In the following essay, Marotti examines how Middleton leveraged the theme of fertility to great comic effect in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside.

When Thomas Middleton wrote A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1611-1613), his finest and most complex comic drama, he was already a practiced and successful private theater playwright. In such plays as Michaelmas Term, A Mad World, My Master, and A Trick to Catch the Old One he had helped to perfect the form of city comedy that was so fashionable in early Jacobean London, reflecting, as it did, the intellectual sophistication, moral scepticism, and taste for irony of its educated audience. In composing A Chaste Maid for the public stage, he faced the problem of turning satiric comedy into popular comedy, or at least of merging the ironic vision of his coterie dramas with the festive spirit of that particular dramatic tradition which a...