A Study Guide for Thomas Middleton's "A Chaste Maid in Cheapside," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.

This volume contains Thomas Middletons four greatest plays, "A Chaste Maid in Cheapside," "Women Beware Women," "The Changeling," and "A Game at Chess." "A Chaste Maid in Cheapside" is the most complex and effective of the city comedies. "Women Beware Women" and "The Changeling" (with William Rowley) are two of the most powerful Jacobean tragedies aside from Shakespeare, studies in lust, power, violence, and self-delusive psychology. "A Game at Chess" was the single most popular play of the whole Shakespearean era, a satirical exposé of Jesuit plotting and Anglo-Spanish politics which played to packed houses at the Globe until King James and his ministers banned it. With the most up-to-date introduction available, this volume offers all the play texts newly edited with richly informative annotation.

The Changeling is a popular Renaissance tragedy in which the relationship between money, sex, and power is explored. Frequently performed and studied in University courses, it is a key text in the New Mermaids series.

A Study Guide for Thomas Middleton's "The Changeling," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.

A Study Guide for Anonymous's "Arden of Faversham," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.

One of the great Renaissance playwrights, Middleton wrote tragedies essentially different from either Marlowe's or Shakespeare's, being wittier than the former and more grittily ironic than the latter. The genre of 'citizen tragedy' came into its own in the eighteenth century, but Middleton can claim to have created it: Bianca, wife of a middling commercial agent, arouses the lust of the Duke of Florence and becomes his mistress, first secretly, then openly and finally, after her husband has been seduced by the scheming Lady Livia and stabbed by Livia's brother, the Duke's wife. Livia plots her revenge, and the play ends with a banquet and a masque that are a triumph of black farce. Middleton's powerful, psychologically complex female characters and his clear-sighted analysis of misogyny are bound to impress today's audiences, but it is the pervasive irony - cynicism, even - with which he dissects the motivations of both oppressor and victim that makes him so eerily modern.

This New Mermaids anthology brings together the four most popular and widely studied of Thomas Middleton's plays - Women Beware Women; The Changeling; The Roaring Girl and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside - with a new introduction by William Carroll, examining the plays in the context of early modern theatre, culture and politics, as well as their language, characters and themes. On-page commentary notes guide students to a better understanding and combine to make this an indispensable student edition ideal for study and classroom use from A Level upwards.

Chaste Value reassesses chastity's significance in early modern drama, arguing that presentations of chastity inform the stage's production of early capitalist subjectivity and social difference. Plays invoke chastity-itself a quasi-commodity-to interrogate the relationship between personal and economic value. Through chastity discourse, the stage disrupts pre-capitalist ideas of intrinsic value while also reallocating such value according to emerging hierarchies of gender, race, class, and nationality. Chastity, therefore, emerges as a central category within early articulations of humanity, determining who possesses intrinsic value and, conversely, whose bodies and labor can be incorporated into market exchange.

The best-selling Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (formerly the Concise dictionary) provides clear, concise, and often witty definitions of the most troublesome literary terms from abjection to zeugma. It is an essential reference tool for students of literature in any language. It is now available in a new and expanded edition and includes increased coverage of new terms from modern critical and theoretical movements, such as feminism, and schools of American poetry, Spanish verse forms, life writing, and crime fiction. It includes extensive coverage of traditional drama, versification, rhetoric, and literary history, as well as updated and extended advice on recommended further reading and a pronunciation guide to more than 200 terms. New to this edition are recommended entry-level web links updated via the Dictionary of Literary Terms companion website.