Shakespeare co-wrote Timon of Athens with Thomas Middleton. Who was he? And how was his writing similar to (and different than) Shakespeare’s? Let’s find out.
A Trick to Catch the Old One by Thomas Middleton
Thursday April 24th at 8pm on Zoom
DM us or contact christine@shakespeareintheruff.com for the Zoom link. (Don’t have time to read the book but still interested in the conversation? Join us anyway!)
A Trick to Catch the Old One is available at Queen Books (10% off with the code RUFFREADS), the Toronto Public Library, and as an ebook.
About the play:
A Trick to Catch the Old One (1608) is a delightful comedy following a young Thomas Witgood who has managed to squander his fortune and is now in debt to his uncle Pecunius Lucre. In order to manage and pay off his debts, an elaborate scheme to court a wealthy mistresses is devised. What ensues is a comedy of intrigue filled with wit and bawdy. In this play greed and seduction intertwine to create a smart comedy with latent social commentary.
About Thomas Middleton:
Thomas Middleton was one of the most prolific Jacobean playwrights, rivaled only by John Fletcher. Like Shakespeare, MIddleton was equally at home with comedy and tragedy and with Shakespeare, Fletcher and Ben Jonson he was at the top of the popularity poll. He was also a major and prolific writer of masque plays, the new form that swept through Jacobean drama like a hurricane. He remains the most noteworthy of the masque and pageant writers and his masques were an important influence on Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
Middleton was born in London in 1580, the son of a bricklayer who raised himself to a ‘respectable’ level, with the accompanying wealth. Young Thomas attended Queen’s College, Oxford. While there he wrote several long poems that met with critical and commercial success and from there he moved on to writing for the theatre.
Like most of the writers of the time he collaborated with other dramatists, including Shakespeare, with whom he wrote Timon of Athens. He worked with John Ford, Thomas Dekker, Cyril Tourneur, Ben Jonson and Philip Massinger, among others. But the play he wrote with William Rowley, The Changeling, has remained one of the most fascinating, violent, intriguing, gripping and entertaining English plays of all time. Its main protagonist, De Flores, is one of English drama and literature’s most memorable psychopaths. The play is still performed regularly and the roles of De Flores and Beatrice-Joanna are loved by actors.