A Mad World, My Masters

Genre

The play belongs to the special subgenre known as city comedy; it provides a satirical and rather cynical view of life, as an amoral and fairly ruthless battle of wits in the urban metropolis of early 17th-century London. It was premiered sometime around the middle of the first decade of the century by the Children of Paul's, a company of boy actors popular at the time—a troupe that tended to specialise in a drama for an elite audience of gentlemen rather than the more broad-based theatre of the large public playhouses like the Globe or Fortune Theatres.

Middleton likely drew upon a wide range of contemporary literature for the play's plot and atmosphere, including a chapbook titled The Merry Conceited Jests of George Peele that was registered in 1605. The play is generally considered one of the best of the satirical city comedies that Middleton wrote in the early 17th century, along with A Trick to Catch the Old One. It has been praised for having "the most skillfully constructed plot" of any of the playwright's London comedies, and also for its liveliness and its "details of local color."[3]


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