SOURCE: "The Four Plots of A Chaste Maid in Cheapside," in The Review of English Studies, Vol. XVI, 1965, pp. 14-24.

Levin uncovers numerous interrelationships among the various plots of A. Chaste Maid, finding contrasts or correspondences in their actions, themes, tones, and genres.

A Chaste Maid in Cheapside is now held to be the last of the plays that Thomas Middleton wrote in that remarkable series known as his 'city comedies', and it is also almost the last of them to win the kind of recognition that it surely deserves. Most of the critics of an earlier generation seem not to have progressed very far beyond the initial shock or titillation they experienced upon discovering that certain of its sexual situations were even more daring than those of the preceding comedies (which were themselves notorious for their 'realism' in this area), so that such favourable comments as they...