| Sumario: | This essay situates Thomas Middleton's A Chaste Maid in Cheapside within the religiopolitical environment of its print publication in Caroline England, seventeen years after the play's initial performance in 1613. I argue that its publisher, Francis Constable, exploited the Puritan acclaim the playwright had received from the notorious anti-Catholic drama A Game at Chess (1624) to develop a critique of those zealous reformers whose deepening radicalism even a known associate like Middleton would denounce. Yet, Constable used Middleton's reputation to express more than just anti-Puritan sentiment. A publisher of plays and conformist religious texts, Constable recognized that Chaste Maid could be read as condemning extremists across the ideological spectrum, from godly radicals to crypto-Catholic Arminians, who were thought to be fueling unrest within the Caroline church. The play juxtaposes corrupt ecclesiastical officers, debauched Puritans, and ceremonialist idolaters with Moll and Touchwood Junior, whose successful use of traditional church rites and orthodox Christian imagery in their efforts to marry allows the play to achieve a comic resolution. In this way, Chaste Maid asserts the via media , or middle way, as a stabilizing force, and its publication by Constable in 1630 refashioned Middleton the radical playwright into a proponent of religious moderation. [J.K.]
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