Abstract
Harold Bloom has insisted that during the English Renaissance, William Shakespeare invented the human. In tortured characters like Hamlet and King Lear, we find the definition of humanity. Now, if being human means that we all must wax noble and operate within a universe of types and extremities, fitting into an age-old ideal and perpetually soliloquizing in angst about actualizing this ideal, then Shakespeare did indeed imbue life into man. But if being human means living in a material world, grappling with its real circumstances, and being true to one’s own personality, preferences, and aspirations, then this line of thought must be reexamined.
A contemporary playwright to Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton does not presume to define the human but rather explores humanity in an imitative form. Focusing on Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and Middleton’s The Lady’s Tragedy; The Roaring Girl; No Wit, No Help like a Woman’s; and The Changeling, this paper demonstrates that Middleton breaks away from the school of thought in which Shakespeare operates and provides his audience with a more complex, more inclusive, and—in many ways—more admirable depiction of life. In this paper, I intend to show that the plays of Thomas Middleton are a decidedly more “ideal” source for understanding what it means to be human than those of William Shakespeare. I pay particular attention to how Middleton represents women and how he plays with (and thus overturns) the ideological binaries of his day.
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