Michaelmas Term

Michaelmas Term is one of five satiric city comedies that the young playwright Thomas Middleton wrote for the boy players of St Paul’s Cathedral, sometime before 1607. Set in a vividly detailed, realistic urban milieu at the start of London’s social season, the play comes alive through the central contest between Ephestian Quomodo, an ambitious, land-hungry city merchant, and Richard Easy, a naive landowning gallant just arrived in the city. Easy is soon deep in debt and his struggle to recoup his debts and reclaim his land from Quomodo takes places against a sharply drawn set of London types - Quomodo’s socially and sexually ambitious wife and daughter, the Scottish upstart Andrew Lethe, and his mistress the Country Wench, eager to exchange her virginity for an elegant new wardrobe. With its witty, bawdy dialogue and complex gulling action, the play offers an unusually cynical assessment of the social and familial displacements, and of the alienation and loss of cultural memory, so characteristic of life in the great metropolis of early modern London. In this sense, the play is an early satiric diagnosis of urban modernity. This edition, newly collated and edited, features complete explanations of the play’s often bawdy exchanges and the complex stage action of the gulling and secondary plots. It will be invaluable for advanced students of the Middleton canon as well as all those interested in early modern London and its vibrant theatrical culture, especially the tradition of boy choristers as professional actors.