<DIV>One of the great Renaissance playwrights, Middleton wrote tragedies<br>essentially different from either Marlowe's or Shakespeare's, being<br>wittier than the former and more grittily ironic than the latter. The<br>genre of 'citizen tragedy' came into its own in the eighteenth century,<br>but Middleton can claim to have created it: Bianca, wife of a middling<br>commercial agent, arouses the lust of the Duke of Florence and becomes<br>his mistress, first secretly, then openly and finally, after her<br>husband has been seduced by the scheming Lady Livia and stabbed by<br>Livia's brother, the Duke's wife. Livia plots her revenge, and the play<br>ends with a banquet and a masque that are a triumph of black farce.<br>Middleton's powerful, psychologically complex female characters and his<br>clear-sighted analysis of misogyny are bound to impress today's<br>audiences, but it is the pervasive irony - cynicism, even - with which<br>he dissects the motivations of both oppressor and victim that makes him<br>so eerily modern.</DIV>