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.....
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