San Antonio College Library

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...

Michelle O'Callaghan analyses how each of Middleton's plays work in terms of the early modern theatre and dramatic genres, and explores the broader cultural issues shaping the plays.

This important and original study demonstrates the existence of a tradition of performance at court of plays and masques which are relevant to the feast day of their performance. Evidence has long been available in the records compiled by E.K. Chambers and Gerald Eades Bentley that the plays and masques which entertained the English court from 1510 through 1640 were likely to occur on the same ten festivals of the English church year. During Elizabeth's...