The English playwright Thomas Middleton (1580-1627) was one of the most productive and talented playwrights of the Jacobean period. His best work was done in "city comedy"--comedy of intrigue with emphasis on the more lurid features of contemporary London.

Thomas Middleton was born the son of a fairly prosperous London bricklayer. He began writing early and had published at least three nondramatic pieces before he was 20. He attended Oxford in 1598 but apparently left without a degree. By 1602 he was in London, actively engaged in writing plays, first as a collaborator and then independently.

Some of Middleton's most successful work as a dramatist was done between 1602 and 1608, when he wrote a series of lively realistic comedies of London life. These include The Family of Love (ca. 1602), The Phoenix (ca. 1603), Michaelmas Term (1605), A Mad World My Masters (1605), and Your Five Gallants (ca. 1607). A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1611), probably Middleton's...