Moll is the maid, or pretty young daughter, of Yellowhammer, a goldsmith. She has two men vying for her hand. One is the wealthy Knight, Sir Walter Whorehound, who already has two mistresses, one of whom has several of his children. Yellowhammer favors Sir Walter for a son-in-law. The second suitor is Tuchwood Junior, whose older brother is a local conman. He is Moll's choice, which forces scheming.
A second plot line involves Tuchwood Senior's con of the wealthy Sir and Lady Kix, a couple who are at each others throats over their lack of children.

This play is a comedy that gets crude and raunchy and probably had its audiences choking with laughter. Puritan women get sloppy drunk, the aristocratic are impotent and obnoxious, the newly educated are pretentious fops and there are constant double entendres about sex. The play did well enough that it was still being published nearly two decades later, then seems to have disappeared from the stage completely until a revival in 1956.

Since this was most likely written around 1613 (it was first performed that year), getting the most out of it would take some doing. I mean that even if you're familiar with Shakespearean language, this is a little more challenging. I read from the Fountainwell Drama Texts, edited by Charles Barber, and it was a decent enough copy but I did feel there were some explanations missing. ( )

Thomas Middleton (1580-1627) was an English Jacobean playwright and poet. Middleton stands with John Fletcher and Ben Jonson as among the most successful and prolific of playwrights who wrote their best plays during the Jacobean period. He was one of the few Renaissance dramatists to achieve equal success in comedy and tragedy. Also a prolific writer of masques and pageants, he remains one of the most noteworthy and distinctive of Jacobean dramatists. Middleton wrote in many genres, including tragedy, history and city comedy. His best-known plays are the tragedies The Changeling (written with William Rowley) and Women Beware Women, and the cynically satirical city comedy A Chaste Maid in Cheapside. His plays are characterized by their cynicism about the human race, a cynicism that is often very funny. True heroes are a rarity in Middleton; in his plays, almost every character is selfish, greedy, and self-absorbed.