ABSTRACT
With their varying emphases and differences in tone, A Chaste Maid and The Dutch Courtesan illustrate the variety of connections city comedy establishes between sexuality and the complexities of social corruption in an urban environment. It is true that the genre frequently relies on the romantic comic convention of the desired marriage to conclude the action in obedience to its comic purpose and, in however qualified, deflected, and obligatory a fashion, to establish a festive tone; this is an important point to which I will return. Here I wish to emphasize that, whether represented with Mars ton's appalled indignation as the generation of social and moral evil that finds its source in women, or viewed with Middleton's detached and cynical wit as the anarchic power that defies containment by law and tradition, sexuality in city comedy is equated primarily with social disjunction and with sin.
