SOURCE: "Middleton and the New Social Classes," in Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson, 1937. Reprint by Barnes & Noble, 1962, pp. 256-69.

In the following essay, Knights examines Middleton's comedies and finds the writer overrated, particularly in respect to the "realism" Eliot and others had praised so highly.

The assimilation of what is valuable in the literary past … is impossible without the ability to discriminate and to reject. Everyone would admit this, in a general way, but there are few to undertake the essential effort—the redistribution of stress, the attempt to put into currency evaluations based more firmly on living needs than are the conventional judgements. To disestablish certain reputations that have 'stood the test of time', to see to it that the epithet 'great' does not spill over from undeniable achievement to a bulk of inferior matter in the work of any one author, is not...