Cheapside during Lent

TOUCHWOOD SENIOR
What shift she'll make now with this piece of flesh
In this strict time of Lent, I cannot imagine;
Flesh dare not peep abroad now; I have known
This city now above this seven years,
But I protest in better state of government
I never knew it yet, nor ever heard of;
There has been more religious wholesome laws
In the half circle of a year erected
For common good, than memory ever knew of,
Enter Sir Oliver Kix and his Lady.
Setting apart corruption of promoters,
And other poisonous officers that infect
And with a venomous breath taint every goodness.

In trying to figure out what the promoters were doing in Middleton's play, I found this speech by Touchstone Sr. in the scene before they appear. He's sincerely worried about the fate of the woman he's impregnated and just paid off, because, as he informs us for the first time, this is the "strict time of Lent." The eating of flesh is forbidden - as is whoring and babies out of wedlock. It's a time when all kinds of excess is supposed to be curbed, and according to Touchstone, it is. But his paean to London's "better state of governance" is completely out of touch with everything we've seen int he play.

Of course, this speech - particularly praising London's growing number of laws - sounds more than a little cheeky. Touchstone may be sincere, but Middleton is certainly not; when Touchstone declares his city "religious" and "wholesome," I can't possibly take him seriously. His praise of innumerate new religious laws is a particularly fun way of tweaking them - they don't seem to have had much effect in Cheapside. And of course, when the promoters themselves arrive, we see what seems to be the whole effect of attempts (presumably Puritan) to legislate virtue: people continue to eat meat, but now the promoters occasionally have an excuse to steal it or to obtain bribes.

If Middleton's Cheapside setting is critical for this play, the timing seems just as carefully chosen: what could highlight the hypocrisy of all this eating, drinking, and whoring more than setting the play at Lent? The downfall of the promoters, smack in the middle of the play, is one of the most satisfying scenes for me: a set-piece that could have gone almost anywhere, it has (1) hypocrites, (2) clever antagonists, and (3) the hypocrites getting their comeuppance. What makes the scene a little more complicated than that, though, is exactly who those clever heroes are. Allwit, triumphing over the promoters, is no more virtuous than they are - but at least, it seems, he's no hypocrite.