‘An Honest Pair of Oars’: Players, Watermen, and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside

This essay offers insight into two playing companies’ ties to a key industry in early modern London and the ways such interconnections shaped the neighbourhoods adjacent to the Thames. It examines Touchwood Senior’s speech in Thomas Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside in relation to the Swan, the Blackfriars, and watermen’s trade to argue that this moment highlights sympathies for the watermen’s plight from the Lady Elizabeth’s Men and exposes underlying tensions between the watermen and the King’s Men in 1613 and 1614.