SOURCE: "The Middle of Middleton," in The Arts of Performance in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Drama: Essays for G.K. Hunter, edited by Murray Biggs et al, Edinburgh University press, 1991, pp. 156-72.

The following essay addresses the critically neglected tragicomedies of Middleton's middle period, including The Witch, A Fair Quarrel, and More Dissemblers Besides Women, finding that Middleton's skepticism toward human nature is the source of these plays' theatrical energy.

The middle plays of Middleton have been something of an embarrassment to critics. Wedged between the early, satirical comedies and the two great tragedies, they seem to suggest 'the absence of a clear pattern of development in Middleton's dramaturgy' (Mulryne, 1975). Largely unedited and unperformed, with a few notable exceptions, they have remained elusive in the midst of the re-discovery of minor Jacobean drama in recent decades. Margot Heinemann (1980) has written illuminatingly on their relation to the political and...