The Secular Morality of Middleton's City Comedies (Thomas Middleton‪)‬

In a book published in 2000, Herbert Jack Heller declared that "the debate on whether Middleton's works are immoral, amoral, or moral" is "now exhausted" (1) The announcement of the debate's demise, however, was decidedly premature. (2) It is difficult, in fact, to imagine how such a debate could ever end, given the provocations Middleton introduced into his plays, especially his city comedies. The most notorious scenes--the appearance of the succubus in A Mad World, My Masters, the Dampit scenes in A Trick to Catch the Old One, and Walter Whorehound's repentance in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside--are almost universally cited by scholars troubled by Middleton's inconsistent or "grotesque" treatment of ethical/spiritual values or of comedy itself. (3) While some readers manage to take comfort in embracing the apparent contradictions in tone and content, most (such is the human condition) attempt to rationalize the contradictions by imposing a coherent reading of the underlying values in the plays. Most attempts to produce a coherent ethical position by which Middleton can be defined, however, ultimately do violence to the plays themselves. Those who argue for a moral, Calvinist reading of the plays have to ignore the genuinely festive comedic quality of the city comedies, while those who argue for an amoral or immoral reading offer a portrait of Middleton as a dispassionate or cynical observer of "real life" that is equally at odds with the frequently serious ethical concerns of the plays. Given the astonishing range of interpretive responses to Middleton's city comedies it is probably fair to say that no overarching thematic analysis will ever answer all the questions the plays raise, but there are elements in each of them that offer productive perspectives that have not yet been sufficiently appreciated. The modest goal of this essay is to identify these elements and explore their value as analytical tools.