A. H. Bullen’s The Works of Thomas Middleton (8 vols. 1885–86) is still the standard edition but I have also used those of Dyce (5 vols., 1840) and Ellis (Mermaid Series, 2 vols., 1887–90) as well as R. J. Wall’s unpublished dissertation, ‘A Critical Edition of Thomas Middleton’s A Chast Mayd in Cheape-side’ (University of Michigan, 1958). Shakespeare’s Bawdy (1956) by Eric Partridge, A Topographical Dictionary to the Works of Shakespeare and his Fellow Dramatists (Manchester, 1925) by E. H. Sugden and M. P. Tilley’s Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor, 1950) have been indispensable reference books.
My sincere thanks are due to Mrs Edith Lack and Mrs Jane Delin, who saved me much tedium in hunting references, to my colleagues at the University of Adelaide, especially F. H. Mares, M. Bryn Davies and G. W. Turner, and to A. M. Gibbs of the University of Leeds. I am also grateful to Miss Pat Story for her typing, Miss Rebecca Foale for her cartography and the General Editors for their patience. To my wife and family I owe a special debt for accepting so nobly and for so long the presence of another woman in the house.
(FIRST EDITION, 1968)
The reprint of 1971 gave opportunity to correct misprints, make corrections and alterations and additions, and to thank Elizabeth Sweeting, the then Administrator of the Oxford Playhouse, for sending details of the 1970 OUDS production of the play.
For the present edition the text has been considered afresh in the light of those which have been published since 1968, and the notes and Introduction have been revised and expanded. I am grateful to the General Editor for helpful suggestions, and to the staff of the Barr Smith Library, Adelaide University, and the Victoria and Albert Theatre Museum, London, for cheerful assistance. For information on the 1997 production at Shakespeare’s Globe I thank Nick Robins and others on the theatre staff.
Since the first New Mermaid edition of 1968 A Chaste Maid in Cheapside has been edited by Charles Barber for Fountainwell Texts (Edinburgh, 1969), R. B. Parker for the Revels Plays (1969), Kenneth Muir in Thomas Middleton: Three Plays (1975), David Frost in Selected Plays of Thomas Middleton (Cambridge, 1978) and Bryan Loughrey and Neil Taylor in Thomas Middleton: Five Plays (Harmondsworth, 1988). All these editions have been drawn on for this revision and are referred to in the notes by the names of the respective editors. The first collected edition of Middleton’s dramatic works since Bullen’s, under the general editorship of Gary Taylor, is scheduled for publication by Oxford University Press in 2003.
I am again grateful to my wife and family for their helpful support.
A. B.
ADELAIDE 2002