A Trick to Catch the Old One

A Trick to Catch the Old One is a Jacobean comedy written by Thomas Middleton, first published in 1608. The play is a satire in the subgenre of city comedy.

The play was entered into the Stationers' Register on 7 October 1607 by the printer George Eld, and published by him in quarto in the following year, 1608. The title page of Q1 states that A Trick was acted by the Children of Paul's, one of the companies of boy actors popular at the time. The play was probably written and first acted ca. 1605.

The play was popular; a second quarto was issued in the same year, printed by Eld for the bookseller Henry Rocket. The title page of Q2 attributes the play to "T. M." and states that A Trick was acted by both the Children of Paul's and the Children of the Chapel (then called the Children of the Blackfriars), the other major troupe of boy actors of the era. (The Children of Paul's had stopped performing plays around 1606, and the Children of the Chapel/Blackfriars may have acquired the play from their defunct competitors.) Q2 also states that the play had been acted at Court before King James I the previous "New Year's night." A third edition followed in 1616, printed by Eld for the stationer Thomas Langley; the title page assigns the authorship to "T. Middleton."

Two decades after its authorship, Philip Massinger used A Trick to Catch the Old One as a model for his most popular play, A New Way to Pay Old Debts, premiered in 1626 and published in 1633. Massinger's version of the plot would go on to become one of the most successful plays in English-language theatre.

The play's protagonist, Theodorus Witgood, has mortgaged his estates to his uncle Pecunius Lucre, a covetous London merchant. Witgood is in love with Joyce, the daughter of another London merchant, Walkadine Hoard. Lucre and Hoard are rivals; Hoard resents Lucre because Lucre has shown himself to be an even more ruthless swindler than Hoard is himself. Witgood persuades a former mistress to masquerade as a rich country widow and his new fiancée. Lucre, delighted at the prospect of a rich match for his nephew, provides him with £50 and a vague promise to make Witgood his heir. Similarly and for the same reason, Witgood's creditors stop dunning him and offer him more credit. Conversely, rival suitors for the "rich widow" arise, including Walkadine Hoard.

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