Maybe it was his mother's doing – bringing him up in her turbulent, litigious second marriage with the debt-ridden Thomas Harvey – but Thomas Middleton's career as a playwright was marked by a near-obsessive preoccupation with widows, particularly the remarrying kind. Of the twelve undoubted, unassisted plays in the Middleton canon, seven include a widow, a remarried widow, or a woman who thinks herself, or is thought by others, to be a widow. When we add his collaboration with William Rowley, A Fair Quarrel (1617), plus two plays now widely considered to be Middleton's – The Puritan (1606) and The Revenger's Tragedy (1606) – the total number of widows rises to ten. And if we look solely at his nine undisputedly canonical non-collaborative comedies, six of them feature widows who remarry or seek to do so. Most other playwrights of the period took casual advantage of the widow's theatrical appeal, writing one or two comedies featuring a remarrying widow (Fletcher, with and without Beaumont, wrote three), but such plots are understood to be something of a Middletonian trademark: “The typical figures of Middleton's city comedies,” remarks Muriel Bradbrook, “are the rich widow and the young spendthrift.