Thomas Middleton’s A Mad World, My Masters: From Script To Performance

This article takes as its cue the surprisingly scant attention paid by the 2007 Clarendon edition of Thomas Middleton's works to the stage history of his plays. Drawing on personal experiences of directing Middleton's A Mad World, My Masters at the University of York in 2011, the essay illuminates how working on the script before and during the rehearsal process raises queries as to some of the ways in which the play has traditionally been analysed, thus generating fresh perspectives on the play's overall crafting and the performance implications and potential, overlooked in the edited collection, of some of its key moments. The article also addresses some of the erroneous suppositions made by scholars about the play: the result, perhaps, of the individual play's distinctiveness being submerged in preconceptions about the presumed generic traits of the larger group of plays to which it is assigned, which leads to a serious underestimation of Middleton's ability to revisit material he has explored in earlier plays, and radically reinvent it. In focusing on interpretations of the play bodied forth in the rehearsal room rather than in critical literature, the article ultimately seeks to detach A Mad World from the generalized assumptions made about the text in order to unlock the dramatic potency which textual scholars of the play have previously masked from view.