Thomas Middleton (1580-1627) was a writer of great versatility, and his career as a London dramatist spans the most productive, innovative, and exciting period of theatrical activity in the history of English drama. Best known for his tragedies, he also wrote many successful comedies of city life. This volume brings together the greatest among them: A Mad World, My Masters, Michaelmas Term, A Trick to Catch the Old One, and No Wit, No Help Like a Woman's. The first three plays, written between 1604 and 1606, are witty and rambunctious satires on the predatory life of the aspiring London citizen. Sex and money are the characters' obsessions; their caustic exposure Middleton's. In the later play, No Wit (1612), satire shades into romance, prose into verse. Together the four plays reveal the range and exuberance of Middleton's writing for the comic stage. Under the General Editorship of Michael Cordner of the University of York, the plays have been newly edited and are presented with modernized spelling and punctuation. In addition, there is a scholarly introduction and detailed annotation.

This volume contains the four plays by Thomas Middleton which have most impressed the modern world: A Chaste Maid in Cheapside is the most complex amd effective of the city comedies; Women Beware Women and The Changeling (with William Rowley) are two of the most powerful Jacobean tragedies outside of Shakespeare — studies in lust, power, violence, and self-delusive psychology; and A Game at Chess was the single most popular play of the whole Shakespearean era, a satirical expose of Jesuit plotting and Anglo-Spanish politics which played to pacifist houses at the Globe until King James and his ministers banned it. All the play texts are newly edited with informative annotation.