The Selected Plays of Thomas Middleton by David L Frost

The Selected Plays of Thomas Middleton by David L Frost

T. S. Eliot said of the Jacobean dramatist Thomas Middleton (1580–1627) that 'he wrote one tragedy which more than any other play except those of Shakespeare has a profound and permanent moral value and horror': Middleton has increasingly been recognised as one of the most important, if not the most important, Jacobean dramatist after Shakespeare himself. This volume contains The Changeling (of which Eliot gave so high an estimate), together with Middleton's other surviving tragedy, Women Beware Women, his best comedy, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, and a more light-hearted early play, A Mad World, My Masters. Though Middleton is typical of many university-trained writers of the period who eked out a living in popular entertainment, his work has a cold satiric stance, a grimly determinist flavour and a savage economy which make it unique. He wrote plays for the boys' companies in the early 1600s and later for Shakespeare's own company, the King's Men, but seems never to have established himself as more than a jobbing dramatist.

The translations are by Professor David Frost, a former Fellow and Director of Studies in English at St John's College, Cambridge, and a University Teaching Officer in the University of Cambridge, then Professor of English Literature in the University of Newcastle, New South Wales, and now Principal of the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies in Cambridge, England. Professor Frost, though a scholar of Renaissance literature, served on the Liturgical Commission of the Church of England throughout the period of creation of church services in modern English that led to AN ALTERNATIVE SERVICE BOOK, 1980, to which he contributed drafting and for which he wrote a number of prayers that achieved international recognition. He was also responsible for the translation into modern English (with the help of an interdenominational team of Hebrew scholars) of the Book of Psalms, which as THE (CAMBRIDGE) LITURGICAL PSALTER was bound up with AN ALTERNATIVE SERVICE BOOK 1980 and also went into some six national prayer books around the English-speaking world. The making of these versions of St John Chrysostom's and Saint Basil the Great's Liturgies, here gathered into one volume, occasioned the translator's decision to join the Orthodox Church as having an unbroken tradition back to the days of the apostles, yet also led to him creating modern translations that have been praised as bringing a fresh eye and ear to material that had been encrusted by tradition and hidden under archaic expression.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780521292368
ISBN 10	0521292360
Title	The Selected Plays of Thomas Middleton
Author	David L Frost
Series	Plays By Renaissance And Restoration Dramatists
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Cambridge University Press
Year published	1978-05-25
Number of pages	440
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.