The following survey of Middleton's works attributes to the dramatist a wide range of skills from comedic to tragic, as well as psychological penetration and clarity of vision.

In the following excerpt, the well-known ninteenth-century poet Swinburne surveys Middleton's dramatic works in an effort to establish him as a central Renaissance playwright.

Wigler investigates the three love affairs in Women Be-ware Women—between Bianca and the Duke, Isabella and Hippolito, and Leantio and Livia—in support of his contention that "the pattern of love" in the play "is ultimately something very close to incest. "

The following essay asserts that Women Beware Women presents its audience with a purposeful incoherence, generating contradictory interpretations of power relations and sexual violation.

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."

The following essay addresses the critically neglected tragicomedies of Middleton's middle period, including The Witch, A Fair Quarrel, and More Dissemblers Besides Women, finding that Middleton's skepticism toward human nature is the source of these plays' theatrical energy.

Charting the early development of Middleton's dramatic range, the following extracts focus on Middleton's innovation and experimentation.

In the following excerpt, Helms argues that, in the context of public concern about gender roles, the cross-dressing Moll in The Roaring Girl challenges gender hierarchy.

In response to critical disagreement about the political situation of A Game at Chess, Yachnin views the play as both an idealization and a satire of English-Spanish relations.

In this essay, Ewbank assesses Women Beware Women, paying particular attention to the unity underlying what initially seems to be a loosely constructed mixture of realistic and moralistic elements. She stresses that the highly theatrical nature of Middleton's conception and execution, rather than heightening the unreality of the allegorical masque, actually integrates it into the realistically depicted intrigues of the play.

In this excerpt from her highly influential treatment of Middleton's plays, Heinemann argues that the playwright's "city comedies" satirize both city-dwellers and landed gentry.

Bromley maintains that the corruption and immorality in Women Beware Women are caused by the collapse of the social structures of family, class, and church

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 ...

In the following essay, Knights examines Middleton's comedies and finds the writer overrated, particularly in respect to the "realism" Eliot and others had praised so highly.

Eliot, a celebrated Americanborn English poet, essayist, and critic, stressed in his commentary the importance of tradition, religion, and morality in literature. His emphasis on imagery, symbolism, and meaning helped to establish the theories of New Criticism. Eliot's concept of the "objective correlative" is considered a major contribution to literary analysis. In his Selected Essays (1932), he defines the objective correlative as "a set of objects, a situation, a chain of eve...

In this influential survey of Middleton's works, Eliot considers Middleton one of the age's great playwrights, praises his realism, and particularly extols the dramatist's portrayals of women.

Empson was an English critic, poet, and editor who is best known for Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), his seminal contribution to the formalist school of New Criticism. Empson's critical theory is based on the assumption that all great poetic works are ambiguous and that this ambiguity can often be traced to the multiple meanings of words. Empson analyzes a text by enumerating and discussing these various meanings and examining how they fit together to communicate the poem's ideas and emotion...