‘Old Dad Dead?’

This article considers whether film adaptations of Middleton's plays are really that much different from their Shakespearian counterparts. Is there something genuinely new occurring in these adaptations? The answer is an unqualified ‘yes’. It is shown that while Middleton adaptations tend to reinforce the reductive equation of the Jacobean period with ‘decadence’, brought about by ‘material comfort, political stability and undue deference to the monarch’, the adaptations examined do not misread the present. These films venture into critiques of the neo-noir universe of late capitalism where Shakespeare films fear to tread. Generating provocative, if not highly disturbing, variations on the noir themes of the obscene father and the femme fatale, film adaptations of Middleton linger on the cusp – or, indeed, in the middle – of an uncertain heritage, caught somewhere between the historical reflex of misogyny and a more radical critique of the collective, totemic paternalism of our own ‘contemporary Jacobean’ culture.