not have any sexually transmitted diseases, Yellowhammer will overlook the knight's transgressions. As Dorothy M. Farr notes in her bookThomas Middleton and the Drama of Realism: A Study of Some of the Representative Plays, Allwit and Yellowhammer have specific moral codes that allow them to commit certain acts. Farr says, ‘‘In the code of both, greed excuses lechery.’’

Other characters have odd codes of morality that allow them to commit one immoral act but not another. One of the most famous examples from the play is the scene with the two promoters. These two hired spies demonstrate that they are willing to take meat away from the poor but will also turn a blind eye to anybody who bribes them enough. The first promoter says to his partner after letting a man sneak some meat by them, ‘‘Tis Mr Beggarland's man, the wealthy merchant. / That is in fee with us." However, when the country wench dupes them into taking her unwanted child, the two promoters have a moral dilemma since they unwittingly promised to keep it. Covatta says,"They are quite willing to use their post for personal profit but feel they cannot break their word.''

Into this corrupt world, where almost everyone seems a villain, Middleton places two characters who help to balance out the immorality, at least a little bit. Charles Barber says in his critical introduction to the University of California Press version of the play, ‘‘The young lovers.... provide, even if sketchily, a norm of human relations by which we can judge the marketeering attitudes of the other characters.’’ Moll Yellowhammer and Touchwood Junior are not entirely innocent of deception. Touchwood Junior at first appears very moral because he believes in chastity. As he remarks to Moll, "Turn not to me till thou mayst lawfully,'' meaning that they should wait until after they are married to have sex. Despite his own adherence to a chaste lifestyle, however, Heller notes that this good intention is offset by Junior's ‘‘active promotion of his senior brother's arrangement with the Kixes.’’ Likewise, Moll engages in a series of tricks and deceptions to try to escape her upcoming marriage to Sir Walter and get married to Touchwood Junior without her parents' consent. However, despite the trickery of Moll and Touchwood Junior, their marriage is motivated by love, which makes them seem more moral than other characters.

In the end, all of the discussion over how moral the play is or even whether the play has a moral, may be a topic of interest only to modern readers and critics. Moral justification for the acts in the play was probably not an issue for many playgoers in Middleton's time since Elizabethan audiences found humor in situations that many modern viewers do not. As Martin Sampson notes in his introduction to Masterpieces of the English Drama: Thomas Middleton, ‘‘he who would understand the immense vivacity of Elizabethan drama must come to perceive that our forbears saw the funny side of many things which to us are beneath or above contempt.’’ Likewise, since Middleton's play has been noted by many critics to be representative of life in London at the time, many of the playgoers may have recognized the moral sacrifices that the characters make in order to survive in the city. As T. H. Howard-Hill notes in his entry on Middleton for Dictionary of Literary Biography, "There is small security in his comic world for any of them, and even the best, like Touchwood and Moll, can thrive only by their wits.’’

Source: Ryan D. Poquette, Critical Essay on A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, in Drama for Students, Gale, 2003.

In Middleton's A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, nothing is quite as it seems. Wives act like whores. Whores pass for wives. Dunces spout Latin to prove their erudition. Middle class parents try desperately to marry their children into an upper class that tries desperately to hide the impending doom of poverty. Even the language Middleton chooses is rife with double meanings. Through all the complicated wordplay and the sometimes bewildering tangle of revelations and protestations, Middleton inexorably explores the difference between what truly is and what can be seen, and the human need for both truth and artifice.

Middleton's Cheapside is crowded with characters who would like to be something other than what they are. The Yellowhammer parents want nothing more than to be considered a step above their current station. Their son, Tim, wants to be considered a learned gentleman. Their daughter, Moll, wishes she were engaged to a different man. Sir Walter Whorehound wishes he possessed the wealth his title suggests he merits. Mistress Allwitt, who has borne him seven illegitimate children, wishes to appear a respectable matron. Touchwood Senior wishes for fewer children, Sir Oliver and Lady Kix for just one of their own. Touchwood Junior longs for the hand of Moll, which is forbidden to him, when the play opens, by the competing ambitions of her parents.

Allwitt alone in this mix is happy in his state and, it seems, in touch with reality. As the cuckolded husband whose household is entirely paid for by the generosity of his wife's lover, Allwitt not only fully acknowledges his position, but glories in it: ‘‘I pay for none at all, yet fools think's mine ... he's jealous for me, watches her steps, sets spies; I live at ease, he has both the cost and torment: when the strings of his heart frets, I feed, laugh or sing.’’ Allwitt's disdain for the fools who are tricked by the shaky artifice of his sham marriage is matched by what could almost be described as a strange zeal for telling the truth. Not only does he horrify Sir Walter with his directness about the reality of their relation, he seems to take glee in telling the truth in other instances as well: he trumps the promoters with the fact of his wife's childbirth, which exempts him from the penalty they planned to place on him for the crime of having meat during Lent. When it looks as though Moll' s unhappy engagement to Sir Walter might end his comfortable arrangement, Allwit resorts not to artifice, but to truth, going to the girl's father, Yellowhammer, with the facts of Sir Walter's domestic situation.

Interestingly, Yellowhammer, one of the characters sunk most deeply in both self-deception and machinations to deceive the rest of the world, reacts to the truth with more artifice by pretending to be enraged at the news but actually filing it away as a bargaining chip in his negotiations with Sir Walter for his daughter. In Middleton's artifice-infested Cheapside, the simple truth can't seem to survive on its own. In fact, Middleton almost seems to question truth's usefulness by giving Allwitt, an extremely corrupt character, such concern for it. Why does Middleton give such seeming concern for truth to a character as corrupt as Allwittt? Middleton, whose vision while realistic is also highly moral, surely is not suggesting that lies are better than truth. He may be making a more complicated point: that a man with a conscience might want to hide parts of himself from the world because of his awareness that he has fallen short of his ideals. ‘‘The more slave!’’ Sir Walter exclaims of Allwitt. ‘‘Whenman turns base, out goes his soul's pure flame: the fat of ease o'erthrows the eyes of shame.’’ Allwitt, although he seems committed to what is true, has actually lost something far more important: the ability to judge between not just truth and lies, but good and evil.

If Allwitt stands on the bottom rung of Middleton's moral ladder, Moll, the "chaste maid'' of the title, and her reasonably virtuous lover, Touchwood Junior, cling somewhat clumsily near the top. The two lovers have done nothing wrong: even Middleton's loaded sexual language simmers down some in their speeches. The two of them want only to be joined in holy matrimony and are prevented by the avarice and artifice of those around them: Moll's parents, who want a daughter wed to a knight, and Sir Walter who wants Moll's parents' gold. Within this twisted world, the young lovers behave with as much honor as may be realistic: Touchwood properly buys a ring for his beloved and brings in a priest to consecrate their union. But, after two thwarted attempts at marriage, the young lovers resort to fighting artifice with artifice, faking their deaths to gain sympathy from both the public and their parents who are unable to stand against the tide of public opinion when the lovers are "resurrected'' in the final scene. Their artifice, however, has a different edge to it than that of their parents, who work to obscure reality by pretending to be other than what they are. Instead, Moll and Touchwood Junior scheme only to reveal the deeper truth of their love.

Middleton's take on the usefulness of truth does not end with a simple preference for artifice over bare facts, however. In fact, although Middleton pairs Allwitt's zeal for revealing the naked truth with a deeply corrupt soul, Middleton is unsparing with his characters who refuse to see the truth when it stands clearly before them. Touchwood Junior buys Moll's wedding ring from her unsuspecting father, even telling the old man that he plans to deceive the parents of his intended in order to marry her, but Yellowhammer, blinded by greed at the sale, sees nothing. His blindness is ironically two-sided: he is unaware of his daughter's true value, objectifying her as only a bargaining chip with which to advance in the world, with little to no thought for her happiness beyond concern for her physical well-being. At the same time, although her moodiness leads him to suspect she might love someone other than Sir Walter, Yellowhammer is absolutely unable to conceive of the possibility that she might muster enough spunk to deceive him and follow her heart. Even when Touchwood boldly claims that Moll is almost a perfect copy of his beloved and uses her finger in fitting the ring, Yellowhammer, perhaps blinded by Touchwood's guarantee of payment, regardless of whether the ring fits or not, remains unseeing. He even adds his own line of mockery to Touchwood's little farce declaring, "I wonder things can be so warily carried, and parents blinded so; but they're served right that have two eyes and wear so dull a sight.’’ If Middleton punishes those that refuse to see clearly, he also rewards those who are true to themselves, however imperfectly. The purest example of this is the young lovers, who refuse to betray their hearts, against strong odds. Middleton is also kind to Touchwood Senior, who, aware of his legendary fertility, uses his double-edged gift to bless Sir Oliver and Lady Kix with a child. In an absolute world, Touchwood Senior stands on very shaky ground, but Middleton uses him as the instrument to grant the wishes of Lord Oliver and Lady Kix, who then reward Touchwood by promising to provide for him and all his future children. On the other hand, the Yellowhammers, Sir Walter, and Tim, all of whom strive to be something which they are not, are those who are punished most severely, all three losing both money and prestige.

Within Middleton's logic of remaining true to oneself, the Welsh gentlewoman is an interesting aberration. Originally a whore, she passes for a maid and becomes a wife, serving as a foil to Mistress Allwitt who passes for a wife but serves as a whore. Middleton's insistence that his characters remain true to themselves would seem to necessitate her punishment for pretending to be something which she is not, which her marriage, and it's attendant rise to respectability, seems to contradict. But Middleton may be using her to make a larger point: that the categories of "wife'' and "whore'' are not defined by behavior alone, that the Welsh gentlewoman's true identity may not be completely defined by her past dalliances. But by no stretch of the imagination is she truly pure or honest, and Middleton is not absolutely benevolent with her: her marriage to Tim could be construed either as reward or punishment. No matter how true or false Middleton's characters are to themselves, a vast gap remains for all of them between what they do and what they say. Throughout the play, character after character makes beautiful written and morally sound speeches on the way life ought to be—then goes on to belie this, sometimes with their very next act. Touchwood Senior's speech on marriage at the opening of act 2 is perhaps the best example. In his almost achingly lovely paean to marriage, he praises his wife's willingness to be separated from him until a time when they can afford the children their desire engenders. ‘‘Honest wife, I thank thee,’’ he says as they part. ‘‘I ne'er knew the perfect treasure thou brought'st with thee more than at this instant moment. A man's happy when he's at poorest that has matched his soul as rightly as his body.'' As soon as Mistress Touchwood exits the scene, Touchwood's speech turns from praise of her character within half a dozen lines, to bitter ruminations on his inability to enjoy marital or extramarital relations without impregnating his partner—and then to an encounter with a woman who is likely the mother of one of his illegitimate children. Sir Oliver wishes his wife happiness at any price, then descends into recriminations about her fertility within half a page of dialogue. The gossips that attend Mistress Allwitt's lying-in offer strings of touching blessings on the likely doomed newborn while drinking so heavily they leave staggering. Even the addle-headed student Tim mouths a seemingly prescient nugget of advice on marriage, wondering that his parents "think I have no more care of my body than to lie with one that I ne'er knew, a mere stranger, one that ne'er went to school with me neither, nor ever play-fellows together’’—but at the close of the drama, he's managed to marry, not just a stranger, but a whore.

What does Middleton mean to say by revealing the ugly ditch between what his characters say and the lives they lead? In the face of the worldly pressures which sympathetic characters like Sir Oliver, Lady Kix, Touchwood Senior, Touchwood Junior, and Moll face—poverty, society, biology— Middleton's realistic about the fact that it's almost impossible to live a life of absolutes and survive. Middleton does not seem to judge his characters for their inability to live up to their more noble dreams. He is not willing to give up on them, either. In fact, by linking Allwitt's corruption with his brash insistence on looking the truth square in the face, Middleton seems to suggest that some artifice may, in fact, be a necessity for the human race. To avoid sinking completely into depravity, Middleton's characters need those lovely speeches. While they can't live up to them, the fact that they can still speak of better things provides the proof that their human flame is still flickering.

Source: Carey Wallace, Critical Essay on A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, in Drama for Students, Gale, 2003.

When Thomas Middleton wrote A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1611-1613), his finest and most complex comic drama, he was already a practiced and successful private theater playwright. In such plays as Michaelmas Term, A Mad World, My Master, and A Trick to Catch the Old One he had helped to perfect the form of city comedy that was so fashionable in early Jacobean London, reflecting, as it did, the intellectual sophistication, moral scepticism, and taste for irony of its educated audience. In composing A Chaste Maid for the public stage, he faced the problem of turning satiric comedy into popular comedy, or at least of merging the ironic vision of his coterie dramas with the festive spirit of that particular dramatic tradition which a play like Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday epitomizes. His solution was to utilize much of the thematic material he had handled in his earlier works—materialism and avarice, bourgeois pretensions, aristocratic degeneracy, religious hypocrisy, libertinism and prodigality—but also to expand his treatment of human sexuality to lay new stress on the theme of fertility and, hence, make Eros, not Momus, the god of his comic world.

I

This new synthesis is anticipated by certain elements in his previous plays, such as the marriages and festivities at the end of A Mad World and A Trick, comedies which avoid the sterner, judgment-scene conclusions of the earlier, more didactic pieces, The Phoenix, Your Five Gallants, and Michaelmas Term. The Family of Love is a particularly interesting case: like A Chaste Maid, it concludes with a celebration of marriage and the family and a clear affirmation of the goodness and power of human sexuality properly used, proclaiming the value of fruitful love in honest physical terms. The love of Gerardine and Maria, the play's romantic hero and heroine, leads logically and naturally to sexual intercourse; and the child born to them in the course of the action is a symbol of the richness and vitality of their relationship. It is no accident that the play's loveless couples, the Purges and the Glisters, are childless, and the lecherous gallants, Lipsalve and Gudgeon, comically impotent in their sexual frustration. In any event, this comedy signals an interest on Middleton' s part in the human reproductive powers—not merely because private theater audiences demanded sexual material, but also because he could make of it valid thematic use.

This interest in the theme of fertility is a continuing one for Middleton, especially apparent in the unusual number of pregnancies and onstage infants in his later plays. In A Fair Quarrel, a tragicomedy written in collaboration with William Rowley, the Fitzallen-Jane relationship bears a remarkable similarity to the Gerardine-Maria one: despite their use for the creation of some tragicomic responses, Jane's pregnancy and the onstage infant serve as a promise that the society of this play will once again be harmonious, that the quarrel between the Colonel and Captain Ager, who are unwittingly related because of the young lovers' precontracted marriage, will end "fairly," with the younger generation of characters enjoying life instead of thwarting it. In More Dissemblers Besides Women, Lactantio' s cast-off mistress, disguised as a page to escape detection by the young hypocrite's antifeminist uncle, is visibly pregnant onstage before giving birth to their child. Aside from the broad comedy of the scene in which she is forced to improve her "manly" graces by taking dancing lessons which actually induce labor (the kind of farcical treatment of sex Middleton could not resist), she is striking evidence, in this play, of the power of fertile sexuality which the woman-hating Cardinal rejects, to which the widowed Aurelia (like Olivia in Twelfth Night) pretends to be immune, and which ultimately causes the discomfiture of the opportunistic Lactantio himself. In terms of the drama's festive conclusion, the child born to this anonymous girl is, as in The Family of Love, a sign of a languishing society's capacity for regeneration. In The Old Law, Agatha, who is sentenced to death under the outrageous edict stipulating that all men over eighty and all women over sixty are to be executed, makes a pathetic attempt at feigning pregnancy by hiding a cushion under her gown in order to be allowed to survive. Here, more obviously than in A Fair Quarrel and More Dissemblers, pregnancy—even a counterfeit one—is a symbol of the life-force within nature and the human instinct to live.

As Shakespeare's sonnets testify, man's pro-creative powers had a more urgent importance in an age of high infant-mortality and short life-expectancy. Jonson' s Hymenaei offers immediate conception as the ideal in human marriage; for fertility, as the conclusion of A Mid-summer Night's Dream and the wedding masque of The Tempest illustrate, is the greatest blessing a loving married couple can possess. In Much Ado About Nothing, Benedick comically remarks that marriage is a necessary institution because "the world must be peopled’’— a commandment which is quite serious, considered against the background of all the immanent dangers to life and health in the medically primitive Renaissance. London, for example, lost more than 30,000 people in the plague of 1603–4; and man's only effective weapon against death was procreation. In Shakespeare's words to the young man of the sonnets: ‘‘nothing 'gainst Time's scythe can make defense / Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence’’ (Sonnet XII).

II

A Chaste Maid in Cheapside demonstrates that the theme of fertility can find its fullest expression in comedy, the one form of drama which best embodies the élan vital; for this particular play fuses this theme with its basic comic pattern. In its joyous celebration of man's procreative energies, A Chaste Maid is close in spirit to comedy's origin in phallic song—a virtually prototypical comic drama (in Susanne Langer's definition of the form), ‘‘erotic, risque, and sensuous if not sensual, impious, and even wicked.’’ If Eros is the ‘‘presiding genius of comedy,’’ he exists here in his properly comic avatar Priapus in the character of Touchwood Sr., who, in his enormous sexual potency, most vividly symbolizes the power of fertility present in Middleton's dramatic world.

Functioning effectively as a life-principle in a world threatened by moral and physical disease and death, he has the incredible—and comically magical—ability of having his every act of intercourse result in a pregnancy. He remarks with genial self-mockery:

... of all men
I am the most unfortunate in that game
That ever pleas'd both genders; I ne'er play'd yet
Under a bastard; the poor wenches curse me
To the pit where'er I come; they were ne'er serv'd so,
But us'd to have more words than one to a bargain:
I have such a fatal finger in such business,
I must forth with't; chiefly for country wenches,
For every harvest I shall hinder haymaking;

Enter a wench with a child

I had no less than seven lay in last progress,
Within three weeks of one another's time.

In this tissue of double entendres, there is a spirit of vitality and play that distracts the audience from the potential moral issues in such rambunctious sexuality. Middleton, in fact, seems only interested in this drama in quickening his audience's ethical awareness with reference to such things as avarice and callous selfishness, sins which have a negative, asocial character and which result in the frustration of love and the disruption of families. For him, the forces which aid Thanatos in its battle with Eros are the really dangerous ones. So Touchwood Sr. exists, in his erotic vitality, as a healthy counterbalance to anti-life activities like fanatical and hypocritical religious asceticism, ruthless social-climbing, and the stubborn pursuit of wealth for its own sake. But, in this play's comic society, his fertility is initially a victim of economic ‘‘necessity’’: he and his wife are forced into a temporary separation because they cannot afford to have more children. As he explains to her in the very first scene in which they appear:

... our desires

Are both too fruitful for our own barren fortunes.
How adverse runs the destiny of some creatures,
Some only can get riches and no children;
We only can get children and no riches ...

... every year a child, and some years two ...

In this action, love must be liberated from the tyranny of money, or at least there must be a reconciliation of Eros and Pecunia, a harmony toward which the play as a whole must move; for the drama's hero and heroine, Touchwood Jr. and Moll Yellowhammer, face a problem thematically related to that of the Touchwood Seniors' and the solutions in the two plot lines are causally interrelated.

The Touchwood Seniors' problem finds its answer through an operation of comic accident. Since Middleton builds a farcical symmetry into his play in assigning to Sir Oliver Kix and his wife a problem precisely opposite to theirs (wealth and childlessness), it is inevitable that the two should cancel each other out. Sir Oliver suffers from impotence, as Lady Kix's insult, "brevity," implies, and, in spite of his railing against his wife for her supposed barrenness, it is clearly his fault that they are without children. Lady Kix complains:

Every one gets before me; there's my sister
Was married but at Bartholomew-eve last
And she can have two children at birth;
O, one of them, one of them would ha' serv'd my turn

Obsessed with their desire for a family, they are willing to ‘‘give a thousand pound to purchase fruitfulness,’’ an offer tailor-made for Touchwood Sr.

In his erotic comedy Mandragola, Macchiavelli uses a fertility potion as a central device for his comic intrigue. Callimaco (who is, like Touchwood Sr., a witty schemer) poses as a doctor with a powerful conception potion derived from the aphrodisiac mandrake plant and persuades Messr. Nicia not only to allow him to administer it to his wife, whom he desires, but to engage the sexual services of an anonymous victim who is supposedly to die from the encounter, a role played by Callimaco himself. In A Chaste Maid, Middleton creates a similar comic action, but he eliminates some of the complexities of the plot Macchiavelli uses, though he utilizes not one, but two fertility potions. In the scene in which the Kixes spend their energies in mutual accusation, a maid tells them about a certain doctor's miraculous remedy for sterility; and, since this is in the same scene in which Touchwood Sr. has been introduced, the audience is in on the trick from the start:

There's a gentleman,
I haply have his name too, that has got
Nine children, by one water that he useth;
It never misses; they come so fast upon him,
He was fain to give it over

... he'll undertake,
Using that water, within fifteen year,
For all your wealth, to make you a poor man,
You shall so swarm with children.

Excited by this vision of abundant progeny, the Kixes immediately hire Touchwood Sr. to administer the "water." In an episode of untroubled farce, Touchwood Sr. gives Sir Oliver a vial of almond milk (totemically, the appropriate color liquid) and sends him out to ride on horseback for five hours to build up his sexual potency. When Lady Kix asks him how she should take her medicine, this "doctor,’’ who has, incidentally, just finished a meal of aphrodisiac foods, tells her, "Yours must be taken lying,'' and leads her off to have intercourse—in her coach, if necessary. When the "water" has worked its magic and Lady Kix's pregnancy is verified, Sir Oliver thinks that he has sired a child with the help of Touchwood Senior's medical skills and is so rapturously happy that he proposes, with comic unconsciousness, that their two families live in a kind of symbiotic relationship. He tells his cuckholder-benefactor:

... I am so endear'd to thee for my wife's fruitfulness
That I charge you both, your wife and thee,
To live no more asunder for the world's frowns;
I have purse, and bed, and board for you:
Be not afraid to go to your business roundly;
Get children, and I'll keep them.

In the harmony that is reached between need and abundance, the force of fertility is finally liberated. In the play's other two plots, however, this goal is harder to achieve, for the problems they contain are more serious and complex.

In the Sir Walter Whorehound-Allwits plot, the comic action is more obviously satiric, since the fertility theme is subordinated to the moral issue of the bourgeois couple's adulterous relationship with their degenerate patron. Whereas Touchwood Senior's motives for his virtually amoral adultery with Lady Kix are healthy in the sense that he brings joy to the Kixes and reunites his own family, Sir Walter's relationship to the Allwits is a brutalizing one that strikes at the very foundation of marriage and the family. In fact, his ultimate expulsion from the play's reconstituted society is justified, in large part, by his pretense that his illicit relationship with Mistress Allwit carries with it the rights of a marital one—a mistake which Touchwood Sr., in his indiscriminate swiving, never makes. Middleton calls attention to Sir Walter's particular moral deformity by attributing to him the kind of thin-skinned jealousy we would expect of the husband, not the cuckolder: he thinks of Mistress Allwit as his rightful possession and is tormented because, as he says to the wittol, "I heard you were once offering to go to bed to her.'' His selfishness affects all three of the play's major plots; and so, after he has been wounded in his fight with Touchwood Jr., he justly deserves his virtual exile, becoming, like Dampit of A Trick to Catch the Old One, a scapegoat figure, carrying with him all the moral disgust the audience might feel for any of the play's other vicious characters.

In spite of the satiric material in this particular plot, the point of view of the Touchwood Sr.-Kixes' plot carries over to soften some of the moral outlines. For even here Middleton is able to affirm some aspects of a basically unattractive situation. This is evident in the (apparently) deliberate dramatic parallelism between Sir Walter's latest child by Mistress Allwit and the infant brought to Touchwood Sr. by the country wench: in each case, Middleton amplifies the theme of procreative vitality and uses the infants, not to condemn male libertinism, but to expose life-denying, anti-carnal religious hypocrisy.

When the country girl leaves him to fare for herself in Puritan London with his latest bastard (her fifth child), the impoverished Touchwood Sr. remarks to himself:

What shift she'll make now with this piece of flesh
In this strict time of Lent, I cannot imagine;
Flesh dare not peep abroad now ...

The pun on the word "flesh" is elaborated dramatically in the subsequent scene in which we witness the corrupt promotors selectively enforcing ‘‘religious wholesome laws.’’ These civil regulations against the consumption of meat in the city during the Lenten season are representative of the pharasaical denial of man's physicality that must be exposed, as it is, by the very "flesh" it seeks to humble. And this is precisely what happens in the episode in which the promoters, who confiscate meat only from those who have not bribed them, seize upon the girl's basket, in which the infant is sleeping, but which they think contains only a piece of mutton they covet, and find themselves with a "piece of flesh'' they had not expected to gather. The flesh, which they actually serve, but puritanically pretend to despise, has its revenge on them.

The christening party scene, at the center of which is another child (the new Allwit baby), is thematically close to this one; for, like the promotors, the Puritan ladies suffer a betrayal by their own appetites. What begins as a display of bourgeois pseudopoliteness becomes an image of comic animality. The women glut themselves on comfits and get ludicrously drunk on the wine offered them, making sexual advances, in their hiccoughing overindulgence, at the first males to come into reach, Tim Yellowhammer and his Cambridge tutor. The infant, which, like the country girl's child, is a sign of the physical vitality within the world of A Chaste Maid, again occasions the unmasking of the animal appetites of religious hypocrites.

The Sir Walter-Allwits' plot, then, may raise some serious ethical questions; but, as is evident in the christening party scene and the strong presence of the fertility theme (much is made of Mistress Allwit's pregnancy and the Allwit household has a total of seven children), there is something comically alive about it. In the Touchwood Jr.-Yellow-hammers plot the mood is darker: here Eros is clearly repressed and, as the symbolic deaths of Moll and her lover indicate, the greed and opportunism of the Yellowhammers are more potent anti-life forces. Money tyrannizes over love in the Yellowhammers' insistence that their daughter marry the profligate, but titled, Sir Walter Whorehound against her will. In a scene which is probably intended as a parody of popular theater romantic pathos, Moll is apparently killed by a combination of her parents' cruel insensitivity to her feelings and the news of her lover's supposed death. And the audience itself believes the young couple to have died; for it is probably meant to react to their resurrection in the final scene with a joyful surprise, jolted into a comic awareness of the value of life and love.

Eros is freed from bondage finally in the context of a conventional but highly theatrical device. After the coffins of the young lovers are brought onstage to file dirgeful music of recorders, attended by the play's major characters (with the exception of the Yellowhammers, who appear later, and Sir Walter, who is in a hospital recovering from his wounds), Touchwood Sr. delivers a funeral oration to enlist the sympathies of his audience, and then suddenly revives his brother and Moll: ‘‘Up then apace, and take your fortunes, / Make these joyful hearts; Here's none but friends.’’ In a trick which Jacobean comedy borrows from the commedia dell'arte, the two lovers arise from their coffins and are married on the spot. This transformation of winding-sheets into wedding-sheets makes their caskets into life and fertility symbols: ‘‘Here be your wedding-sheets you brought along with you: you may both go to bed when you please too,’’ Touchwood Sr. tells them, presiding over their resurrection and espousals (as he had over their earlier aborted wedding) like a benevolent fertility god. Even in this plot, love triumphs over all odds; and the double wedding with which the play concludes—Touchwood Jr. and Moll, Tim Yellow-hammer and Sir Walter's Welsh courtesan—converts the mood of the comedy wholly into one of celebration, the avaricious Yellowhammer, despite a comic trace of stinginess, incongruously emerging as a joyful host to the younger generation:

So fortune seldom deals two marriages
With one hand, and both lucky; the best is,
One feast will serve them both: marry, for room,
I'll have the dinner kept in Goldsmiths' Hall,
To which, kind gallants, I invite you all.

This festive conclusion, like that of A Mad World, My Masters, not only regenerates the play's comic society, but it also ceremoniously reaches out into the world of the audience—a popular one in this case—to offer it the wholesome recreation of the spirits and the psychological cleansing that comic mirth can bring. A Chaste Maid, having exorcised its own narrowly moral concerns along with Sir Walter, whose absence is notable in this last scene, conveys to the spectators what Susanne Langer calls ‘‘the pure sense of life [which] is the underlying feeling of comedy,’’ a feeling which has been implicit all along in the theme of human fertility.

Source: Arthur F. Marotti, ‘‘Fertility and Comic Form in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside,'' in Comparative Drama, Vol. 3, No. 1, Spring 1969, pp. 65-74.

Richard Levin’s recent article on the interrelations of the four plots of A Chaste Maid in Cheapside does justice to the highly complex structure of this fascinating comedy and covers an area of Middleton criticism so far practically neglected. While admiring the details of Professor Levin’s elaborate and meticulous analysis, I feel, nevertheless, that the ground plan of the play is still missing. What fundamental design did Middleton have in mind when mustering with such splendid skill his own architectonic abilities? Why did he select the particular episodes that he did? In other words, what exactly brings together and unifies the various plots of the play, not excluding the Touchwood Senior episode? The answer, I believe, has to be sought not merely at the level of plot (causal or analogical), but at yet another level, at which Middleton has ultimately integrated his work and with which the level of plot is correlated. A Chaste Maid in Cheapside is a fine achievement of the Elizabethan multiple unity, since, as has been recognized, the distinction of the play lies in its range and inclusiveness, the forging into coherent artistic pattern of material apparently heterogeneous, an ingenious reconciliation of discordants into a well-integrated comic whole. Middleton was dramatist enough to make a virtue of a necessity, even to glory in it. Among other modes of dramatic unification conventionally resorted to in the Elizabethan period, particularly when an unwieldy number of episodes or subplots were concerned, the most potent, though not always the most obvious, was the thematic. A Chaste Maid in Cheapside not only subscribes to this thematic unity, but, belonging as the play does to the genre of poetic drama, its language—particularly its imagery—also contributes significantly to the integration of the different dramatic components, endorsing the author’s unified comic vision. A consideration of the play’s principal theme and of its image technique can therefore, I believe, provide the necessary clue to its organization.

I

Middleton’s favorite perspective, that of looking at life in terms of the family, has received critical comment. It is this viewpoint that attains final comic shape in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, as it awaits tragic shape in Women Beware Women and The Changeling. In fact the family is the nexus of the play’s various complications, the basis of its thematic as well as structural unity. The progress of the action admittedly depends on intrigue and counterintrigue, and they get delightfully complicated in the play’s course. Yet, critically speaking, the initial comic situations, together with the problems they pose, become far more relevant to the understanding of the play than the intrigues. The latter exist not for themselves (as they do in A Mad World, My Masters) but for the comic solutions they provide, even if not originally intended to do so, as answers to these problems. The characters are intimately related to the situations and actions because the situations are either created by the characters or depend on them, while the intrigues are motivated by the characters in their conflict and interaction. Whereas in an early play like The Phoenix Middleton tries to link up fortuitously diverse satiric units through family relationships, by the time he writes A Chaste Maid in Cheapside not only are family ties used to establish ‘‘causal connexions among the different plots,’’ but the family itself as a functional dramatic unit becomes the focus of his comedy.

The family, as theme, is a subject of perennial human interest, with its appeal to fundamental instincts, but in this play it gains considerable local value by being rooted to a particular, Jacobean, social setting. In A Chaste Maid in Cheapside the concept of the family is comically explored in almost all conceivable detail, but primarily in relation to begetting and birth, the necessary corollaries of the social institution of marriage. The rearing and upbringing of children, from the time of birth till the time they are well settled in life to start families of their own, also naturally constitute the comic concern of this play. The family, in all its implications, receives more systematic comic attention here than in any other play of Middleton or for that matter, perhaps, in any other Jacobean comedy. Therefore, to look at the play is to look at its various family units (out of which situation, character, action, mood, all emerge) and to study the problems in which each has become involved as a family. All the different plots are comic variations on this family theme.

We are introduced first to the Yellowhammer household, a typically bourgeois goldsmith family, which engenders both the Moll and Tim plots. Since the children in this family are already grown up, the prime concern of the parents is their proper education and marriage, and these are well under way in the very first scene. As representative citizen parents, the Yellowhammers share Quomodo’s attitude of the social climber and seek to gain status by finding rich upper-class matches for both daughter and son. Maudlin Yellowhammer, the mistress of the house, is a proud descendant of Noah’s wife in the miracle plays, her energies as scold being directed not to her husband but to her daughter. She is introduced loudly upbraiding her daughter for not responding sufficiently to her music and dancing lessons. Her frank contrast of her own youth, ‘‘I was lightsome and quick two years before I was married,’’ with her daughter’s, whom she depreciates as fit to be a plumber’s daughter and not a goldsmith’s, is rich in ironic implications, both moral and professional. In her ardor to recommend the knight to her daughter, it appears that she herself would like to have him, if only she could. Middleton’s irony consciously plays upon the mother-daughter relationship, and one is obliquely reminded of Lethe’s theory regarding Thomasine’s affections (in Michaelmas Term), as in other respects Thomasine is an obvious contrast to Mistress Yellowhammer. Finding her daughter’s responses to the knight so cold, Maudlin also uses Falso’s language of tender grievance (over his niece) and tries to goad her into a distasteful match. On her daughter’s escape from the house, the virago is reported to have been seen in her full physical violence, hotly chasing her runaway daughter in a smelt boat and tugging her back by the hair. Though she is depicted as a cruel mother to Moll, here the action is farcical, the exaggeration and incongruity of her behavior making her role comic. Maudlin is the typical shrew. Still tugging Moll’s hair, she wishes to make her own daughter ‘‘an example / For all the neighbours’ daughters,’’ and triumphantly presents her to her father: ‘‘I’ve brought your jewel by the hair.’’

Maudlin’s husband, though overshadowed, represents the reverse of the same coin. He shares his wife’s citizen aspirations and takes care to lock up his daughter safely, like his gold. Informed of his would-be son-in-law’s moral depravity, he merely refers to his none-too-spotless youth and decides in favor of the match; after all, ‘‘The knight is rich.’’ Marriage to him, then, is but an act of social convenience, though his own daughter is involved. Even her presumed death does not deter him from manipulating for the ‘‘rich Brecknock gentlewoman’’ as a good match for his son, to which his wife echoes assent. Lastly, when neither marriage turns out to his satisfaction he can still appease his citizen instincts for thrift by economizing on a joint wedding feast. A stock comic idea in Middleton, the single feast for a double purpose (compare A Mad World, My Masters, A Trick to Catch the Old One), is here given a satiric point.

Maudlin’s relations with her son also occasion much comic business. Tim is solicitously being provided a Cambridge education, silver spoon included, so that he may turn out a bachelor of art ‘‘and that’s half a knight.’’ Like mother, like son. If Tim has the foolish pedantry to send a Latin letter, Maudlin has the presumption to interpret it, claiming, ‘‘I was wont to understand him.’’ But the irony is that she can neither read Latin nor understand him as a mother (her social inferior, Hobson’s porter, is at least shrewd enough to misconstrue the Latin to his own advantage), and Middleton makes the most of a dramatic situation by linking up the verbal comedy to traits of character. Maudlin sends for Tim from Cambridge because ‘‘There’s a great marriage / Towards for him. . . A huge heir in Wales at least to nineteen mountains / Besides her goods and cattle.’’ She tries to embolden him for wooing by calling him up among the female company of gossips at the Allwit christening, and characteristically offers him six sugarplums, which even her fool of a son resents. She also presumes to discuss her son’s academic progress with his tutor. Trusting to the direct method of wooing, she locks the door on her son and the ‘‘Brecknock gentlewoman,’’ but her plans are nearly frustrated by the fool’s Latin pretensions. Tim’s sole occupation in the play seems to be a fool’s delight in parading his folly. The logical disputes of Tim and his tutor follow upon the irrational quarrel of the Kixes, and both would appear on the stage as equally devoid of reason and farcically exaggerated, though on different planes.

The Welsh courtesan, as bait, combines the traditions of a rich heiress (as in A Trick to Catch the Old One) and a pure virgin (as in A Mad World, My Masters), but is rather basely drawn, with none of the redeeming virtues of her predecessors. Dramatically she is a perfect match for Tim: a prize for his own stupidity and a retribution for his parents’ covetousness, since the professed heiress is found to possess nothing at all, not even her maidenhead.

Moll is the only chaste person in this highly dubious household, as, apparently, in all Cheapside. In her single-minded devotion to her lover and her frantic efforts to be united with him, she is a romantic comedy heroine, complete with swan song. Yet Middleton seems to have used dramatic shorthand in delineating her character. Shorn of the pathetic sentiment surrounding a Rose (in Dekker’s The Shoemakers’ Holiday) or a Luce (in The Knight of the Burning Pestle), Moll is depicted as the active partner in intrigue, escaping through unromantic holes and gutters. Even when she calls upon death, the context must dispel all pathos: Her parents scold in characteristic language, and her fatuous brother conceives the bright idea of keeping watch over her in armor (an obvious burlesque). Later when she appears to be dying, her parents still wrangle in mutual faultfinding while Tim and his tutor vie with each other to compose epitaphs in what they regard as a fight against time. To ask a Jacobean public theater audience to restrain laughter at such provocation would be asking the impossible. Surely Middleton knew what he was doing. One suspects the spirit of Littlewit’s Hero and Leander puppet show to have entered surreptitiously in the handling of Moll and her affairs by the dramatist.

Touchwood Junior is drawn in the tradition of witty intriguer heroes like Middleton’s own Follywit and Witgood. He wins a wit combat with Yellowhammer all in ‘‘good mirth,’’ the father-in-law realizing too late that the posy on the ring is a joke at his own expense. The emphasis is again on parental relationship. Just as Yellowhammer puts himself on guard—‘‘we cannot be too wary in our children’’— Touchwood Junior aims at ‘‘blinding parents’ eyes,’’ at the same time comically justifying his action: ‘‘Rather than the gain should fall to a stranger, / ‘Twas honesty in me t’enrich my father.’’ As in the case of all intriguer heroes, he has a standby, his brother, who thus also has a family link to him.

That the Moll and Tim sequences are related as opposites has been observed by Professor Levin, but it needs to be stressed that the contrast is clinched by both characters belonging to the same household and involving the same set of parents, who play no negligible, if opposed, parts in the two plots. In fact the contrast lies fundamentally in the children’s relation to their parents and the parents’ respective attitudes. Moll is the rebellious daughter, making her own choice of a husband and resisting their imposition of Sir Walter, much to their annoyance. Tim is the docile son, gloating in his Cambridge learning, appreciated and shown off by his mother, smacking his lips over an arranged match, acquiescent in his parents’ values, even siding with them in their harassment of his sister. By the time their two stories end, the parents too, we hope, have learned their lesson of parental folly. In respect to mood, while a general farcical tone unites the Yellowhammers with affairs of both daughter and son, yet the solid realism of the goldsmith’s house (unrivaled even in Eastward Ho), with its harsh mercenariness, sets off the romantic plot, on the one hand, and the low farce, on the other, both equally removed imaginatively.

If the Yellowhammer family is taken up with problems of grown-up children, the problems of the other three families of the play concern the begetting and birth of children and also their maintenance. In fact, the relation of ‘‘riches’’ to ‘‘children,’’ a favorite comic idea of Middleton (compare Michaelmas Term), is fully elaborated in this play: ‘‘Some only can get riches and no children; / We only can get children and no riches.’’ The two contrasted situations sum up the predicament of the Kixes and the Touchwoods. The Allwits glory in someone else’s wealth and have to put up with someone else’s children. The Yellowhammers, possessing both children and riches, value riches above their children. All pose problems for the comedy.

From the point of view of the family, the Allwit household represents the most outrageous comic situation that Middleton ever contrived. Though he may have taken hints from literary sources, the comic technique of inflation-plus-inversion is a mode congenial to Middleton that attains final expression here. (It is, in fact, present as early as The Phoenix, in the treatment of the captain who envies his friend’s being kept by a courtesan and who in his turn unhesitatingly sells his wife.) The stock figure of the jealous husband who unintentionally helps his wife to cuckold him (like Harebrain) is reversed in the contented cuckold, Allwit. The comedy is savagely grotesque. Allwit’s soliloquy cataloguing point by point the blessings of a cuckold’s life is a reductio ad absurdum which appalls and shocks by its Swiftian irony of logical rigor. The comic apogee is reached with the complete inversion of roles between husband and cuckolder. Sir Walter is made to smart under the stings of jealousy while Allwit falls a-singing of dildoes. To the servants he is no longer the master but the mistress’ husband.

The family theme is emphasized by the inclusion of children. Nick and Wat innocently (but ironically) refer to Allwit as their father while he curses them under his breath as bastards. Their education and future are often referred to, and it is significant that even Sir Walter wishes to prevent his bastards from mingling with the legitimate children he hopes to get in marriage. Mistress Allwit is conspicuous in the state of expecting her seventh bastard; the baby is born and christened. The family position is dramatically explored in what are regarded as the best scenes of the play, those connected with the christening of the bastard. By the very nature of the situation, this christening is a flagrant violation of all that the traditional ritual stands for—divine blessing, intimate family ties, social harmony—though the form is rigidly maintained. Allwit limits his task to inviting the gossips. Sir Walter not only supervises everything but sacrilegiously offers himself as the godfather to his own begotten child, in order to deceive the world. With appropriate symbolic significance Allwit gets into one of Sir Waiter’s suits on the morning of the busy day. The situation provokes numerous double entendres. Properly enough, at the christening most of the conversation dwells on the topics of begetting and birth and the correct upbringing of children, so that these scenes not only appeal by their realism but also underline the major theme of the play.

The comic corollary of the explosive Allwit situation is the fantastic action of the wittol, who does his best to subvert the marriage prospects of the cuckolder in fear of losing his own source of income. His poor relation, Davy, having a similar ax to grind, incites him to this attempt. The ensuing scene, in which Allwit describes himself most truthfully in highly derogatory terms, under the guise of a well-wisher and a relative to the Yellowhammers, is supreme in Middleton’s concentric irony. Allwit’s pose as a moral guardian is as ridiculous as his imposture of being a relation is false. And even so, what is the true nature of the benefit that he is supposed to reap for himself by this devious stratagem? But, of course, Yellowhammer can be trusted to get over his momentary moral compunctions as soon as Allwit’s back is turned, and Allwit’s purpose is defeated without his even realizing it.

Sir Walter’s wound comes like the announcement of doomsday to the Allwit family. Mistress Allwit falls in a faint, while Allwit is ready to depart from this world with Sir Walter. This unnatural parasitic relationship (contrasted with that of the natural parasite, Davy) is amusingly shocking. Sir Walter’s penitence and realization of sin are at first regarded as ‘‘raving,’’ and the whore and her bastards are employed to restore him to his senses. That the children should be made to appeal to Sir Walter as the last resort of the Allwits again ironically points up the family theme. But since this only provokes the ‘‘will’’ of curses, the incorrigible Allwit family take their revenge by forsaking Sir Walter altogether in his hour of need. Husband and wife now become amicably reconciled, and their depravity is absolute as they brazenly plan to set up lodgings in the Strand with the very stock of Sir Walter’s leftover goods.

Since a family is the thematic and structural unit of the play, Sir Walter Whorehound is to be regarded as the villain of the piece in his active role of the disrupter of families. His final rejection by the Allwits is in the ironic parting-shot tradition of Middleton (compare Proditor’s turning on the captain in The Phoenix). A close parallel to Penitent Brothel in his repentance, Sir Walter is, however, steeped so far in sin that it is impossible for him to save himself or reform others. His futile penitence and the lack of salvation become almost a tragic theme at this point (echoing Dr. Faustus and Macbeth) and look forward to Middleton’s own tragedies:

Her pleasing pleasures now hath poison’d me, Which I exchang’d my soul for.

A comic villain may have appropriate comic retribution, and so long as serious sentiment is kept at bay one makes no objection; but the introduction of penitence, its poetic intensity combined with its ineffectuality, tends to disrupt the comic tone. After all, the comic (and cynical) question posed so far has been: As between equals, Allwit and Sir Walter, who reaps the greater advantage? Evidently Middleton’s purpose is to alienate audience sympathy from the Allwits, for although Sir Walter is the dramatic villain, Allwit is made the principal satiric target at this point.

Touchwood Senior’s family life offers an allied dramatic theme. Husband and wife might have lived happily had not the husband’s fertility proved so disastrous. ‘‘You do but touch and take,’’ ruefully observes the Country Girl, who appears with his bastard and gives him a piece of her mind before she can be bribed off. A farcical episode is made out of the clever disposal of the bastard. The discovery of a child for a lamb’s head in the time of Lent recalls the Mak episode of the Towneley Second Shepherds’ Play, in reverse. Middleton shows his dramatic skill by making a topical digression into a derivative comic incident. Sandwiched between scenes of the Allwit christening, its thematic link is the social accommodation of bastards. While Allwit has apparently resigned his family duties out of perversity, Touchwood has been forced to do so by sheer necessity; the comic smugness and complacency of one stands out against the comic uneasiness and reluctance of the other. Touchwood’s hyperbolic eulogies on his wife’s perfection may be contrasted with Allwit’s sneering grotesqueries about his. The two wives, too, are well balanced: Mistress Touchwood and Mistress Allwit are both fertile, but while Mistress Touchwood is fully prepared to contain her desires and live away from her husband, Mistress Allwit cuckolds her husband by indulging them, though living under the same roof.

In exact contrast to the Touchwoods stand the Kixes, whose marriage has proved equally unhappy for lack of children. But while the Touchwoods are patiently submissive to fate and decide upon living separately, the Kixes refuse to accept their situation calmly. They ‘‘fall out like giants, and fall in like children’’ and are seen alternately scolding and kissing in bold, farcical manner. They quarrel aggressively on the constant theme of begetting and birth, charging each other with infertility. ‘‘O that e’er I was begot, or bred, or born!’’ Lady Kix laments, her language subconsciously expressing her own desires as well as reiterating the play’s theme. Kix’s bargain with Touchwood Senior—the payment by results and the even distribution of the reward over different stages in the actual process of having a child—has the typical Middleton touch:

One hundred pound now in hand. Another hundred when my wife is quick; The third when she’s brought a-bed; and the last hundred When the child cries, for if’t should be still-born, It doth no good, sir.

Not only is it supposed to be a neat and careful business deal, but once more the comic theme of begetting and birth is closely explored. The Kixes’ excess of joy when the medicine takes (as it must) farcically matches their previous wrangling.

The Kixes and the Touchwoods are an immediately contrasted pair of problem families. They have the affinity of belonging to the same type of genial farce, and neatly dovetail into each other when they team up to maintain and perpetuate their respective families, the lighthearted spirit of the solution almost anticipating Restoration comedy. The Allwit family, on the other hand, sets off both of these by its sordidly mercenary character. A kind of comic ratio may then be established if we compare the atmosphere of the Yellowhammer household in relation to the Moll and Tim sequences with that of the Allwit household in relation to the Touchwood and Kix plots, while taking into account at the same time the fact that the Yellowhammers and Allwits, as citizens of Cheapside, share a common scale of values.

The denouement, as befitting a comedy, is meant to bring about a happy ending all round, and it actually succeeds in preserving the various family units intact. Master and Mistress Yellowhammer continue their joint citizen life and have the (somewhat equivocal) satisfaction of seeing their children married and thus starting new families. Moll and Touchwood Junior undergo a comic resurrection from death and are married, presumably to live happily ever after. Even Tim’s wife announces she will turn honest, if not by logic then by marriage. The Allwits are unexpectedly, if reluctantly, rescued from their abnormal situation and plan to live together as best they may. The family troubles of both the Touchwoods and the Kixes are blissfully over. Sir Walter, however, has no family. He courts Moll more for her dowry than for anything else, and tries to pass off his courtesan as a virgin. He undermines the very concept of marriage in a citizen household, and also seeks to thrive on the barrenness of another couple. Therefore he alone is punished. His real punishment is the disinheritance, which ties up neatly with the rest of the play, but Middleton lays it on heavily by confining him to prison for debt. As a consequence, ‘‘Reverend and honourable Matrimony’’ (‘‘. . . thou that mak’st the bed/Both pleasant and legitimately fruitful!’’ can now feel safe.

The supreme irony of the play is, of course, that the methods of solution are often as questionable as the problematic situations themselves, so that, though surface respectability is ensured, it is a patched-up one. In the course of the play each family is proved to have violated the basic assumptions of marriage. If Maudlin has been ‘‘light’’ with her dancing master, Yellowhammer has a bastard now grown up. Tim is married to a courtesan. Mistress Allwit has seven bastards including the one that is born, while Touchwood Senior may have had any number. Sir Oliver threatens to keep a whore and shares with Allwit the dishonor of becoming a contented cuckold, though presumably an unconscious one. Lady Kix claims she was other than barren in court, and readily accepts the kind of help that Touchwood Senior has to offer. Even Touchwood Junior is consciously responsible for his brother’s dubious intrigue. Moll, the chaste maid of the title, alone is impeccable.

Yet as in the case of Wycherley’s The Country Wife, the exuberance proves quite amusing; ‘‘we stop judging and start counting’’ (to borrow a phrase), as I have done. What has been remarked of Horner’s stratagems may be equally applicable to the stratagems in the present play: ‘‘They are morally preposterous and factually incredible,’’ demanding ‘‘a setting of outrageous farce.’’ Touchwood’s device to cure the Kixes is both ironical and fantastic, resembling the china episode in The Country Wife. The monstrosity of the Allwit household may be compared to the Horner situation; in both the assumptions go unquestioned, the comedy lying in what follows given such premises and in the extent of the absurdity to which conclusions can be pursued without the play’s going up in fumo. Middleton and Wycherley share this highly explosive comic quality in their best plays, though their social values may differ considerably.

II

The language of A Chaste Maid in Cheapside reflects its dramatic maturity, and is completely adapted to its stylistic requirements. The play’s imaginative conception demanded a verse medium, and while Middleton transfers the suppleness and flexibility of his prose to verse, at the same time the verse remains capable of lending itself to the necessary stylization. Transitions from prose to verse are made imperceptibly, unlike the rigid, sealed-off divisions of his early plays. In effect, the highly dramatic quality of his medium in the mature tragedies is already anticipated. Speech is carefully governed by the local necessities of character and mood, of realism and comic inflation: Citizen colloquialism, indecent grotesquery, parody of Latin and scholastic logic, Puritan Old-Testament idiom, Welsh dialect—all find their place in this linguistic medley and contribute toward the total comic effect. Though Middleton’s use of imagery is remarkably sparing, compared with that of his contemporaries, an overall poetic organization has been achieved by a significant pattern of images and key words related to the play’s comic themes and attitudes.

The play’s main theme being the family, the word ‘‘house’’ is repeatedly used with particular appropriateness and almost symbolic significance. A tension is set up among the subtly variant meanings of the term—dwelling, home, family, lineage— often with ironic intention. Allwit effusively expresses his gratitude to Sir Walter:

I thank him, has maintain’d my house this ten years; Not only keeps my wife, but ‘a keeps me And all my family.

Sir Walter has maintained his house simply in the financial sense, as also ironically in begetting his family, and the abnormality of the Allwit situation is adequately defined. On the news of Sir Walter’s wound, Mistress Allwit laments, ‘‘A misery of a house,’’ and Allwit echoes her: ‘‘. . . here’s like to be / A good house kept, when we’re all together down.’’ Again there is the interplay of meanings to which dramatic irony is added, since the kind of ‘‘house’’ kept so far has meant a total inversion of both house and housekeeping. When Allwit again takes up the word—‘‘Cannot our house be private to ourselves,’’ ‘‘You have been somewhat bolder in my house / Than I could well like of’’—and finally drives Sir Walter literally out of his house (place of refuge), all his previous usages of the term and its different meanings are ironically brought to bear on his action.

Conversely, the Kixes presumably take the Touchwood Seniors within their house—‘‘I’ve purse, and bed, and board for you’’—in their unconsciously ironical mutual-benefit arrangement. Touchwood Senior refuses to keep his own bastard, on the ground ‘‘I’ve no dwelling; / I brake up house but this morning,’’ which factually describes his plight while serving as an excellent excuse for his reluctance. When the exasperated Sir Oliver threatens ‘‘to give up house’’ and keep a ‘‘fruitful whore,’’ Touchwood Senior in his turn tries to pacify him by promising means ‘‘To get and multiply within your house,’’ where the double meaning is again ironically obvious. The Kixes’ situation is chorically summed up by their maid: ‘‘. . . weeping or railing,/ That’s our house-harmony.’’ Her irony underlines the problem that it is in fact ‘‘house-harmony’’ which has been violently jarred into discord in the various family units that come within the play’s comic scope. The future continuity of happy family life is also hinted at in the same terms when Touchwood Senior banteringly refers to Moll’s marriage: ‘‘Now you keep house, sister.’’

Language imagery, both literal (e.g., references, descriptions) and figurative (simile, metaphor, analogy), is coordinated with stage imagery (e.g., action, stage property) to give the effect of unified comic vision. The Cheapside goldsmiths speak with their broad citizen accent while their vulgarity and debased scale of values are reflected in their language. Their class and professional biases are never forgotten: Their imagery is characteristically drawn from their wealth. Maudlin’s contemptuous admonition of her daughter in the opening scene establishes her identity: ‘‘You fit for a knight’s bed! drowsy-browed, dull-eyed, drossy-spirited!’’; or

You dance like a plumber’s daughter, and deserve Two thousand-pound in lead to your marriage, And not in goldsmith’s ware.

Not only does the virago have her choice of vigorous epithets (comically pointed by alliteration), as does her husband when sufficiently roused, but the goldsmith’s wife’s pride of profession is revealed in the sharply contrasted pairs of images: dross/lead against gold, plumber against goldsmith. Middleton’s irony is of course at Maudlin’s expense, and the traditional moralistic undertone of the intrinsic value of lead over gold (as symbolized by Portia’s caskets) is given an interesting comic twist.

Gold imagery is a composite part of the play’s pattern. Realistically correct in the context of a goldsmith’s family trade (one must remember such stage business as the weighing of a customer’s gold chain in I.i and the ironic ring-making episode), this image is made to carry poetic significance by being related to the play’s themes of greed and commercialism.

I bring thee up to turn thee into gold, wench, And make thy fortune shine like your bright trade; A goldsmith’s shop sets out a city maid.—

says Sir Walter to his Welsh whore. (Notice the comic emphasis by the use of a concluding couplet and a sawlike generalization.) Here turning into gold has the connotations of both exchange and alchemy, while ‘‘shine’’ and ‘‘bright,’’ normally applied to gold, are given ironic turns by being linked euphemistically to a dubious profession; ‘‘setting out’’ carries double entendre and multiple shades of meaning: ‘‘to embellish, adorn, deck out,’’ ‘‘to display for sale,’’ with perhaps the additional suggestion of ‘‘precious stone set in gold’’ (O.E.D.). Allwit also uses the gold image to describe literally and figuratively what he considers his unique situation: ‘‘I have the name, and in his gold I shine.’’ Yellowhammer’s concern to keep Moll in safe custody is expressed in the conventional language of a miser hoarding gold (compare A Staple of News, IV.i).

In the meantime I will lock up this baggage As carefully as my gold; she shall see As little sun, if a close room or so Can keep her from the light on’t.

Maudlin, echoing her husband sarcastically, uses a related image: ‘‘I’ve brought your jewel by the hair.’’ Even Tim cannot forbear using the family imagery: ‘‘Chang’d? gold into white money was ne’er so chang’d / As is my sister’s colour into paleness.’’

Literal references to wealth and riches reinforce the figurative imagery in evoking a world of commercialized values:

I shall receive two thousand pound in gold, And a sweet maidenhead worth forty.

Sir Walter anticipates his good fortune purely in financial terms. ‘‘O how miraculously did my father’s plate ’scape! . . . Besides three chains of pearl and a box of coral,’’ comments Tim thankfully at his sister’s disappearance. (One is reminded of Shylock’s dual sorrow for his daughter and his ducats.) A mother thus expresses concern for her dying daughter:

The doctor’s making a most sovereign drink for thee, The worst ingredience dissolv’d pearl and amber; We spare no cost, girl.

Thou shalt have all the wishes of thy heart That wealth can purchase!

Yellowhammer couples ‘‘riches’’ with love: ‘‘You overwhelm me, sir, with love and riches’’— where the comic juxtaposition also contains dramatic irony by unwittingly referring to a penniless whore. Touchwood Junior’s attitude defines the dramatic norm from which others have departed: ‘‘How strangely busy is the devil and riches,’’ and the two implied equations are meant to counterbalance each other. When Touchwood Junior himself uses gold imagery, it is in conjunction with a vegetative image, ‘‘And shake the golden fruit into her lap,’’ where the implications are not primarily commercial, though the suggestion of Kix’s getting both child and property is subtly present.

Food imagery, particularly of flesh, is pervasively used in the play, since most of the dramatis personae are perpetually being driven by some kind of appetite: for food, for sex, for money. Stage imagery is correlated with language imagery, and an intricate texture results. Maudlin’s recommendation of a husband—‘‘had not such a piece of flesh been ordained, what had us wives been good for? to make salads, or else cried up and down for samphire’’—is typical; to her, food and sex are almost interchangeable concepts, and the pursuit of the image to include the fine distinction between flesh and vegetable is ludicrously comic. Allwit’s wife ‘‘longs’’ for nothing ‘‘but pickled cucumbers’’ and Sir Walter’s coming: Food and sex, governed by the same verb, are brought together, resulting in a comic grossness of attitude, particularly in its dramatic context. Allwit aptly likens his position to that of a man ‘‘Finding a table furnish’d to his hand’’ and in his turn refuses to ‘‘feed the wife plump for another’s veins’’; he also resists ‘‘being eaten with jealousy to the inmost bone.’’

Combined with the food-eating imagery, anatomical references reinforce the sense of physical grossness. The latter is further exemplified in such phrases as ‘‘rip my belly up to the throat,’’ ‘‘With one that’s scarce th’ hinder quarter of a man,’’ ‘‘what cares colon here for Lent?’’ Literal references to food, whether in speech or action, often acquire an unhealthy savor by their sensual associations and rankness of context. Such are the references to sweetmeats and the action of their distribution and pocketing, with Allwit’s pungent asides, in the christening scene, where poor Tim finds his sugarplums so insipid; or Allwit’s enumeration of his wife’s delicacies. The list of aphrodisiacs on which Touchwood Senior is made to dine brings food and sex together on a farcical level. Even Touchwood Junior speaks of himself in terms of eating: ‘‘Or else pick a’ famine,’’ ‘‘it but whets my stomach, which is too sharp-set already.’’ Middleton’s comic use of the flesh image seems to be popularly inspired. ‘‘Mutton’’ was a contemporary cant term for a prostitute, and the double entendre whenever flesh is mentioned must have been quite transparent to the popular audience. This is easily perceived when Touchwood Junior refers to Sir Walter’s Welsh whore— ‘‘. . . and brought up his ewe-mutton to find / A ram at London’’—where the idea of the coupling of animals is fused into it (compare Othello, I.i.88–89). Touchwood Senior takes up the same image: ‘‘I keep of purpose two or three gulls in pickle / To eat such mutton with’’; and he defines his ideal of marriage in similar terms: ‘‘The feast of marriage is not lust, but love,’’ while its opposite is to ‘‘suck out others.’’’

In the scene of the disposal of the bastard by the Country Girl, stage imagery spills over into language imagery, and a complex of interrelations between associated images is established, contributing significantly to the play’s comic unification. ‘‘Flesh’’ is made to apply to both human beings and animals, comically obscuring the differentia; and ‘‘flesh’’ also suggests food and sex, as it does elsewhere. Live animal, dead animal, animal flesh, human flesh, live human being—these concepts are variously juxtaposed, fused or disjuncted, combined and recombined to maintain a taut irony. Touchwood Senior refers to his bastard as ‘‘this half yard of flesh, in which, I think, / It wants a nail or two,’’ and expresses his anxious concern about its disposal: ‘‘What shift she’ll make now with this piece of flesh / In this strict time of Lent, I cannot imagine; / Flesh dare not peep abroad now.’’ The identification between human being and animal flesh is complete. Figurative interchanging of a human being with an animal is translated into stage action in the ruse practiced by the Country Girl on the promoters. As a general background of the play, Lent with its ‘‘carnal strictness’’ (the phrase itself is telling) serves to emphasize the irony of all the different types of appetite depicted; but locally the concentration is on the desire for flesh (meat) as the passion of the season. Touchwood Senior comments on Lady Kix’s behavior:

I hold my life she’s in deep passion For the imprisonment of veal and mutton Now kept in garrets; weeps for some calf’s head now: Methinks her husband’s head might serve with bacon.

The Lenten scene ironically proliferates with figurative and literal references to food, particularly meat: ‘‘This Lent will fat the whoresons up with sweetbreads, / And lard their whores with lambstones.’’ ‘‘A bird,’’ though primarily a term derived from snaring, is also food by implication, followed by references to veal, green-sauce, green goose. Meat is contrasted with fish, which symbolizes the strictness of Lent. Allwit’s ‘‘scornful stomach’’ will admit no fish; a man caught by promoters must do with ‘‘herrings and milk pottage’’ in lieu of meat, while the promoters gloat over their seized veal. Guesses about the bastard, with ‘‘rump uncovered’’ and disguised under ‘‘a good fat loin of mutton,’’ range over ‘‘a quarter of lamb,’’ ‘‘a shoulder of mutton,’’ ‘‘loin of veal,’’ and a ‘‘lamb’s head.’’ The victims of the imposture see their folly in terms of expense for food: ‘‘Half our gettings / Must run in sugar-sops,’’ since they have been figuratively made ‘‘calves’ heads,’’ and they exasperatedly leave the stage to ‘‘roast their loin of mutton.’’ It appears that Lent might turn into a veritable banquet of flesh on the street outside, while inside Allwit’s house comfits and wine are served at an ironical christening. One type of social corruption reinforces another analogically, and both are partially expressed in terms of an inordinate desire for food.

Animal imagery is the peculiar prerogative of Allwit in keeping with his character, though it is Whorehound who is named after an animal by the vice of his nature. While Yellowhammer refers to Moll as ‘‘minx’’ and Lady Kix dubs her husband ‘‘grub’’ in the heat of passion, Allwit quite dispassionately regards his wife as a pig: ‘‘My wife’s as great as she can wallow’’; ‘‘As now she’s even upon the point of grunting.’’ He describes the promoters as hungry dogs, ‘‘sheepbiting mongrels.’’ Connotations of animal and human being coalesce in his comic conceits:

Ha, how now? what are these that stand so close At the street-corner, pricking up their ears And snuffing up their noses, like rich men’s dogs When the first course goes in? . . . T’arrest the dead corps of poor calves and sheep.

Various bodily processes referred to or depicted on the stage—eating, drinking, kissing, copulating, begetting, wetting—stress the physical aspect of human beings and bring them closer to the animal kingdom, not only in Allwit’s speeches, where they predominate, but practically throughout the play.

Apart from the major images considered, minor images may also be shown to link up with the major imagery by association. Even when independently used, such images nonetheless perform a functional role by being intimately connected with theme and characterization. The term ‘‘fat’’ is often applied in association with the animal-cum-human imagery, perhaps implying that human beings fattening on the flesh of animals imbibe their subhuman qualities. Such is Sir Walter’s characterization of the promoters’ bawds:

The bawds will be so fat with what they earn, Their chins will hang like udders by Easter-eve, And, being stroak’d, will give the milk of witches—

where supernatural associations are also added, the inflated and deliberate grotesquery being an intrinsic quality of his language throughout the play. Allwit’s analogies for the wittol’s household dovetail the different implications of ‘‘flesh’’ with a commercial image appropriate in the play’s bourgeois background:

As other trades thrive, butchers by selling flesh, Poulters by vending conies . . .

Imagery of poison, though not outstanding in the play’s scheme, is connected with the food / meat imagery, on the one hand, and animal imagery, on the other, since the opposite of food is poison and it is also the property of certain animals to exude poison. The promoters, as the chief targets of topical satire, are the subjects of the most direct animal imagery, characteristically addressed by Allwit as dogs (already quoted) and reptiles:

And other poisonous officers, that infect And with a venomous breath taint every goodness.

The most poignant expression of the poison image is in Sir Walter’s repentance:

My taste grows bitter; the round world all gall now; Her pleasing pleasures now hath poison’d me, Which I exchang’d my soul for.

His meat has turned into poison, which now sickens him (the alliteration fixes the paradox), and the commercial metaphor in a religious context underlines the profanity of his action. The fish-flesh opposition, set up naturally in its Lenten context, is taken up with a difference in the incident of Moll’s escape by water. Maudlin takes a smelt boat, which leads Tim to comment that she goes ‘‘afishing’’ for Moll, to which Yellowhammer concludes: ‘‘She’ll catch a goodly dish of gudgeons now, / Will serve us all to supper.’’ When Moll is dragged back halfdrowned, Tim describes the scene:

She hath brought her from the water like a mermaid; She’s but half my sister now, as far as the flesh goes, The rest may be sold to fishwives.

But here fish and mermaid carry sexual double entendres. As representative of the bourgeoisie, the Yellowhammers’ stock of imagery also includes other forms of merchandise (apart from their family— gold / jewel—images) or financial transactions:

As there’s no woman made without a flaw; Your purest lawns have frays, and cambrics bracks. But ’tis a husband solders up all cracks. E’en plain, sufficient subsidy-words serves us, sir.

The concepts of dry and wet are counters playfully tossed about in the play’s scheme. Kix, as his name implies, is barren and therefore dry; ‘‘’Tis our dry barrenness puffs up Sir Walter,’’ Lady Kix complains. Wetness applies to fertility, and Touchwood Senior is supposed to get ‘‘Nine children by one water that he useth,’’ his sallies are also referred to as ‘‘drinkings abroad.’’ But wetness also implies urine. The gossips refer to a girl too wet to be married; Allwit comments on fingers washed in urine, and suspiciously looks for wet under the stools. Tim is nauseated by the wet kisses of a gossip. In a serious context, dryness is lack of grace; Sir Walter bequeaths the Allwits:

All barrenness of joy, a drouth of virtue, And dearth of all repentance.

Such examples illustrate Middleton’s way with language, the effort of the conscious artist to wring different meanings out of the same word, adapting a similar method to comic or tragic issues. This mode of work becomes most systematized in his greatest play, The Changeling.

Middleton was no mean artist, and particularly when writing his major comedy he appears to have completely mastered the art of unity in variety. Therefore, the first impression of a bewildering medley, rich but crazy, turns out on closer inspection (and the play demands such scrutiny) to be a vitality and exuberance well within the dramatist’s control. A wide range and variety of situations, characters, actions, moods, language are integrated within the play’s scheme. The comic tone ranges from hilarious farce to the grimly grotesque, and all shadings from the light to the sombre are present in this chiaroscuro effect. The realism of Middleton has been repeatedly noticed, and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside is obviously rooted in the everyday realities of the Jacobean social word: its class conflict, citizen behavior, puritan hypocrisy. Localization in space—London of Cheapside—is balanced by localization in time: Lent with its strict laws and their violations. But what is artistically more significant is the play’s stylization, the comic distortion and violent coloring that the characters, almost caricatures, receive through the audacious poetic technique that Middleton adopts as the final phase of his comic development. It is as though the realism of Middleton’s social comedies—The Phoenix, Your Five Gallants, Michaelmas Term—combines with the fancifulness of his domestic-intrigue comedies— A Mad World, My Masters, A Trick to Catch the Old One—and both together acquire a new direction, testifying to a rare synthesis of poetic sensibility and intellectual energy in the play’s comic organization. Perhaps only the peculiarly sophisticated yet accommodating nature of the Jacobean public stage could do full justice to this distinctive play, yet one would like to see A Chaste Maid in Cheapside revived today.

Source: Ruby Chatterji, ‘‘Theme, Imagery, and Unity in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside,’’ in Renaissance Drama VIII, edited by S. Schoenbaum, Northwestern University Press, 1965, pp. 105–26.