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This article examines the spaces of commensality represented in Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker's The Roaring Girl. It discusses the expansion of the public dining scene in early modern London and nature of different establishments such as taverns, ordinaries, and alehouses. It highlights the impact of these spaces on patterns of sociability and on the construction of social identity, as well as the frequent association of victualling houses and playhouses within the cultural geography of the time. Whereas discussion of the play's attitude toward the social upheaval of Jacobean society has frequently focused on Moll's transvestism and the intersection of gender and class hierarchies, I show how the play's portrayal of public dining both upholds and upends the traditional organization of society. This, in turn, celebrates the opportunities for sociability and self-fashioning at the Fortune playhouse, where The Roaring Girl was staged.

In a controversial attempt to impose order after the Gunpowder Plot, James I sought to require the entire nation to take an Oath of Allegiance confirming his political and religious authority. This essay traces two popular attacks on London’s immorality and disunity performed in St. Paul’s Cathedral churchyard that respond to the Oath during this period (1606–1609): Thomas Middleton’s “city comedy” The Puritan Widow, performed by the choirboy-actors of St. Paul’s, and William Crashawe’s Paul’s Cross sermon Against the Papists and Brownists. Despite Crashawe’s famous denunciation of Middleton from the pulpit, I argue that Middleton’s iconoclastic play carefully reforms its own satire and concludes with a proposal for a united front between the Puritans and their less zealous coreligionists against Catholics and foreigners that would have been acceptable to a preacher like Crashawe in matter if not in medium.

In the early seventeenth century, playwrights such as Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton composed mock-almanacs. These texts aimed to undermine the contemporary fascination with almanacs and the astrological determinism housed in such directive texts. Pushing against the idea that knowledge of one’s body, the future, and the stability of the nation-state can be articulated in a single, calendrical text, mock-almanac authors instead adopted a position of playful ignorance as a means for counteracting the hubris of the new science of the period. This essay contextualizes the growing interest in and critique of astrology and looks to how literary authors responded to this phenomenon in print. The mock-almanac is a unique genre, participating in the culture of audience response to scientific understanding while at the same time undermining the means through which readers and audiences encountered such a proliferation of totalizing narratives in celestial influence. In arguing for a serious consideration of the virtues of ignorance in these satiric texts, this article highlights the critical distance between our modern sensibilities and the state of purposeful unknowing espoused in the jest pamphlet culture of the period.

This essay argues that the musical performances in Middleton's The Witch (ca 1616), largely dismissed by critics as unsophisticated spectacles, are some of the play's most innovative features. The witches' songs implicitly critique the patriarchal order that has led to the dysfunctional intrigues of the courtly world from which they are excluded and offer the audience an alternative centred on a joyful, supportive community of women. To do this, Middleton's play appropriates and subverts the musical dynamics of Ben Jonson's Masque of Queens (1609), deconstructing conventional associations between music and social harmony, and invites the audience to explore alternative social formations.

This article discusses the critical apparatus surrounding Dekker and Middleton’s wellknown play The Roaring Girl. While previous discussions of the text have focused mostly on Moll’s cross-dressing, I instead look at Moll’s sword skills to show how the lascivious behaviour of London’s men produces her gender performance, which seems unruly by early modern standards. I also examine other rituals of gender construction that texture previous analyses of Moll.

This essay examines the effects of women’s roles in early modern English food marketplaces, highlighting ways that ordinary women could use their participation in food transactions to destabilize (and even subvert) power structures and garner authority. In Thomas Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1613) and Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (1614), food informs a complete understanding of early modern attitudes toward shifting gender roles in the ever-evolving and expanding food economy.

Bringing a thorough study of court masques to bear on reoriented readings of The Revenger's Tragedy, Women Beware Women, The Changeling, and the lesser known Your Five Gallants, I show that Thomas Middleton's intimate knowledge of the Jacobean court masque enables him to exploit its conventions, iconography, and structural functions for use in the playhouse. Middleton confidently 'deconstructs' masque dramaturgy to create a masque episode which encapsulates the play's overarching theme and engineers the resolution. At the same time, by subverting the very device used to represent the court to the world, he subtly critiques king and court.

First is listed, in bold, the \"target play\" (the play under investigation). The two plays that share with Peele's David and Bathsheba more weighted unique 3-grams than does his Edward the First are Gervase Markham and William Sampson's Herod and Antipater (1622), written a quarter of a century after Peele's death in 1596, and Marlowe's 2 Tamburlaine (in second place, with a score of 4.78). Since Marlowe's The Massacre at Paris enters David and Bathsheba's top dozen matches (in twelfth with a score of 2.72), Marlowe's showing equals Peele's, and in fact 1 Tamburlaine scores only fractionally lower than The Massacre at Paris. Most significantly for the present purpose, Field's A Woman is a Weathercock is only the thirtieth play on the ranked list of weighted unique 4-gram matches to Amends for Ladies, and Amends for Ladies is only the fifty-third play on the ranked list of weighted unique 4-gram matches to A Woman is a Weathercock. [...]in terms of word-tokens, the first four scenes of The Honest Man's Fortune constitute only about 22 per cent of the play, so that unique 4-gram matches with it are likely to be too few to create reliable evidence. [...]exploration of Rizvi's valuable website shows that \"weighted unique n-grams\" using maximal counts of all unique matches, whatever their length, bolster our conclusions.

Huston Diehl sees Elizabethan and Jacobean drama as both a product of the Protestant Reformation--a reformed drama--and a producer of Protestant habits of thought--a reforming drama. According to Diehl, the popular London theater, which flourished in the years after Elizabeth reestablished Protestantism in England, rehearsed the religious crises that disrupted, divided, energized, and in many respects revolutionized English society. Drawing on the insights of symbolic anthropologists, Diehl explores the relationship between the suppression of late medieval religious cultures, with their rituals, symbols, plays, processions, and devotional practices, and the emergence of a popular theater under the Protestant monarchs Elizabeth and James. Questioning long-held assumptions that the reformed religion was inherently antitheatrical, she shows how the reformers invented new forms of theater, even as they condemned a Roman Catholic theatricality they associated with magic, sensuality, and duplicity. Using as her central texts the tragedies of Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, and John Webster, Diehl maintains that plays of the period reflexively explore their own power to dazzle, seduce, and deceive. Employing a reformed rhetoric that is both powerful and profoundly disturbing, they disrupt their own stunning spectacles. Out of this creative tension between theatricality and antitheatricality emerges a distinctly Protestant aesthetic. central texts the tragedies of Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, and John Webster, Diehl maintains that plays of the period reflexively explore their own power to dazzle, seduce, and deceive. Employing a reformed rhetoric that is both powerful and profoundly disturbing, they disrupt their own stunning spectacles. Out of this creative tension between theatricality and antitheatricality emerges a distinctly Protestant aesthetic.central texts the tragedies of Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, and John Webster, Diehl maintains that plays of the period reflexively explore their own power to dazzle, seduce, and deceive. Employing a reformed rhetoric that is both powerful and profoundly disturbing, they disrupt their own stunning spectacles. Out of this creative tension between theatricality and antitheatricality emerges a distinctly Protestant aesthetic.central texts the tragedies of Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, and John Webster, Diehl maintains that plays of the period reflexively explore their own power to dazzle, seduce, and deceive. Employing a reformed rhetoric that is both powerful and profoundly disturbing, they disrupt their own stunning spectacles. Out of this creative tension between theatricality and antitheatricality emerges a distinctly Protestant aesthetic.