A Chaste Maid in Cheapside

Author: Thomas Middleton
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1408144557
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 160

Book Description
Written for the adult players at the open-air Swan theatre in 1613, this master-piece of Jacobean city comedy signals its ironic nature even in the title: chaste maids, like most other goods and people in London's busiest commercial area, are likely to be fake. Money is more important than either happiness or honour; and the most coveted commodities to be bought with it are sex and social prestige. Middleton interweaves the fortunes of four families, who either seek to marry their children off as profitably as possible, to stop having any more for fear of poverty, or to acquire some in order to keep their property in the family. Most prosperous is the husband who pimps his wife to a rich knight and lets him support the household with his alimony. Like many early modern critics of London's enormous growth, this play warned: the city is a monster that lives off the money the country produces.

A Chaste Maid in Cheapside

Author: Thomas Middleton
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408144565
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 145

Women Beware Women

Author: Thomas Middleton
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408144603
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 179

Book Description
One of the great Renaissance playwrights, Middleton wrote tragedies essentially different from either Marlowe's or Shakespeare's, being wittier than the former and more grittily ironic than the latter. The genre of 'citizen tragedy' came into its own in the eighteenth century, but Middleton can claim to have created it: Bianca, wife of a middling commercial agent, arouses the lust of the Duke of Florence and becomes his mistress, first secretly, then openly and finally, after her husband has been seduced by the scheming Lady Livia and stabbed by Livia's brother, the Duke's wife. Livia plots her revenge, and the play ends with a banquet and a masque that are a triumph of black farce. Middleton's powerful, psychologically complex female characters and his clear-sighted analysis of misogyny are bound to impress today's audiences, but it is the pervasive irony - cynicism, even - with which he dissects the motivations of both oppressor and victim that makes him so eerily modern.

Thomas Middleton: Four Plays

Author: Thomas Middleton
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1408174634
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 559

Book Description
This New Mermaids anthology brings together the four most popular and widely studied of Thomas Middleton's plays - Women Beware Women; The Changeling; The Roaring Girl and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside - with a new introduction by William Carroll, examining the plays in the context of early modern theatre, culture and politics, as well as their language, characters and themes. On-page commentary notes guide students to a better understanding and combine to make this an indispensable student edition ideal for study and classroom use from A Level upwards.

The Changeling

Author: Thomas Middleton
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : English drama
Languages : en
Pages : 104

Book Description
The Changeling is a popular Renaissance tragedy in which the relationship between money, sex, and power is explored. Frequently performed and studied in University courses, it is a key text in the New Mermaids series.

Five Plays

Author: Thomas Middleton
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780140432190
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 468

Book Description
Thomas Middleton (1580-1627) was one of the most prolific and fascinating playwrights of the Jacobean era, producing nearly fifty theatrical pieces in a quarter of a century. This collection comprises five of his most powerful plays, from the comedies satirizing city life, A Trick to Catch the Old One, and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, to his later tragedies Women Beware Women and The Changeling, in which Middleton reveals a world dominated by the corrupting power of lust and subject to the futility of human pretensions. Also included is The Revenger's Tragedy, originally ascribed to Cyril Tourneur, a Revenge Play infused with sardonic wit and biting irony.

Michaelmas Term

Author: Thomas Middleton
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719015526
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Book Description
"This edition, newly collated and edited, features complete explanations of the play's often bawdy exchanges and the complex stage action of the gulling and secondary plots. It will be invaluable for advanced students of the Middleton canon as well as all those interested in early modern London and its vibrant theatrical culture, especially the tradition of boy choristers as professional actors."--BOOK JACKET.

A Chaste Maid in Cheapside

Author: Thomas Middleton
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 144

Book Description
Involves a series of sexual relationships, 'most directed by greed for riches', which overrides even family loyalties. Allwit and his wife live off her lover Whorehound. The Yellowhammers are out ot exploit their children as business assets. Lady Kix commits adultery with Touchwood Senior who is being paid to make her foolish old husband fertile, while Touchwood has had to leave his own loving wife because they have too many children and can support no more.

Middleton A Chaste Maid in Cheapside

Author:
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 134

Book Description

The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Middleton

Author: Gary Taylor
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199559880
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 690

Book Description
The 37 essays in The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Middleton reinterpret the English Renaissance through the lens of one of its most original, and least understood, geniuses. Shakespeare's younger contemporary and collaborator, Middleton wrote modern comedies, tragedies, tragicomedies, history plays, masques, pageants, pamphlets, and poetry. The largest collection of new Middleton criticism ever assembled, this ambitious Handbook provides a comprehensive, in-depth, cutting-edge reaction to OUP's Collected Works of Thomas Middleton, winner of the 2009 MLA prize for editing, the first complete scholarly text of his voluminous and diverse oeuvre. The Handbook brings together an international, cross-generational team of experts to discuss all these genres through an equally diverse range of critical approaches, from feminism to stylistics, ecocriticism to performance studies, Aristotle to Zizek. Reinterpretations of canonical plays such as The Changeling, Women Beware Women, The Roaring Girl, and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside mingle with explorations of neglected or recently-identified works. Middleton's dramatic use of dance, music, and clothing, Middletonian adaptation, his relationships to the classical world and to continental Europe, his fascinating explorations of sexuality and religion, all receive attention. The collection also provides new essays on modern and postmodern reactions to Middleton, including recent Middleton revivals and films, and living artists' responses to his work-responses that range from the actresses who play Middleton's women to writers in various genres who have been inspired by his artistry. The Handbook establishes an authoritative foundation for the rapidly-expanding growth of interest in this extraordinarily protean, funny, moving, disturbing, and modern writer.