The Roaring Girl and Other City Comedies

The Roaring Girl and Other City Comedies

Author: Thomas Dekker

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2008-06-12

Total Pages: 481

ISBN-13: 0192658557

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Thomas Dekker: The Shoemaker's Holiday George Chapman, Ben Jonson, John Marston: Eastward Ho! Ben Jonson: Every Man In His Humour Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker: The Roaring Girl Oxford English Drama offers plays from the sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries in selections that make available both rarely printed and canonical works. The texts are freshly edited using modern spelling. Critical introductions, wide-ranging annotation, and informative bibliographies illuminate the plays' cultural contexts and theatrical potential for reader and performer alike. 'The series should reshape the canon in a number of significant areas. A splendid and imaginative project.' Professor Anne Barton, Cambridge University ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.


Michaelmas Term

Michaelmas Term

Author: Thomas Middleton

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 9780719015526

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"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.


Jacobean City Comedy

Jacobean City Comedy

Author: Brian Gibbons

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-03-27

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 135198229X

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The first decade of the Jacobean age witnessed a sudden profusion of comedies satirizing city life; among these were comedies by Ben Jonson, John Marston and Thomas Middleton, as well as the bulk of the repertory of the newly-established children’s companies at Blackfriars and Paul’s. The playwrights self-consciously forged a new genre which attracted London audiences with its images of folly and vice in Court and City, and hack-writing dramatists were prompt to cash in on a new theatrical fashion. This study, first published in 1980, examines ways in which the Jacobean city comedy reflect on the self-consciousness of audiences and the concern of the dramatists with Jacobean society. This title will be of interest of students of Renaissance Drama, English Literature and Performance.


Five Plays

Five Plays

Author: Thomas Middleton

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 1988

Total Pages: 468

ISBN-13: 9780140432190

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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.


Plotting Early Modern London

Plotting Early Modern London

Author: Dieter Mehl

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-03-02

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1351910698

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With the publication of Brian Gibbons's Jacobean City Comedy thirty-five years ago, the urban satires by Ben Jonson, John Marston and Thomas Middleton attained their 'official status as a Renaissance subgenre' that was distinct, by its farcical humour and ironic tone, from 'citizen comedy' or 'London drama' more generally. This retrospective genre-building has proved immensely fruitful in the study of early modern English drama; and although city comedies may not yet rival Shakespeare's plays in the amount of editorial work and critical acclaim they receive, both the theatrical contexts and the dramatic complexity of the genre itself, and its interrelations with Shakespearean drama justly command an increasing level of attention. Looking at a broad range of plays written between the 1590s and the 1630s - master-pieces of the genre like Eastward Ho, A Trick to Catch the Old One, The Dutch Courtesan and The Devil is an Ass, blends of romance and satire like The Shoemaker's Holiday and The Knight of the Burning Pestle, and bourgeois oddities in the Shakespearean manner like The London Prodigal - the twelve essays in this volume re-examine city comedy in the light of recently foregrounded historical contexts such as early modern capitalism, urban culture, the Protestant Reformation, and playhouse politics. Further, they explore the interrelations between city comedy and Shakespearean comedy both from the perspective of author rivalry and in terms of modern adaptations: the twenty-first-century concept of 'popular Shakespeare' (above all in the movie sector) seems to realign the comparatively time- and placeless Shakespearean drama with the gritty, noisy and bustling urban scene that has been city comedy's traditional preserve.


Women Beware Women

Women Beware Women

Author: Thomas Middleton

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2014-07-03

Total Pages: 179

ISBN-13: 1408144603

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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.


Society and Politics in the Plays of Thomas Middleton

Society and Politics in the Plays of Thomas Middleton

Author: Swapan Chakravorty

Publisher: Clarendon Press

Published: 1996-05-23

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 019159170X

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A comprehensive reassessment of Middleton's cultural importance, this wide-ranging study examines both the writer's dramatic and non-dramatic texts to show how he laid bare the complicit interests at work behind assumptions about sex, morality, society, and politics in late feudal culture. Middleton's importance has long been acknowledged in the modern theatre, but academic criticism still seems distracted by questions regarding his morals and `Puritanism'. Swapan Chakravorty argues again the reductivism of such enquiries, and demonstrates the complexity behind the texts' disengagement from received ideological premises and gneric formulae. Combining close reading with lively historical analysis, Society and Politics in the Plays of Thomas Middleton reveals Middleton to have been a pioneer of politically self-conscious theatre. Full of insight, this study brings alive the plays' meanings by engaging with the social, political, and cultural concerns of Middleton's day.


Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works

Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works

Author: Thomas Middleton

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2010-03-25

Total Pages: 2017

ISBN-13: 0199580537

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Thomas Middleton is one of the few playwrights in English whose range and brilliance comes close to Shakespeare's. This handsome edition makes all Middleton's work accessible in a single volume, for the first time. It will generate excitement and controversy among all readers of Shakespeare and the English classics.


A Chaste Maid in Cheapside

A Chaste Maid in Cheapside

Author: Thomas Middleton

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 532

ISBN-13: 9780192826145

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This volume contains Thomas Middletons four greatest plays, "A Chaste Maid in Cheapside," "Women Beware Women," "The Changeling," and "A Game at Chess." "A Chaste Maid in Cheapside" is the most complex and effective of the city comedies. "Women Beware Women" and "The Changeling" (with William Rowley) are two of the most powerful Jacobean tragedies aside from Shakespeare, studies in lust, power, violence, and self-delusive psychology. "A Game at Chess" was the single most popular play of the whole Shakespearean era, a satirical exposé of Jesuit plotting and Anglo-Spanish politics which played to packed houses at the Globe until King James and his ministers banned it. With the most up-to-date introduction available, this volume offers all the play texts newly edited with richly informative annotation.