Word: middletons
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Taylor hopes The Collected Works will allow others to discover what he's long believed: that Shakespeare may be the king of English drama, but Middleton, more than anyone else, deserves a throne of his own. Some aren't so sure. "Yes, Middleton wrote some great plays: The Changeling is a better play than many of Shakespeare's," says Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate. "And there's no doubt he's been unluckily marginalized. But I object to the idea that he alone is Shakespeare's equal. Christopher Marlowe was as good at tragedy as Middleton. And the best comedies...
...married to Shakespeare, but for 20 years I've been having an affair with Middleton. Shakespeare is the Bard Next Door your parents want you to love - respectable, familiar, stable, well-connected. I met him in high school and we've been together ever since. But Middleton - well, they don't tell you about Middleton in high school...
...Middleton is our other Shakespeare, why don't you know more about him? Because he's the madwoman in the attic - the secret we don't want our kids to discover. Would your parents want you to marry someone who describes getting pregnant as being "poisoned with child"? In Shakespeare's 39 plays there are 40 certified virgins. Middleton sees the allure of innocence ("Virginity is paradise, locked up"), and his plays include some magnificent maidens. But in his world most men want a sexually experienced woman. "Desire," Middleton insisted, "is of both genders": women can be as lascivious...
...Middleton's The Widow, the title character is no virgin, and neither is the male protagonist. Ricardo announces immediately that he's had sex with 1,000 women - 500 of them other men's wives. Such a man is unimaginable as the romantic lead in a Shakespeare comedy...
...Middleton sexed language, and languaged sex, more comprehensively and creatively than any other writer in English. His sex is never just sex: it can be fun, funny, sad, repellent, lyrical, satirical; it entangles bodies in psychology, politics, ethics, religion. Middleton dramatized incest, an adult son obsessed with his mother's sexuality, a husband happily pimping his wife, a husband literally selling his wife, a husband brutally raping his wife. He wrote of transvestism, stalking, sexual blackmail, castration, impotence, masochism, necrophilia and an adulteress forced to eat her lover's corpse...