SOURCE: "Middleton and the New Social Classes," in Drama & Society in the Age of Jonson, 1937. Reprint by Barnes & Noble, 1962, pp. 256-69.

A renowned English Shakespearean and Elizabethan scholar, Knights followed the precepts of I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis as he attempted to identify an underlying pattern in all of Shakespeare's work. His How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth? (1933)—a milestone study in the twentieth-century reaction to the Shakespearean criticism of the previous century—disparages the traditional emphasis on "character" as an approach which inhibits the reader's total response to Shakespeare's plays. The following discussion of Middleton is taken from his highly regarded study Drama & Society in the Age of Jonson, which was first published in 1937. Knights examines Middleton's comedies and finds the writer overrated, particularly in respect to his often-admired "realism."

The assimilation of what is valuable in the literary past… is impossible without the ability...