The co-author of "The Changeling," and chiefly responsible for the parts that Dan Jemmett adapts into "Dog Face," is Thomas Middleton (c.1580-1627). Although one of many busy playwrights in the golden age of English theater, his stock has risen in recent years. Middleton is now generally ranked above John Webster and just below Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson among Shakespeare's playwriting contemporaries.

To a large extent, writing for the theater in Shakespeare's day was collaborative, like movie writing today. Among Middleton's collaborators were William Rowley, on "The Changeling" (1622) and "A Fair Quarrel" (1617), and the prolific Thomas Dekker, on "The Honest Whore" (1605) and "The Roaring Girl" (1610). Other collaborators probably included Webster, Anthony Munday, John Fletcher -- and Shakespeare, 16 years his senior, with whom Middleton is now thought to have collaborated on "Timon of Athens" (1605). He also wrote material that appears in "Macbeth" (1606) and "Measure for Measure" (1603), though it may have been added later.

But Middleton wrote much on his own, including "A Mad World My Masters" (1606), "A Chaste Maid in Cheapside" (1611), "Women Beware Women" (1621) and "A Game at Chess" (1624). He has also been credited with the well-known "The Revengers Tragedy" (1607), previously ascribed to Cyril Tourneur.

In listing the qualities that make the playwright feel particularly modern, Middleton scholar Richard Dutton lists "a sustained ironic or sardonic mode, fascination with self-destructive violence, penetrating insight into sexual psychology, unblinking observation of the effects of money, lust and power ... [and] a drama of urban identity, commercial ideology and partisan politics."

Just as Jemmett has found Middleton ripe for adaptation, so have many other English playwrights. The gritty, proletarian Barrie Keefe turned Middleton's "A Mad World My Masters" into a 1977 attack on Margaret Thatcher's England. Another English critic of capitalism, Howard Barker, re-wrote "Women Beware Women" in 1986. Peter Barnes and Edward Bond have also adapted him.

In Pittsburgh, the University of Pittsburgh staged Dennis Kennedy's "The Changeling: Re/Vision" (1992), a modern re-making of Middleton's most famous play that is as ambitious as (and far more elaborate than) Jemmett's, and in 2003, Unseam'd Shakespeare did Kevin Ewart's intelligently pruned version of "Women Beware Women."