ABSTRACT
Paul Yachnin writes that ‘Middleton’s women characters are more various in type than either Shakespeare’s or Jonson’s’.1 Perhaps that is why they have been so misunderstood. Dismissed as misogynist by early twentieth-century critics, Middleton’s treatment of gender was reopened to debate in the 1980s when scholars re-discovered The Roaring Girl.2 Although Middleton’s cross-dressed heroine has inspired a number of fascinating and generally celebratory feminist readings, the attention to this single co-authored play has not settled the question of Middleton’s larger attitude toward women. Indeed, the only systematic and sustained defence of the playwright’s female characters appeared in Caroline Lockett Cherry’s 1973 monograph, a work whose thesis was later attacked in a terse, twelve-page article by Ingrid Hotz-Davies.3 Although a recent Oxford anthology takes the latter as the
1 Paul Yachnin, Stage-wrights: Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and the Making of Theatrical Value (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), p. 136.
