SOURCE: "A Chaste Maid in Cheapside and Middleton's City Comedy," in Shakespeare and Others, Folger Books, 1985, pp. 203-17.

In this essay, which was first published in 1959, Schoenbaum compares A Chaste Maid in Cheapside to Middleton 's other comedies of urban life and judges this work far superior. A Chaste Maid, he declares, "testifies to the sudden advent of maturity, poetic and dramatic, in a major writer. "

In his early twenties, the exasperating juvenilia behind him, Thomas Middleton applied himself to a series of comedies portraying the contemporary scene and set, for the most part, against the background of Jacobean London. At first he stumbled. In The Family of Love (ca. 1602) he combined satire with romance; but the satire is no more than tedious calumny of an insignificant Puritan sect, and fornication and blackmail—principal ingredients of the main action—perhaps do not afford the most promising basis for...