The World Tossed at Tennis

The World Tossed at Tennis is a Jacobean era masque composed by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, first published in 1620. It was likely acted on 4 March 1620 (new style) at Denmark House.

Middleton and Rowley conducted one of the most interesting collaborative efforts in English Renaissance drama; together they produced significant works, The Changeling and A Fair Quarrel. Their only masque is one of the stranger and more original literary products of their generation.

A Courtly Masque; the Device called, the World tost at Tennis was entered into the Stationers' Register on 4 July 1620, and published later that year in a quarto printed by George Purslowe for the stationer Edward Wright. The title page assigns authorship to Middleton and Rowley; it states that the work was performed "diverse times" by Rowley's acting company, Prince Charles's Men.

The first edition bears Middleton's dedication to Charles Howard, Baron of Effingham and his wife Mary Lady Effingham, the daughter of Sir William Cockayne, a Lord Mayor of London. It also includes an address to the reader signed by "Simplicity," a Prologue, and a list of "The Figures and Persons" in the masque.

In their other collaborations, Middleton takes primary responsibility for the main plot, and Rowley handles subplot materials – usually comic, but also serious, as in A Fair Quarrel. The standard dichotomy of main plot and subplot does not apply to their masque; in this work, Rowley was mainly responsible for the first half of the work, the first 471 lines, and Middleton the second half, 515 lines. The break between the two writers' shares comes just after the masque's oddest and most original feature, the introduction of the personifications of five coloured starches.

...
Wikipedia