A Mad World My Masters

A Mad World, My Masters is a Jacobean stage play written by Thomas Middleton, a comedy first performed around 1605 and first published in 1608. The title is proverbial, and was used by a pamphleteer, Nicholas Breton, in 1603. The title later became the basis for the title of Stanley Kramer's 1963 film, "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World".

The play was entered into the Stationers' Register on 4 October 1608, and first published in quarto later that year by the bookseller Walter Burre. In the play's final two Acts in the 1608 text, some characters have different names than in the prior three Acts (Penitent Brothel is Penitent Once-Ill; Harebrain is Hargrave, or Shortrod) — which suggests that the extant text is a revised version. A second quarto appeared in 1640, issued by the bookseller James Becket; the title page of Q2 states that the play had been "often acted" by Queen Henrietta's Men at the Salisbury Court Theatre. The play was revived at least twice in the Restoration era (1661–2), and was adapted for other productions in the later 18th century.

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.

...
Wikipedia