SOURCE: "Middleton's Nameless Art," in The Sewanee Review, Vol. XCV, No. 4, Fall, 1987, pp. 591-609.

In the following essay, Huebert examines Middleton's depiction of sexuality and the desire for power in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, Women Beware Women, and The Changeling. "Middleton's work as a whole, " he claims, "is a statement of what happens when you make self-interest (including sexual self-interest) the measure of all things."

Thomas Middleton was "but a base fellow," Ben Jonson said to Drummond of Hawthornden [see Ben Jonson's Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden, ed. R. F. Patterson, 1974]. I'm sure this remark owes more to Jonson's drinking habits than to his critical principles; but it does imply something worm knowing about the distance which separates Middleton from his famous contemporaries. In temperament, connections, and circumstances he was a man apart from the mainstream. Eliot thought Middleton was a playwright without a point of...