By contrast, Shakespeare’s name appeared in print for the first time in 1593 (Venus and Adonis), when the Stratford playwright was already 29. Middleton wrote The Revenger’s Tragedy when he was just 26 (Shakespeare’s age when he finished Henry VI, Part Two). Can anyone doubt which 26-year-old wrote the greater play? Can anything in Henry VI compare with “melt all his patrimony in a kiss” or “the poor benefit of a bewitching minute” or “Joy’s a subtle elf: I think man’s happiest when he forgets himself” or the startlingly modern, ironic “Old Dad dead”?
[...]
Middleton responded to the challenge by matching Shakespeare on his own ground. The pair are the only English playwrights – and two of the very few in any language – who have written acknowledged multiple masterpieces in both comedy and tragedy. Middleton’s other tragedies include The Changeling and Women Beware Women. The searing one-act Yorkshire Tragedy, with its compelling portrait of a bitterly impoverished, abusive father who tries to kill his wife and succeeds in killing two of his children, was written within months of The Revenger’s Tragedy. These masterpieces are matched by a string of complicated, magnificent comedies: A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, The Roaring Girl, and A Mad World, My Masters are only the best known. Middleton’s most famous history play, A Game at Chess, was also the biggest box-office hit of the early London theatre, the most talked-about, written-about play of its time.
[...]
If Middleton is our other Shakespeare, why is he so little known? The most obvious explanation is that he is a purveyor of inconvenient truths: about sex, poverty, disease, political corruption, religious hypocrisy and sectarian hatred. From the beginning, some people have tried to shut him up. His second book, Microcynicon, was publicly burned. A member of the House of Commons complained about The Penniless Parliament of Threadbare Poets. A sermon at St Paul’s singled out The Puritan Widow for special obloquy. The censor cut passages from the promptbook of The Lady’s Tragedy. And for the spectacular success of A Game at Chess, Middleton was rewarded with imprisonment. He was eventually released, but never wrote another play; it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that his silence was involuntary. His last major dramatic work – the official pageant to celebrate the coronation of Charles I, commissioned by the City of London – was never performed. The new king delayed, delayed, and finally cancelled it, and Middleton died a year later.
Quien conozca un poco a Middleton se sentirá inmediatamente como en casa cuando vea a Tony Soprano entrar en la consulta de un psiquiatra: esa falta de gravitas, ese poderoso rebosar de sentimientos cotidianos en alguien que habría de tener estatura trágica es puro teatro jacobeo en sus manos más altas: las de Middleton, las de Webster, las de Shakespeare escribiendo sus tragedias tardías si se lo observa con ojos aviesos, con mirada oblicua, atravesá. Andamos cortitos de líquido, si no esta edición de sus obras completas que anuncia el Guardian serían un autorregalo de Navidad imprescindible. Leer A Trick to Catch the Old One el Domingo de Pascua de 1998 fue una de esas rarisimas experiencias de lectura que te dejan extraordinariamente euforico… Curioso, esos extasis son casi todos anteriores al 10 de septiembre del 2000.
[Quien conozca un poco a Middleton también será capaz de comprender hasta qué punto es absurdo asignarle cualquier valor a Lope y a Calderón, aparte del de mero documento histórico: pero eso es otra historia, aburrida, insignificante]
