1625. The expedition was a failure and when, on the voyage home, plague broke out on board the flagship Royal Anne, Tourneur was one of 150 sick men put ashore at Kinsale in Ireland. He died there in February 1626.

Middleton’s Early Work

Thomas Middleton began to write for the stage sometime around 1602, and produced his last play — A Game at Chess — in 1624. His career therefore spans the Jacobean period almost exactly, and during that time he was involved in virtually every activity open to the professional playwright. He wrote for public and private theatres, adult and children’s companies, pageants for the streets, entertainments for the court, and produced a range of work remarkable for its variety — and its quality.

Middleton: Summary and Conclusions

Thomas Middleton apparently began his solo writing career as a dramatist by writing The Phoenix for the Children of Paul’s, a play possibly intended to restore that Company’s reputation following the scandal over The Old Joiner of Aldgate (see Gair, 1982: ch. 5). In this play (now lost), George Chapman had put on the Paul’s stage barely disguised representations of local men and women involved in vigorous legal wrangling over a marriage. It had been commissioned by one of those involved — a bookbinder named Flaskett whose business premises were in Paul’s Yard — in an attempt to influence the court case in his favour. When it looked like the play might get him into trouble, however, Flaskett was able to argue that no commentary on affairs outside the theatre was intended, declaring that the play was ‘onely a meere Toye which had idle applications of names according to the Inventors disposicion thereof’, even though the play’s success resulted precisely from the audience being able to identify the protagonists. It seems appropriate, therefore, that Middleton should conclude his playwriting career by producing a scandal on the grand scale, representing characters playing out their parts not in the neighbourhood of St Paul’s Cathedral, but on the world stage.

Tragicomedies: ‘The Witch’ and ‘A Fair Quarrel’

The plays of John Fletcher are not widely studied today, and are even less frequently performed.1 In the early seventeenth century, however, working often in collaboration with Francis Beaumont, Fletcher was responsible for developing and popularising the genre of tragicomedy, which became enormously successful, particularly with the audiences at the Blackfriars indoor ‘private’ theatre.

Women Beware Women

The earliest printed edition of the play is dated 1657, and was issued bound together with another Middleton play, More Dissemblers Besides Women. Although the two titles may have suggested a likely combination to the publisher, and although it has been suggested recently that both plays deal with issues of topical polititical concern, the plays are very different in tone. More Dissemblers, written around 1615, is one of Middleton’s tragicomedies (see chapter 6), whereas Women Beware Women is a sharp analysis of the inextricable links between power, sex and money. In this it more closely resembles Middleton’s early comedies, and Margot Heinemann’s description of it as a ‘city tragedy’ is apt.1

The Roaring Girl

The Roaring Girl was written (in collaboration with Thomas Dekker) for the Prince’s Men.1 Formerly known as the Admiral’s Men (for whom Middleton had done his earliest theatre work), Henslowe’ s company had changed their name in 1603 when they came under the patronage of Prince Henry, King James’s elder son. They performed at the Fortune Theatre, an open-air public playhouse situated north of the city in Golden Lane, Cripplegate. Built in 1600 to replace the Rose, the company’s previous home on the Bankside, the Fortune was unique among the public playhouses in being square (measuring 80 feet/24 m on the outside, 55 feet/16.5 m inside) rather than polygonal. In 1621 it was destroyed by fire, rebuilt (probably in ‘circular’ shape), and finally dismantled completely in 1661. The builder — Peter Streete — was the same man James Burbage had employed to demolish the Theatre in Shoreditch (built 1576), transport the timber south of the river, and reconstruct it as the Globe. The contract giving Streete his instructions for the Fortune has survived, and although much of it tantalisingly tells the builder to copy what he had done the previous year with the Globe without specifying exactly what that was, it is still a major source of information on the nature of the structure of the open-air playhouses. (The contract is quoted in Gurr, 1970: 92–4.)2

A Game at Chess

From his earliest published poem to his last play, Middleton s work reflects his militant Protestantism, frequently expressed in terms of an antipathy towards Catholics in general and Spain and Jesuits in particular. In this it follows in the tradition of chauvinistic works such as John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments of the Christian Reformation (popularly known as The Book of Martyrs) and the Book of Homilies, a collection of sermons on topics such as ‘Order’ and ‘Obedience’ written by Elizabethan bishops to be read in churches. These and other Protestant writings stressed the political dangers of Catholicism, portraying England as an Elect Nation engaged in battle with a Catholic church identified as a whore and headed by a Pope identified as the Antichrist. Catholicism’s complex ritual and ceremony was savagely attacked and parodied, especially what was seen as its worship of idols and images ‘all for eye, and to snare the heart of a carnal’ man, bewitching it with so great glistening of the painted harlot’ (quoted in Dures, 1983: 82). Catholicism, it was claimed, was not merely a misguided form of Christianity, but had debased and perverted Christ’s teaching in order to justify its followers’ pursuit of sensual pleasure. In the words of the Puritan writer William Perkins: ‘Of all religions, to the carnal man none is so pleasant as popery is.’1

City Comedies: ‘Michaelmas Term’, ‘A Mad World, My Masters’, ‘A Trick to Catch the Old One’

City comedy, as Alexander Leggatt (1973: 3) has written, ‘is one of those conveniently vague terms that seem serviceable enough until an attempt is made to define them’. It is possible, however, to identify some of the main characteristics of this genre, which enjoyed enormous popularity during the first decade of the seventeenth century, above all through the comedies of Ben Jonson (whom Gibbons describes as the genre’s ‘founder’ — 1980: 5), John Marston and Middleton himself.1

‘The Revenger’s Tragedy’

As its title and the name of its central character advertise, The Revenger’s Tragedy (1606) clearly belongs to the genre of Revenge Tragedy (see chapter 12). Other roots, dramatic and non-dramatic, can also be identified, mainly the Morality play, the homilies of medieval preachers, contemporary Jacobean satire, as well as various iconographic traditions. The influence of all of these can be found in the opening speech which, in terms of its staging, form and content, demonstrates many of the stylistic approaches and theatrical strategies of the play as a whole.1

A Chaste Maid in Cheapside

A Chaste Maid in Cheapside was probably written in 1613 (see New Mermaids edition, p. xiii), and performed the same year by the Lady Elizabeth’s Men. This company — formed in 1611 — was, until 1613, based at the Swan playhouse on the Bankside. A contemporary sketch of the playhouse (known as the De Witt drawing: Plate 2) shows a circular building, mainly open to the sky, with three tiers of galleries and a tiled roof. The drawing is dominated by the tiring-house (mimorum aedes = ‘house of the actors’) and the stage. The former has two sets of double doors, apparently hinged to open outwards. Above these is a gallery divided into six bays, in which figures can be seen. This gallery appears to have had three uses: it provided an ‘upper level’ for the actors when needed (there is no such need in A Chaste Maid); it provided a location for the musicians (referred to in the stage direction preceding V. iv); and it seems likely that this gallery also provided seating for audience. Since no other audience is drawn in, De Witt may have included them here to draw attention to this as a viewing point, though as it is not clear whether the whole drawing shows a performance, a rehearsal, or is merely a general recollection, the status of the figures remains conjectural. It has been calculated that the Swan had an audience capacity of between 2000 and 3000.