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Chargement... A Chaste Maid in Cheapsidepar Thomas Middleton
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Inscrivez-vous à LibraryThing pour découvrir si vous aimerez ce livre Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre. Thomas Middleton (1580-1627) was an English Jacobean playwright and poet. Middleton stands with John Fletcher and Ben Jonson as among the most successful and prolific of playwrights who wrote their best plays during the Jacobean period. He was one of the few Renaissance dramatists to achieve equal success in comedy and tragedy. Also a prolific writer of masques and pageants, he remains one of the most noteworthy and distinctive of Jacobean dramatists. Middleton wrote in many genres, including tragedy, history and city comedy. His best-known plays are the tragedies The Changeling (written with William Rowley) and Women Beware Women, and the cynically satirical city comedy A Chaste Maid in Cheapside. His plays are characterized by their cynicism about the human race, a cynicism that is often very funny. True heroes are a rarity in Middleton; in his plays, almost every character is selfish, greedy, and self-absorbed. aucune critique | ajouter une critique
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Written for the adult players at the open-air Swan theatre in 1613, this master-piece of Jacobean city comedy signals its ironic nature even in the title: chaste maids, like most other goods and people in London's busiest commercial area, are likely to be fake. Money is more important than either happiness or honour; and the most coveted commodities to be bought with it are sex and social prestige. Middleton interweaves the fortunes of four families, who either seek to marry their children off as profitably as possible, to stop having any more for fear of poverty, or to acquire some in order to keep their property in the family. Most prosperous is the husband who pimps his wife to a rich knight and lets him support the household with his alimony. Like many early modern critics of London's enormous growth, this play warned: the city is a monster that lives off the money the country produces. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)822.3Literature English & Old English literatures English drama Elizabethan 1558-1625Classification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
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A second plot line involves Tuchwood Senior's con of the wealthy Sir and Lady Kix, a couple who are at each others throats over their lack of children.
This play is a comedy that gets crude and raunchy and probably had its audiences choking with laughter. Puritan women get sloppy drunk, the aristocratic are impotent and obnoxious, the newly educated are pretentious fops and there are constant double entendres about sex. The play did well enough that it was still being published nearly two decades later, then seems to have disappeared from the stage completely until a revival in 1956.
Since this was most likely written around 1613 (it was first performed that year), getting the most out of it would take some doing. I mean that even if you're familiar with Shakespearean language, this is a little more challenging. I read from the Fountainwell Drama Texts, edited by Charles Barber, and it was a decent enough copy but I did feel there were some explanations missing. ( )