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 is soon deep in debt and his struggle to recoup his debts and reclaim his land from Quomodo takes
places against a sharply drawn set of London types--Quomodo's socially and sexually ambitious wife and daughter, the Scottish upstart Andrew Lethe, and his mistress the Country Wench, eager
to exchange her virginity for an elegant new wardrobe. In its witty, bawdy dialogue and complex gulling action, the play offers an unusually cynical assessment of the social and
familial displacements, the alienation and loss of cultural memory, characteristic of life in the great metropolis of early modern London. In this sense, the play is an early satiric
diagnosis of urban modernity. This edition, newly collated and edited, features complete explanations of the play's often bawdy exchanges and the complex stage action of the gulling
and secondary plots. It will be invaluable for advanced students of the Middleton canon as well as all those interested in early modern London and its vibrant theatrical culture,
especially the tradition of boy choristers as professional actors.
