Fertility and Comic Form in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside

Fertility and Comic Form in A Chaste Maid In Cheapside Arthur F. Marotti When Thomas Middleton wrote A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1611-1613), his finest and most complex comic drama, he was al­ ready a practiced and successful private theater playwright. In such plays as Michaelmas Term, A Mad World, M y Masters, 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 play like Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday epitomizes. His solution was to utilize much of the thematic material he had handled in his earlier works— materialism and avarice, bourgeois pretensions, aristocratic degeneracy, religious hypocrisy, libertinism and prodigality ■ —but also to expand his treatment of human sexuality to lay new stress on the theme of fertility and, hence, make Eros, not Momus, the god of his comic world.1 I This new synthesis is anticipated by certain elements in his pre­ vious plays, such as the marriages and festivities at the end of A Mad World and A Trick, comedies which avoid the sterner, judgmentscene conclusions of the earlier, more didactic pieces, The Phoenix, Your Five Gallants, and Michaelmas Term. The Family of Love is a particularly interesting case: like A Chaste Maid, it concludes with a celebration of marriage and the family and a clear affirmation of the goodness and power of human sexuality properly used, proclaim­ ing the value of fruitful love in honest physical terms. The love of Gerardine and Maria, the play’s romantic hero and heroine, leads logically and naturally to sexual intercourse; and the child bom to them in the course of the action is a symbol of the richness and vital­ ity of their relationship. It is no accident that the play’s loveless couples, the Purges and the Glisters, are childless, and the lecherous gallants, Lipsalve and Gudgeon, comically impotent in their sexual 65 66 Comparative Drama frustration. In any event, this comedy signals an interest on Middle­ ton’s part in the human reproductive powers— not merely because private theater audiences demanded sexual material, but also because he could make of it valid thematic use. This interest in the theme of fertility is a continuing one for Middleton, especially apparent in the unusual number of pregnancies and onstage infants in his later plays. In A Fair > Quarrel, a tragi­ comedy written in collaboration with William Rowley, the FitzallenJane relationship bears a remarkable similarity to the Gerardine-Maria one: despite their use for the creation of some tragicomic responses, Jane’s pregnancy and the onstage infant serve as a promise that the society of this play will once again be harmonious, that the quarrel between the Colonel and Captain Ager, who are unwittingly related because of the young lovers’ precontracted marriage, will end “fairly,” with the younger generation of characters enjoying life instead of thwarting it. In More Dissemblers Besides Women, Lactantio’s cast-off mistress, disguised as a page to escape detection by the young hypo­ crite’s antifeminist uncle, is visibly pregnant onstage before giving birth to their child. Aside from the broad comedy of the scene in which she is forced to improve her “manly” graces by taking dancing lessons which actually induce labor (the kind of farcical treatment of sex Middleton could not resist), she is striking evidence, in this play, of the power of fertile sexuality which the woman-hating Cardinal rejects, to which the widowed Aurelia (like Olivia in Twelfth Night) pretends to be immune, and which ultimately causes the discomfiture of the opportunistic Lactantio himself. In terms of the drama’s festive conclusion, the child born to this anonymous girl is, as in The Family of Love, a sign of a languishing society’s capacity for regeneration.2 In The Old Law, Agatha, who is...