A Trick to Catch the Old One
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A Trick to Catch the Old One is a Jacobean comedy written by Thomas Middleton, first published in 1608. The play is a satire in the sub-genre of city comedy.
The play was entered into the Stationers' Register on Oct. 7, 1607 by the printer George Eld, and published by him in quarto in the following year, 1608. (George Eld was one of the rare printers of the era who also functioned as a publisher; a better-known example of this dual function can be found in Eld's contemporary William Jaggard. Eld was less successful than Jaggard; he published the first edition of The Puritan, a play of the Shakespeare Apocrypha, in 1607, and the first edition of A Trick a year later—but otherwise he functioned solely as a printer, printing books for booksellers, as in Q2 and Q3 of A Trick.) The title page of Q1 states that A Trick was acted by the Children of Paul's, one of the companies of boy actors popular at the time. The play was probably written and first acted ca. 1605.
The play was popular; a second quarto was issued in the same year, printed by Eld for the bookseller Henry Rocket. The title page of Q2 attributes the play to "T. M." and states that A Trick was acted by both the Children of Paul's and the Children of the Chapel (then called the Children of the Blackfriars), the other major troupe of boy actors of the era. (The Children of Paul's had stopped performing plays around 1606, and the Children of the Chapel/Blackfriars may have acquired the play from their defunct competitors.) Q2 also states that the play had been acted at Court before King James I the previous "New Year's night."[1] A third quarto followed in 1616, printed by Eld for the stationer Thomas Langley; the title page of Q3 assigns the authorship to "T. Middleton."
[edit] Synposis
The play's protagonist, Theophilus Witgood, has mortgaged his estates to his uncle Pecunius Lucre, a covetous London merchant. Witgood is in love with Joyce, the daughter of another London merchant, Walkadine Hoard. Lucre and Hoard are rivals; Hoard resents Lucre because Lucre has shown himself to be an even more ruthless swindler than Hoard is himself. Witgood persuades a former mistress to masquerade as a rich country widow and his new fiancée. Lucre, delighted at the prospect of a rich match for his nephew, provides him with £50 and a vague promise to make Witgood his heir. Similarly and for the same reason, Witgood's creditors stop dunning him and offer him more credit. Conversely, rival suitors for the "rich widow" arise, including Walkadine Hoard.
Witgood advises his past mistress to accept Hoard's proposal and so fix herself for life. She allows herself to be spirited away by Hoard, with Lucre in hot pursuit. The "widow" agrees with Lucre to resist Hoard if Lucre restores Witgood's estates, and Lucre reluctantly agrees. But Witgood's creditors, angry over his apparent loss of a rich match, have him arrested; Witgood, however, claiming a pre-contract with the "widow," cons Hoard into paying his debts. Witgood marries Joyce in secret; at the banquet celebrating Hoard's marriage, it is revealed that Hoard's new rich wife is Witgood's poor ex-mistress. But the courtesan kneels to her new husband and promises to be a good wife, and Witgood joins her in repentance and rejection of his former sensual and spendthrift ways.
Two decades after its authorship, Philip Massinger used A Trick to Catch the Old One as a model for his most popular play, A New Way to Pay Old Debts, premiered in 1626 and published in 1633. Massinger's version of the plot would go on to become one of the most successful plays in English-language theatre.
The term "city comedy" is double-edged or ambiguous; it can refer to optimistic and populist works like Thomas Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday (1599), but also to satirical and rather cynical plays like Middleton's—and A Trick is one of the more cynical in the genre. In the play, everyone tries to fool everyone else, and victory goes to the most successful con artists. As a result, the play was largely neglected in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The revolution of re-appraisal that twentieth-century scholars have brought to Middleton's canon has directed much more intense serious attention to A Trick along with other of Middleton's plays.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Parsing the confusion between Old Style and New Style dates, Chambers, Vol. 3 p. 439, states that the New Year's night performance was "doubtless" on Jan. 1, 1608/9, or in modern terms 1609. But he does not expound upon his use of "doubtless."
[edit] References
- Brown, John Russell, and Bernard Harris, eds. Jacobean Theatre. Edward Arnold Ltd., 1960.
- Chambers, E. K. The Elizabethan Stage. 4 Volumes, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1923.
- Heller, Herbert Jack. Penitent Brothellers: Grace, Sexuality, and Genre in Thomas Middleton's City Comedies. Newark, DE, University of Delaware Press, 2000.
- Martin, Matthew R. Between Theatre and Philosophy: Skepticism in the Major City Comedies of Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton. Newark, DE, University of Delaware Press, 2001.
