Brissenden Alan - A Chaste Maid in Cheapside

NEW MERMAIDS

General editors:
William C. Carroll, Boston University
Brian Gibbons, University of Mnster
Tiffany Stern, University of Oxford

Reconstruction of an Elizabethan Theatre
by C. Walter Hodges

NEW MERMAIDS

The Alchemist

All for Love

Arden of Faversham

Arms and the Man

Bartholmew Fair

The Beaux Stratagem

The Beggars Opera

The Changeling

A Chaste Maid in Cheapside

The Country Wife

The Critic

Doctor Faustus

The Duchess of Malfi

The Dutch Courtesan

Eastward Ho!

Edward the Second

Elizabethan and Jacobean Tragedies

Epicoene or The Silent Woman

Every Man In His Humour

Gammer Gurtons Needle

An Ideal Husband

The Importance of Being Earnest

The Jew of Malta

The Knight of the Burning Pestle

Lady Windermeres Fan

London Assurance

Love for Love

Major Barbara

The Malcontent

The Man of Mode

Marriage A-La-Mode

A New Way to Pay Old Debts

The Old Wifes Tale

The Playboy of the Western World

The Provoked Wife

Pygmalion

The Recruiting Officer

The Relapse

The Revengers Tragedy

The Rivals

The Roaring Girl

The Rover

Saint Joan

The School for Scandal

She Stoops to Conquer

The Shoemakers Holiday

The Spanish Tragedy

Tamburlaine

The Tamer Tamed

Three Late Medieval Morality Plays

Mankind

Everyman

Mundus et Infans

Tis Pity Shes a Whore

The Tragedy of Mariam Volpone

The Way of the World

The White Devil

The Witch

The Witch of Edmonton

A Woman Killed with Kindness

A Woman of No Importance

Women Beware Women

NEW MERMAIDS

A Chaste
Maid in
Cheapside

The True Likeness (Vera Effigies) of Thomas Middleton. An engraving published in November 1795 by W. Richardson.

NEW MERMAIDS

THOMAS MIDDLETON

edited by Alan Brissenden

Adelaide University

A. H. Bullens The Works of Thomas Middleton (8 vols. 188586) is still the standard edition but I have also used those of Dyce (5 vols., 1840) and Ellis (Mermaid Series, 2 vols., 188790) as well as R. J. Walls unpublished dissertation, A Critical Edition of Thomas Middletons A Chast Mayd in Cheape-side (University of Michigan, 1958). Shakespeares Bawdy (1956) by Eric Partridge, A Topographical Dictionary to the Works of Shakespeare and his Fellow Dramatists (Manchester, 1925) by E. H. Sugden and M. P. Tilleys Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor, 1950) have been indispensable reference books.

My sincere thanks are due to Mrs Edith Lack and Mrs Jane Delin, who saved me much tedium in hunting references, to my colleagues at the University of Adelaide, especially F. H. Mares, M. Bryn Davies and G. W. Turner, and to A. M. Gibbs of the University of Leeds. I am also grateful to Miss Pat Story for her typing, Miss Rebecca Foale for her cartography and the General Editors for their patience. To my wife and family I owe a special debt for accepting so nobly and for so long the presence of another woman in the house.

(FIRST EDITION, 1968)

The reprint of 1971 gave opportunity to correct misprints, make corrections and alterations and additions, and to thank Elizabeth Sweeting, the then Administrator of the Oxford Playhouse, for sending details of the 1970 OUDS production of the play.

For the present edition the text has been considered afresh in the light of those which have been published since 1968, and the notes and Introduction have been revised and expanded. I am grateful to the General Editor for helpful suggestions, and to the staff of the Barr Smith Library, Adelaide University, and the Victoria and Albert Theatre Museum, London, for cheerful assistance. For information on the 1997 production at Shakespeares Globe I thank Nick Robins and others on the theatre staff.

Since the first New Mermaid edition of 1968 A Chaste Maid in Cheapside has been edited by Charles Barber for Fountainwell Texts (Edinburgh, 1969), R. B. Parker for the Revels Plays (1969), Kenneth Muir in Thomas Middleton: Three Plays (1975), David Frost in Selected Plays of Thomas Middleton (Cambridge, 1978) and Bryan Loughrey and Neil Taylor in Thomas Middleton: Five Plays (Harmondsworth, 1988). All these editions have been drawn on for this revision and are referred to in the notes by the names of the respective editors. The first collected edition of Middletons dramatic works since Bullens, under the general editorship of Gary Taylor, is scheduled for publication by Oxford University Press in 2003.

I am again grateful to my wife and family for their helpful support.

A. B.
ADELAIDE 2002

First mentioned in 1067 as Westceape, as Chepsyde in 1510 and deriving its name from ceap, the Anglo-Saxon word for barter, the wide street of Cheapside was the old market place of London, extending from the north-east corner of St Pauls churchyard to the Poultry. Down the centre stood four structures: at the western end the Little Conduit by St Pauls gate, then, three storeys high, one of the twelve crosses set up by Edward I to mark the resting-places of Queen Elinors body on its way from Lincoln to Westminster Abbey after her death in 1290; next was the Standard, a square pillar with a conduit, and a statue of Fame on the top, and at the eastern end, where Cheapside met the junction of Bucklersbury and Poultry, stood the Great Conduit, first built in 1285, to which water was piped from Paddington. The conduits water reservoirs ran red wine on special occasions, including the triumphal Progress of James I through London on 15 March 1604, and those with flat tops served as stages for shows during such events. From the fourteenth century to the eighteenth Cheapside provided the culminating point on the main processional route through the city for royal entries to London and major civic observances, particularly the inauguration of the Lord Mayor.the seventeenth century, and there was a pillory at the eastern end. In 1912 a hoard of early seventeenth-century jewellery, now in the Museum of London, was dug up, presumably hidden by thieves or by a goldsmith fleeing fire or plague. Cheapside has remained a commercial centre.