Thomas Middleton

Part of the Nick Hern Books Globe Quartos series, co-published with Shakespeare's Globe, marking their rediscoveries of forgotten plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries. Thomas Middleton's only surviving historical play weaves together two powerful stories: the spectacular rise and fall of the bloody-minded King Vortiger, and the legend of Hengist and Horsa. Set in fifth century Britain struggling against the power of Rome, the play chronicles Vortiger's despotic career; his ruthless murders, the violent betrayal of his British wife, the brutal wars against his own subjects, and an opportunistic but ultimately catastrophic alliance with the newly-arrived Saxons. The play also provides a striking comic subplot, involving Simon the tanner – the eponymous Mayor of Queenborough. Thomas Middleton's play The Mayor of Queenborough was first staged c.1620. This edition, in the Nick Hern Books Globe Quartos series, is edited by Howard Marchitello.

This Jacobean city comedy is a curiosity in that it presents a real-life character, the notorious cross-dresser Moll Frith, who probably was among the first audiences of 'her' play before she was taken up for public misconduct. Middleton and Dekker's 'roaring girl' may outrage her society with her pipe, bluster and swagger, but she turns out to be the moral centre of the play. Her code of honour leads her to call the bluff on rogues and conspicuous consumers, to thrash a hypocritical gallant in a duel, and to act as go-between for the young lovers thwarted by parental tyranny. This wry dramatisation of female deviancy exposing male ineffectuality is as much to the point today as it was in King James's England. An appendix helps the modern reader to appreciate the canting terms used by the low-life characters.

One of the great Renaissance playwrights, Middleton wrote tragedies essentially different from either Marlowe's or Shakespeare's, being wittier than the former and more grittily ironic than the latter. The genre of 'citizen tragedy' came into its own in the eighteenth century, but Middleton can claim to have created it: Bianca, wife of a middling commercial agent, arouses the lust of the Duke of Florence and becomes his mistress, first secretly, then openly and finally, after her husband has been seduced by the scheming Lady Livia and stabbed by Livia's brother, the Duke's wife. Livia plots her revenge, and the play ends with a banquet and a masque that are a triumph of black farce. Middleton's powerful, psychologically complex female characters and his clear-sighted analysis of misogyny are bound to impress today's audiences, but it is the pervasive irony - cynicism, even - with which he dissects the motivations of both oppressor and victim that makes him so eerily modern.