"This reference volume compiles nearly 100 seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth-century responses to the works of Thomas Middleton, and occasionally to the author as a person." "Although Thomas Middleton is a major English playwright whose works have received a great deal of critical attention in recent decades, students and scholars have been hard pressed to locate early commentary unless they have had access to major research collections. Even early nineteenth-century materials often cannot be loaned or copied, and many of the earlier pieces are not available in reprints or in well-edited modern texts. Professor Steen has gathered together these disparate documents, many not even familiar to readers of Jacobean drama, and imposed an accessible system by which the earliest or best available text is accompanied by a full bibliographical citation and a contextual introduction. Original punctuation and spelling have been retained. Besides its obvious benefit to Middleton scholarship, this book will be welcomed by adherents of the New Historicism as the first collection of historical responses to the playwright's works."--BOOK JACKET.