Michaelmas Term

by Thomas Middleton, Gail Kern Paster (Editor)

Michaelmas Term is one of five satiric city comedies that the young Thomas Middleton wrote for the boy players of St. Paul's Cathedral sometime before 1607. In its witty dialogue and complex action, the play offers an unusually cynical assessment of the displacement and alienation of life in the great metropolis of early modern London. This edition, newly collated and edited, features complete explanations of the play's often bawdy exchanges and the complex staging of secondary plots.

Genres: Plays

208 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1604

About the author

Thomas Middleton (1580 – 1627) was an English Jacobean playwright and poet. Middleton stands with John Fletcher and Ben Jonson as among the most successful and prolific of playwrights who wrote their best plays during the Jacobean period. He was one of the few Renaissance dramatists to achieve equal success in comedy and tragedy. Also a prolific writer of masques and pageants, he remains one of the most noteworthy and distinctive of Jacobean dramatists.

Reviews

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

I saw Michaelmas Term performed by the Edward's Boys last year, and it was superb. The play still works magnificently: very funny, like a cross between The Sting and Volpone, but without the morality of either.

Yeah, I mean, the bad people are punished at the end, but no one (certainly among the men: the women slightly different) is worthy of any respect. All the men are shallow, venial-venereal, self-centred, and in disguise for most of the play.

The end seems to be from a damaged copy: it feels like it could do with another page, but this is a stonker of a play. Well worth reading.

[Gill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Classic Middleton city comedy, with deceitful merchants, country fools easy to trick, a whole bunch of swindlers and women whose fate is entirely at the disposal of the menfolk. Some very funny scenes, and a random appearance of Spiderman (as a named character.)

Read as part of the REP online readathon of the repertoire of the Jacobean Children's Companies.