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.....
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