A Match at Midnight is a Jacobean era stage play first printed in 1633, a comedy that represents a stubborn and persistent authorship problem in English Renaissance drama.
[1] The play was entered into the Stationers' Register on 15 January 1633 (new style), and was published later that year in a quarto printed by Augustin Matthews for the bookseller William Sheares.
The title page of the 1633 quarto states that the play was acted by the "Children of the Revells" – though no specific information on any production has survived, and there is no guarantee that that company premiered the work onstage.
But in the early nineteenth century, James Robinson Planché combined material drawn from the play with extracts from Jasper Mayne's The City Match to create a theatrical hybrid he called The Merchant's Wedding.
[5] The play's plot centers on the fortunes of an old usurer named Bloodhound and his three children, his sons Alexander and Tim and his daughter Moll.
The opening scene shows Tim running his father's pawnbroking business, making small loans to London tradesmen on their tools.
Ancient Young mortgaged his family estate with Bloodhound; he returns to pay off the loan, but is four days late, and so loses his lands to the usurer.
Randall the Welshman has come to London to marry the same Widow sought by Bloodhound; though he has never met the woman, he is attracted by her reputation of wealth, youth, and beauty.
The Widow enjoys this state, and reveals that she has little intention of actually marrying Bloodhound; her servant Jarvis aids her in evading and misdirecting the attentions of her suitors.
Since the women wear masks in public, there is a good deal of mistaken identity in the night, as characters dodge the watchmen through the streets of London.
Tim shows up with a new bride in tow; he thinks her name is Lindabrides, and that she is "descended from the Emperour Tribatio of Greece" – though she is actually "a common whore" called Sue Shortheels.