The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume VI. The Drama to 1642, Part Two.
§ 15. Later Plays by Middleton
The Spanish Gipsie is generally put down almost as a whole to Middleton, and even Swinburne refuses to see the hand of Rowley in “the more high-toned passages.” It seems possible that Rowley wrote a larger part of the play than Middleton, and not by any means only the gipsy scenes, with their jollity, dancing and crabbed ballad singing. The opening, no doubt, was actually written by Middleton; but it has a quality unusual in his work, and not unusual in the work of Rowley. It is as if Rowley stood behind Middleton, controlling him. Most of the prose, both when it goes creeping and tedious with Sancho and Soto, and when it overflows into doggerel and occasionally unsavoury snatches of song, has Rowley’s manner and substance; but he is to be traced, also, in the slow and powerful verse which ends the third act, in lines like
Yet it is difficult to assign to any other period the comedy of Any Thing for a Quiet Life, printed in 1662, and so badly printed that it is not easy to distinguish prose from verse, the more so as the one seems to be set to run in no very different measures from the other. It seems to be a late and only return to the earlier manner of the farcical comedies of city life, with shopkeeping scenes of the old random brilliance and the old domestic fooleries. Even more matter is crammed into it, and this even more hastily, and there is the old fierce vigour of talk. But, in two plays, published together in 1657, we see what seems to be almost the last mood of Middleton, after his collaboration with Rowley was at an end, and the influence, perhaps, not wholly evaporated. More dissemblers besides Women, which is characteristic of Middleton in its tangle of virtues and hypocrisies, its masquerade of serious meanings and humorous disguises, is written in verse of a lovely and eager quality, which bends with equal flexibility to the doings of “those dear gipsies” and to the good cardinal’s concerns of conscience “in a creature that’s so doubtful as a woman.” It is a particoloured thing, and has both beauty and oddity. But, in Women beware Women, we find much of Middleton’s finest and ripest work, together with his most rancid “comic relief”; a stern and pitiless “criticism of life” is interrupted by foul and foolish clowning; and a tragedy of the finest comic savour ends in a mere heap of corpses, where