The theatrical context is almost everything. His plays in the main are firmly plotted, with intricate parts deftly subordinated to one another, and the action moves briskly to ends which, in the comedies at least, are rarely predictable or commonplace. The deep theatricality of the situations gives his plain colloquial style a peculiar power for which one would search in vain if a speech were anthologized. As an ironist Middleton was second to none of his contemporaries; situational ambivalences and speeches of unwitting double meaning, together with his usually unornamented language, are especially congenial to modern readers and relished by the audiences of those few works which have been played in this century:
The Revenger's Tragedy,
Women Beware Women,
The Changeling, and a few of his comedies.
Middleton's present reputation is largely the creation of pioneering nineteenth-century scholars although the last decade has seen a significant increase in the scholarly attention given to his works. His reputation has suffered from the fact that as a craftsman (rather than an artist) of the theater, he was quick to follow the dictates of contemporary taste, thus obliging himself to write in styles (such as Fletcherian tragicomedy) for which apparently he had little sympathy or enthusiasm.
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