This genre of theater was widely successful in the city. Plays such Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday and Jonson's Bartholomew Fair are included under this category of satirical plays that usually attempt to set morals for the audience, and Middleton was also a dramatist who dabbled in comedy. [4] First, a definition is needed.
Twyning offers a general statement about citizen comedy that also notes the characteristics of city comedy:
" . . . city comedy (anti-romantic satires of their contemporary milieu which deploy intrigues about sex, marriage, and money) and citizen comedy (the means by which contemporary London staged and tested middle-class mores). . . " |
A Chaste Maid in Cheapside is undeniably both a city and citizen comedy, as it criticizes the values of those who try and gain social status or wealth at any price (see The Play for more detail about the plot). Notably, Middleton does not condemn the blatant hedonism and sexual deviancy of the characters in the play - he merely makes fun of them in bouts of irony:
". . . the play is continuously built on ironic distances: chaste maids are chased whores and vice versa; the family is a hollow sham; Puritans are hypocrites; the stupid appear clever, as the clever are crooks" [21]. |
There is a distinct difference between A Chaste Maid in Cheapside and other citizen comedies: although he's a realist ("Middleton's comic plots are likely to be quite fantastic in their manipulation; yet so vivid are his rogues and gulls and pictures of London life that we unhesitatingly call him realist" [6]), his comedies are almost unbelievable in their plots, and Middleton does not moralize the plot for the audience.
". . . Middleton. . . seems to me . . . ready to tolerate human depravity" [2]
". . .the extremes of sexual license which [A Chaste Maid] depicts. This is a community that has so thoroughly lost normative social control of basic biological function . . .[but] by insisting on the Kixes's own satisfaction in the matter and on Sir Walter's unworthiness as heir, Middleton prevents us from making simple moral judgements" [17]
"There is none of Jonson's moral indignation in Middleton's treatment of these characteres; he is rather a dispassionate observer of things as they are, always ready to dispel the gloom by the introduction of highly farcical scenes" [15] |
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The Author 