SOURCE: "Thomas Middleton," in The Best Plays of the Old Dramatists: Thomas Middleton, edited by Havelock Ellis, 1887. Reprint by Scholarly Press, 1969, pp. vii-xlii.

In the following excerpt, the well-known ninteenth-century poet Swinburne surveys Middleton's dramatic works in an effort to establish him as a central Renaissance playwright.

If it be true, as we are told on high authority, that the greatest glory of England is her literature, and the greatest glory of English literature is its poetry, it is not less true that the greatest glory of English poetry lies rather in its dramatic than its epic or its lyric triumphs. The name of Shakespeare is above the names even of Milton and Coleridge and Shelley: and the names of his comrades in art and their immediate successors are above all but the highest names in any other province of our song. There is such an overflowing life...