ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the metaphor of debt in Middleton’s city comedy, with particular reference to A Chaste Maid in Cheapside. Middleton’s city comedies are saturated by exchange culture to the extent that it motivates their action entirely. To a certain extent the ironized layers of Middleton’s comedy of accumulation and obligation are continued beyond the boundaries of dramatic narrative onto a meta-theatrical plane. Middleton’s comedie practice, then, could be said to be marked by debt. Given the essentially parasitical nature of the Middletonian metropolis, the most significant facet of the drama is not simple, straightforward comedy, but a more savage irony. The metropolis of city comedy is defined by people such as these, men who trade on their wits, free from the weight of familial obligations, and suffering from an advanced case of what Swapan Chakravorty has called ‘social and parricidal amnesia’.
