The Tudor Tarantino, BBC iPlayer

Dominic Awkwright charts the rise and fall of Thomas Middleton, with help from Gary Taylor and opinions from Professor Jonathan Bate, Professor Sir Brian Vickers, and actress Harriet Walter. Available here on BBC iPlayer until 12.02 pm on Tuesday the 18th of May. Well worth a listen.

Middleton: Renaissance Man, Gary Taylor, National Theatre, Monday 10th May

Gary Taylor is a bit of a rock star to me. He's largely responsible for the revival of Middleton's reputation, and shared responsibility with John Lavagnino for producing The Collected Works of Thomas Middleton, as fine a piece of scholarship as you are ever likely to stub your toe on. But, see, Middleton's cool. He's the Rolling Stones to Shakespeare's Beatles. So when Gary Taylor rocks up on stage, with his long hair and his black painted fingernails (on later inspection, actually a rather fetching metallic blue), it's looking like a good evening to me. Under the glittering chandeliers of the Felliniesque set for Women Beware Women, his lecture-lite (geared towards the London theatre crowd, and pretty accessible) concentrated on how Middleton writes women. Taylor points out that while some of Middleton's work is undoubtedly misogynist, in Women Beware Women the ladies always have more lines than their lovers, something otherwise unknown in Early Modern drama. They're not always nice to other women. They can like sex with men a lot or reject it utterly, buy sex for money or refuse to sell it. They're rarely idealised - I'm not sure Middleton ever idealised a single character. What's interesting is that the first revival of Women Beware Women was at the Arts Theatre, a private members club that could get round the censorship of the Lord Chamberlain's office. Thirty-nine year old widows who enjoy themselves with younger men of relatively lowly status apparently used to need a lot of censoring. Taylor is, as one would expect, a practiced and compelling speaker, particularly when in defence of Middleton's talents. And he's right. Middleton excelled in as many forms as Shakespeare - comedy and tragedy alike. The most popular play that ever played at what is now called 'Shakespeare's Globe' was actually one of Middleton's. I think they should rename it, personally...

The Duchess of Malfi, New Players Theatre, Tuesday 4th May

The Duchess of Malfi's getting a good airing at the moment, in Greenwich, here under the arches of Charing Cross, and later in the year with a collaborative operatic treatment from English National Opera and scary interactive theatrical groundbreakers Punchdrunk. Greenwich stuck to a predictable, if effective, fascist-lite setting, and I have absolutely no idea what dark madness to expect from Punchdrunk. Vaulting Ambition, at the New Players, went with...the circus. It could have worked - perhaps some kind of totalitarian ringmaster regime? But it doesn't stick, and a Cardinal is still a Cardinal, even if he's Cardinaling in spangly pants. Only a few of the performers are circus trained; they are mesmerising enough to completely detract at times from the action of the play, and talented enough to make the main actors' attempts at circus stylings seem woefully inadequate. The only real gift of the design is to James Sobol Kelly as Bosola, whose pancake make-up creeps across his face, becoming more and more skull-like as he piles up the body-count. He's a grisly Buster Keaton, a haunted outsider in this production, and it's a testament to the greatness of the writing that this interpretation works as well as any of the other, more macho portrayals I've seen. Just when I thought I couldn't find clowns any more frightening...
The design's a pity - there are some excellent performances, and the production could have stood up perfectly well without the big-top malarkey. The whole Malfi family seem creepily intimate, making Ferdinand's advances to the Duchess easier to reconcile, and our Cardinal, Andrew Piper is quite clearly after Alan Rickman's job. Alinka Wright's a very foxy Julia, who provides an excellent counterpoint to Tilly Middleton's Duchess, whose wooing of Antonio is charmingly tentative, for all her insistence. There are some nice touches in terms of costume design - Alex Humes' werewolf turn is greatly helped by leather and fur, and the lighting is innovative.
With circus arts enjoying a renaissance of their own at the moment, it does them a disservice to crowbar them into renaissance drama. If you want circus, get yourself over to the Roundhouse. Better yet, get thyself to Circus Space and learn how to do it yourself.

Tudor Gallery, The Queen's House, Greenwich, Monday 3rd May

The Queen's House in Greenwich sits on the site of the much older Palace of Placentia, birthplace of Henry VIII, holiday home of Elizabeth I (good distance from the plague) and subsequently the residence (although sometimes briefly) of all the Stuart queens of England. The best way to get there is to get the boat downriver from the Tower, because the Royal Naval College, which stands between the Queen's House and the Thames, is most imposing when seen from the water.
Most of the collection housed here relates to England's maritime history, but there are two tiny rooms devoted to portraits of the Tudor monarchs. There's the ubiquitous Holbein Henry VIII, of course, in between Henry VII (who always looks like a criminal to me - I wouldn't buy a used car from someone with that face) and Mary I and Philip II of Spain, who win the prize for most awkward looking couple ever. There's a marvellously gloomy painting for Francis Drake, 'Sic Magna Parvis' hovering over his head, which I like very much.
It seems appropriate, given the forthcoming election, to dwell briefly on the anonymous painting that hangs here, of the Somerset House Conference of August 1604. The Treaty of London was signed at the conference, bringing an end to nineteen years of war with the Spanish, whose delegation sit on the left of this picture, their English opposite numbers on the right, around a lushly carpeted table. I have studied this picture at length, and I can say with some certainty that not a single one of the politicians depicted looks as if he would apologise for calling you a bigot. At least two of them look like they'd have you quietly done away with first, and call you a bigot later. Call me old fashioned, but I miss that.
The highlight, for me, is Elizabeth I, British School, c. 1590, well into her fifties, and looking half of that. Elizabeth was one of the first English monarchs to exert such rigid control over her own image, and it's hard not to think, while gazing on her pale, perfect face, that we've not changed much. If she could have PhotoShopped herself, she would have - image is everything. It's not quite the same, of course - morally less dubious, perhaps. I'm not suggesting that spotty Tudor boys were sneaking crude woodcut equivalents of Nuts up to the hayloft to have one off the wrist over Her Majesty, and growing up all warped thinking that all the Tudor girls look like that, but... Well, maybe I am.