Where Witgood Tricks Everybody

A Trick to Catch the Old One by Thomas Middleton
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the first Thomas Middleton play I've read, and it's okay. A little up and down. Parts of it are quite entertaining, and it's not too hard to understand (comparatively speaking), but a lot of the action is annoying and hard to get behind, so started off by giving it a 3. However, I'm talking myself into a 4 as I review the story and realize it's pretty good, actually. :)

A young man--Witgood--has been messing around, wasting money gambling and paying for prostitutes, and just generally being irresponsible. His rich uncle (Uncle Lucre) has taken advantage of him when he needed a loan instead of helping him out and has taken control of his property. (Before the play, even.) I'm not sure how he did that, but it's part of the setup. But through the course of the play, Witgood gets his property back, has his debts wiped out, marries a good girl, and foists his prostitute/mistress off on his uncle's worst enemy, another usurer named Hoard. It's all tricks; they make everyone think that the courtesan is actually a rich heiress, and from that point just let all the greedy gold-diggers drive the action.

I was put off by the attitude everyone took toward the poor woman who had been Witgood's mistress. She's clearly a decent person, seems very kind, and yet she's spoken of as if she's monstrous. Witgood, who we are meant to be very sympathetic to, helps her out by setting her up with a husband, but Lucre is a horrible person. It's treated like a great joke on the greedy old man, but I'm imagining the poor girl having to be stuck with him. Witgood, meanwhile, has moved on from her to another girl who he marries, because you don't marry your mistress, right? One of Lucre's friends, invited to his wedding feast, is furious when he recognizes his wife and starts to leave like everyone else. As he's going, he says to Lucre:

"Fie, fie! A man of your repute and name!
You'll feast your friends, but cloy 'em first with shame."

Anyway, I get it. That's the attitude of the time. Can't really blame the author. But their hate toward one of the few sympathetic characters in the play was kinda shocking. (She very carefully never lies to Lucre. She says she has no money or property. He just thinks she's being secretive and doesn't believe her. In the end, it's his greed, not her statements, that makes the scheme work.)

The tricks were good, getting revenge on greedy money guys, getting Witgood out of trouble and setting his mistress up for life (hoping, I suppose, that the rich old guy she tricked into marriage doesn't last long). There are happy endings all around. Pretty solid story, all told.

View all my reviews