Life & Wisdom Quote by Thomas Middleton

A line like "Though I be poor, I'm honest" arrives with its chin up. Middleton compresses an entire social argument into eight plain words, using a concession ("Though") to acknowledge the era's brutal math: poverty is often read as moral failure. The speaker grants the audience its prejudice before snapping the sentence shut with a counterclaim that refuses the expected conclusion. It's not "I'm poor and honest", a neutral pairing; it's "Though...", a verbal flinch away from the stigma, followed by a declaration of selfhood.

The subtext is defensive because it has to be. In early modern London, "poor" wasn't just an economic category; it was a social suspicion. Vagrancy laws, Protestant moralizing, and a growing market economy all helped turn need into evidence. Middleton's stage world - crowded, transactional, saturated with hustlers and hypocrites - thrives on the idea that virtue is for sale. This line pushes back by insisting on an older, more stubborn metric of worth: character as something that can survive material lack.

It also works because it sounds like a proverb, the kind of sentence you could say at a doorway, in a courtroom, or under your breath while being sized up. That portability is political. Middleton lets an ordinary voice claim moral authority, and in doing so, he quietly exposes the real corruption: a culture eager to confuse money with merit, and to treat honesty as a luxury good.