The Taming of the Shrew vs A chaste maide in Cheapside

The Taming of the Shrew

William Shakespeare

1631

The Wonder of Shakespeare One who reads a few of Shakespeare's great plays and then the meager story of his life is generally filled with a vague wonder. Here is an unknown country boy, poor and poorly educated according to the standards of his age, who arrives at the great city of London and goes to work at odd jobs in a theater. In a year or two he is associated with scholars and dramatists, the masters of their age, writing plays of kings and clowns, of gentlemen and heroes and noble women, all of whose lives he seems to know by intimate association. In a few years more he leads all that brilliant group of poets and dramatists who have given undying glory to the Age of Elizabeth. Play after play runs from his pen, mighty dramas of human life and character following one another so rapidly that good work seems impossible; yet they stand the test of time, and their poetry is still unrivaled in any language. For all this great work the author apparently cares little, since he makes no attempt to collect or preserve his writings. A thousand scholars have ever since been busy collecting, identifying, classifying the works which this magnificent workman tossed aside so carelessly when he abandoned the drama and retired to his native village. He has a marvelously imaginative and creative mind; but he invents few, if any, new plots or stories. He simply takes an old play or an old poem, makes it over quickly, and lo! this old familiar material glows with the deepest thoughts and the tenderest feelings that ennoble our humanity; and each new generation of men finds it more wonderful than the last. How did he do it? That is still an unanswered question and the source of our wonder.

A chaste maide in Cheapside

Thomas Middleton

1630

Written for the adult players at the open-air Swan theatre in 1613, this master-piece of Jacobean city comedy signals its ironic natureeven in the title: chaste maids, like most other goods and people inLondon's busiest commercial area, are likely to be fake. Money is moreimportant than either happiness or honour; and the most covetedcommodities to be bought with it are sex and social prestige. Middletoninterweaves the fortunes of four families, who either seek to marrytheir children off as profitably as possible, to stop having any morefor fear of poverty, or to acquire some in order to keep their propertyin the family. Most prosperous is the husband who pimps his wife to arich knight and lets him support the household with his alimony. Likemany early modern critics of London's enormous growth, this playwarned: the city is a monster that lives off the money the countryproduces.