A Chaste Maid is a fast-paced comedy that celebrates trickery and pokes fun at pomposity, while also giving us the cross-class love story of Moll Yellowhammer (a goldsmith’s daughter) and Touchwood Junior (a poor gentleman). Thomas Middleton (1580–1627), unlike Shakespeare, did not have the advantage of owning a share of an established company, so his work as a playwright was, of necessity, more commercial.
He wrote A Chaste Maid for the Lady Elizabeth’s Men, a company funded by theatrical entrepreneur Philip Henslowe. Middleton combines his experience of working for both boy and adult acting companies to write an experimental comedy, very much in tune with his own social outsider status. His version of the mercurial urban world of Jacobean London mixes the wit, satire and sexual daring of city comedies, with a new take on the tired cliché of the country versus city plot. The rise of the merchants by the turn of the century gave Middleton the chance to write for mercantile audiences and patrons, depicting them as the new monied and socially secure class.
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