Logic is a Losing Game: Games, Rationality, (AND SEX!) in Chaste Maid

In many ways Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside plays with the standard logics of the early modern drama. There are, for instance, multiple plotlines (Allwits/Sir Walter; Moll/her Parents/Touchwood Jr; the Kixes/Touchwood Sr; Touchwood Sr./Country Wench/Promoters; Tim/Tutor/Welsh woman) whose complex overlappings can give the play a breathless, directionless feel. Hence, we imagine, this theatre’s sense that they needed to explain the roles of the characters ahead of time:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8xGw-26c1Q

Characters also tend to haphazardly appear and disappear; think of the promoters, the gossips, the Puritans, and the suddenly-pivotal Susan.

Given such structural choices, we want to direct attention to Middleton’s portrayal of the relationship between rationality/linearity and games/chance in this play. On the latter point, Allwit’s motto that “there’s no gamester like a politic sinner, for whoe’er games, the box is sure a winner” implies a combination of logic (the rules of the game) and chance (gaming, risking, betting) (5.2.176). Allwit himself is a living contradiction—both wittol and all-wit—who wins the hand by kicking out Sir Walter at exactly the right moment. In a similar fashion, Tim uses logic and reason to marry contradictions. His transitive proof makes a fool a “rational creature” at the start of Act 4, and a whore an honest woman at the end of Act 5. Tim’s brag that “by logic I’ll prove anything” (4.1.35), along with his mother’s earlier suggestion that his “learning is a great witch” (1.1.61), suggests that logic and reason in the play are merged with, rather than polar opposites to, illogic and trickery.

We'll have more to say on these issues for Tuesday, after which we might broach any of the following questions:

• In what ways does Allwit’s motto prove true? Or, put another way, how does the “house” win in this play: completely, partially, or not at all? Is it the “patriarchal household” that wins out? Or is it a game of wits in which the winners have outsmarted the rest (or “beat the system”) and the losers are the true fools?
  
  
• What is Middleton’s aim in highlighting the “gaming” nature of city life, and its related reliance upon wobbly logic? Is the goal, as McLuskie suggests in her introduction, to highlight how characters can manipulate the odds/rules in their favor? Or is this a wider critique of the irrationality at the heart of a supposedly reasonable society? We might think here, too, of Paster’s suggestion that the play ultimately depicts a “resealing” of both leaky women and the contradictions of the ruling ideology.

• Finally, and on a somewhat unrelated note, what’s with all the sex?! Chaste Maid is, perhaps more than any other play we’ve read, driven by plots involving sex and procreation, or the lack thereof. The puns and bawdy jokes also come hand over fist. What are we to make of Middleton’s uncompromising raunchiness and the centrality of sex to the play?