Thomas Middleton, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1613)

Moll and Touchwood Junior's first attempt to marry (III.1)

[Image source: https://www.angelfire.com/realm/mine2/johncastle/A_Chaste_Maid_in_Cheapside.html . From William Gaskill's production at the Royal Court in 1966. Moll was played by Barbara Ferris, Touchwood Junior by John Castle, and the Parson by Roger Booth.]

Moll

I suppose that Moll is the "chaste maid" of the title; at any rate no-one else fits that description. Chastity being apparently a rare commodity in Cheapside, she's pursued by Touchwood Junior and Sir Walter Whorehound, not as just another lay but as a wife. 

MAUDLINE.

      Have you played over all your old lessons

      O' the virginals?

MOLL.                      

                                  Yes. 

(I.1.1-2)

The Oxford editor prints this as verse, like all the play except for some passages that are wholly or partly in Latin. Actually it's a flexible medium that sometimes has the swing of verse but very often doesn't. Anyway, Moll's monosyllabic reply leaves the half-line hanging expectantly. Her mother is not impressed:

MAUDLINE.

      Yes? You are a dull maid o'late, methinks;

      You had need of somewhat to quicken

      Your green sickness -- Do you weep? -- a husband.  ...

That might be true, but Moll's taciturnity continues all through the play. For instance, her one-line commentary on the final scene is "I am silent with delight" (V.4.46-47). Touchwood Senior says she'll be voluble enough to the maid servants now she's mistress of her own house. He seems almost embarrassed. 

Sir Walter, her intended, addresses her several times, but she never says a word to him. She is, in fact, as shy of speaking to strangers as Ward in Women Beware Women. Like him she's an adolescent. She speaks only to her mother, her father, her lover and his brother. Her longest speech is four lines (V.2.25-28). She does sing a song in the same scene; it's the only time she might appear a romantic heroine, but she's singing it because of her mother's badgering, and disclaims it immediately. Most of the time neither her parents nor her lover are particularly keen for her to speak. Touchwood Junior, sure of her "blood" (i.e. desire) wants her to silently absorb messages and to respond with her "liking in three words", and her parents order her about. But despite her lack of speech, she's quite active. She's driven by feeling, but is minimalist in her verbal expression of it.  Typical speeches by Moll:

O death! (I.1.109)

O, were I made of wishes, I went with thee! (I.2.200)

Good sir, do; we cannot be too safe. (IV.3.27)

The play even emphasizes this silent centre to a very verbal play. When Allwit asks who Sir Walter means to marry, Davy Dahumma replies: "E'en the same was gossip, and gave the spoon" (III.2.198). That's apparently enough to identify her to Allwit, who met her in II.3. But we never see Moll with the other gossips, nor giving a spoon. Maybe it's the gilt one that Sir Walter presents with other gifts (III.2.38), but Sir Walter gives the impression that all the gifts are from him alone. 

As a virtually wordless adolescent, Moll brings together many other elements in the play. As still half a child who calls all men "Sir" she connects to the infants with which the play abounds (including two on stage, presumably represented by dolls), and to Nick and Wat, two of the seven Allwit children. Perhaps she would not be much more at ease with the gossips than her brother Tim is.

But as an impassioned sexual being she also connects with a lot of the adult goings-on. And as a supposedly subservient daughter, she connects with the various servants and maids who glide around the background of the play. There are no elderly people here. Sir Oliver talks in an elderly way but his youth is magically restored when his wife becomes pregnant. When Sir Walter starts to have premonitory thoughts about death, he is promptly ejected from the comedy by the Allwits, who retain their own presence in it by unstinted material drive. The world of the play is one of "getting", it has no room for the thoughts of age. 

Middleton might have originally intended to call her Mary (as in one speech prefix), signifying chastity. But if he did he soon switched to the nickname version Moll, which already had a racy association (as in Allwit's "molls and dolls" (II.2.64) -- compare those later heroines Moll Flanders and Molly Bloom). (And of course it matches the hints of her mother's name "Maudline".)

Moll's name is only used twice in the spoken text, by her mother during the scene where Moll "dies" (V.2). It's a token of affection that's only skin deep. When Moll sings the song she requested, Maudline's enjoyment of the music makes her forget about its dire context. After Moll is "dead", her parents' sorrow is comically brief: there is the practical matter of limiting reputational damage, and the consolation of their son Tim's imminent wedding. (Meanwhile Tim's chief concern is Moll's dying too quickly, before he has written his Latin epitaph.) 

Moll is pulled about a lot. The scene where her mother drags her on stage by her hair is distasteful to Sir Walter's sensibilities (and to the boatmen, and to Yellowhammer). Nevertheless, the suggestion is that mother and daughter understand each other very well:

MOLL. 

      O, my heart dies!

MAUDLINE. 

                                   I'll make thee an example

      For all the neighbours' daughters. 

MOLL.       

                                                             Farewell, life!

MAUDLINE. 

      You that have tricks can counterfeit. 

(IV.4.21-23)

Well, yes, Moll undeniably does have tricks and she does counterfeit. Maudline knows it, because she was just the same and sometimes still is. You want something, you go for it.  

Actually, it's a tough call to pick the most distasteful moment in a play that revels in slipping them past us with sunny insouciance. I think I would choose Moll's father's reflections on her fiancee being revealed as an arrant whoremaster.  

YELLOWHAMMER. 

      Well, grant all this, say now his deeds are black,

      Pray, what serves marriage, but to call him back;

      I have kept a whore myself, and had a bastard,

      By Mistress Anne, in anno --

      I care not who knows it; he's now a jolly fellow,

      H'as been twice warden, so may his fruit be,

      They were but base begot, and so was he;

      The knight is rich, he shall be my son-in-law,

      No matter so the whore he keeps be wholesome,

      My daughter takes no hurt then, so let them wed,

      I'll have him sweat well e'er they go to bed.

(IV.1.237-247)

No doubt the Yellowhammers are keen to benefit from their economic property as soon as decently possible. Tim, at Cambridge, might be 18 and Moll (we tend to assume, illogically) about the same age. But Tim is sexually backward, Moll is not. 

By the same vague process of assimilation, we assume that Touchwood Junior is not so very much younger than Touchwood Senior, who has evidently been married quite a long time. Mid-twenties, anyway. But like Moll he isn't notable for florid language. To Sir Walter's elegant anger he replies rather haplessly: 

                                          Like enough, sir.

     You have ta'en me at the worst time for words

     That e'er you picked out: faith, do not wrong me, sir.

(III.1.52-54)

When the lovers meet their speech is functional, almost arguing with each other in the excitement.

TOUCHWOOD JUNIOR

                                  What made you stay so long?

MOLL

     I found the way more dangerous than I looked for.

TOUCHWOOD JUNIOR

     Away, quick! There's a boat waits for you; and I'll

     Take water at Paul's wharf ....

(IV.3.23-26)

     

When Touchwood Junior says "O sir, if ever you felt the force of love, / Pity it in me" (III.1.1-2), he's evidently laying it on thick to get the Parson on side. I can't think of any Jacobean play that's more firmly focussed on sex, but A Chaste Maid doesn't speak the language of passion: that's relegated to the songs. 

Touchwood Junior has been accused of taking a basely material view of his relationship with Moll 

                                                    her blood's mine,

      And that's the surest. Well, knight, that choice spoil

      Is only kept for me.   [He catches Moll's attention from behind.]

MOLL

                                       Sir?

TOUCHWOOD JUNIOR

                                               Turn not to me

      Till thou may'st lawfully; it but whets

      My stomach, which is too sharp-set already.

(I.1.134-138)

But it doesn't sound as if Moll and he are out of harmony on this. They have an understanding, so enough of the flimflam. And besides, there's the matter of concealment. "Love that's wise / Blinds parents' eyes" (I.1.186-187).

At any rate, Touchwood Junior isn't in the same class as his rival when it comes to sexual materialism. Here he tots up his prospects:

SIR WALTER

                                    I never was so near my wish

     As this chance makes me: ere tomorrow noon 

     I shall receive two thousand pound in gold

     And a sweet maidenhead worth forty. 

(IV.4.47-50)

Perhaps Sir Walter when he says this is already showing some signs of revulsion from the whole business. Nevertheless it's brutal. 

Touchwood Junior doesn't make such explicit reference to the gold that comes with Moll, but he is certainly aware of it: "an you'll follow my suit and save my purse too", he says to his brother, egging him on in the outrageous scheme to disinherit Sir Walter by assisting the childless Kixes. 

After all, the Touchwood brothers are cash-strapped. Touchwood Junior manages to buy a fine wedding-ring, but he has to ask Touchwood Senior to stump up for the license. Understated as his expression is, he does seem to love Moll primarily for herself, or for her body anyway. But the Yellowhammers' wealth is a fact of life. 

 

Moll and Touchwood Junior

[Image source: https://www.thestage.co.uk/reviews/a-chaste-maid-in-cheapside . Press photo (not credited, but probably by Bethany Blake) for the 2015 production by Mercurius at the Rose Playhouse, London, directed by Jenny Eastop. Moll was played by Beth Eyre and Touchwood Junior by Harry Russell.]

Online text of A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, on Chris Cleary's valuable site:

https://tech.org/~cleary/chast.html . It puts completions of verse lines in the left margin, as Middleton himself was apparently wont to do. Richard Dutton, in the Oxford English Drama text I've been reading (1999), lays them out in the orthodox way: i.e. a speech that starts midway through a line of verse is  indented. Not that the lines often bear much meaningful resemblance to verse, as I mentioned before. 

Mrs Allwit and the gossips (III.2)

[Image source: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2020/feb/20/frances-cuka-obituary . From William Gaskill's production at the Royal Court in 1966. Mrs Allwit was played by Frances Cuka.]

I've been dipping into JStor's resources A Chaste Maid in Cheapside. Here's a few papers that I enjoyed reading. 

Chatterji, Ruby. “Theme, Imagery, and Unity in ‘A Chaste Maid in Cheapside.’” Renaissance Drama, vol. 8, [University of Chicago Press, Northwestern University], 1965, pp. 105–26, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41913895.  Useful for parallels across Middleton's wider oeuvre, and I was struck by the glancing reference to Wycherley. Chatterji's characterizations of the Allwit's household, and of the Yellowhammer parents, are interesting, because I read them both a bit differently. She implies that in 1965 the play had yet to be revived: that was about to change. 

Wigler, Stephen. “Thomas Middleton’s ‘A Chaste Maid in Cheapside’: The Delicious and the Disgusting.” American Imago, vol. 33, no. 2, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976, pp. 197–215, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26303131. "In A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (as in most Middleton plays), delight and distaste perpetually contaminate one another." Considers the relentless nature of Middleton's content and language, and the discomforts of laughing along with what Wigler calls the "comic-grotesque". 

Huebert, Ronald. “Middleton’s Nameless Art.” The Sewanee Review, vol. 95, no. 4, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987, pp. 591–609, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27545804. A lively account of Middleton's major plays. A Chaste Maid is characterized as a play about sexual management and mismanagement. Particularly insightful on the striking character of Allwit, I thought. Also interesting is his remark that Middleton is the "first great secular playwright in English drama" (some other commentators have linked him with Puritanism). Huebert ends: "I think he is serving a warning, not about what will happen to sinners in the hands of an angry God, but about what we are capable of doing to one another and to ourselves".

Van Den Broek, A. G. “Take the Number Seven in Cheapside.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, vol. 28, no. 2, [Rice University, Johns Hopkins University Press], 1988, pp. 319–30, https://doi.org/10.2307/450555. I don't quite concede to the theory about the symbolic significance of the number seven, but this is a vivid  reading of the play which considers aspects of the action that are often overlooked. For instance the possible hint of Allwit's reformation in his final lines, and whether Touchwood Senior will continue to increase the size of the Kix family. An acute suggestion about Allwit's name, too: it is not just a reversal of "wittol". 

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