A Mad World, My Masters
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A Mad World, My Masters is a Jacobean stage play written by Thomas Middleton, a comedy first performed around 1605 and first published in 1608. (The title is proverbial, and was used by a pamphleteer in 1603.)
The play belongs to the special sub-genre known as city comedy; it provides a satirical and rather cynical view of life, as an amoral and fairly ruthless battle of wits in the urban metropolis of early seventeenth-century London. It was premiered sometime around the middle of the first decade of the century by the Children of Paul's, a company of boy actors popular at the time—a troupe that tended to specialize in a drama for an elite audience of gentlemen rather than the more broad-based theatre of the large public playhouses like the Globe or Fortune Theatres.
The play was entered into the Stationers' Register on Oct. 4, 1608, and first published in quarto later that year by the bookseller Walter Burre. In the play's final two Acts in the 1608 text, some characters have different names than in the prior three Acts (Penitent Brothel is Penitent Once-Ill; Harebrain is Hargrave, or Shortrod),—which suggests that the extant text is a revised version. A second quarto appeared in 1640, issued by the bookseller James Becket; the title page of Q2 states that the play had been "often acted" by Queen Henrietta's Men at the Salisbury Court Theatre. The play was revived at least twice in the Restoration era (1661-2), and was adapted for other productions in the later eighteenth century.[1]
Middleton likely drew upon a wide range of contemporary literature for the play's plot and atmosphere, including a chapbook titled The Merry Conceited Jests of George Peele that was registered in 1605. The play is generally considered one of the best of the satirical city comedies that Middleton wrote in the early 1600s, along with A Trick to Catch the Old One. It has been praised for having "the most skillfully constructed plot" of any of the playwright's London comedies, and also for its liveliness and its "details of local color."[2]
[edit] Notes
[edit] References
- Chambers, E. K. The Elizabethan Stage. 4 Volumes, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1923.
- Frost, David L., ed. The Selected Plays of Thomas Middleton. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1978.
- Logan, Terence P., and Denzell S. Smith, eds. The Popular School: A Survey and Bibliography of Recent Studies in English Renaissance Drama. Lincoln, NE, University of Nebraska Press, 1975.
