In an article on these pages last Friday, Mark Rylance, director of the Globe  mentioned his project to stage full readings of all surviving plays from 1567 to 1642. Incredibly, there are more than 400 of these, most never read except by scholars, and the enterprise is expected to take another 30 years. In the Globe's current season of full productions, the second batch of plays consists of two that might otherwise have emerged only in those readings. One of them, Middleton's A Mad World, My Masters, proves to be a modest gem. The other, The Honest Whore, in which Middleton assisted Dekker is tedious and unpleasing, although it is briefly redeemed by a neat reversal allowing women to score a rare triumph over misogynous men.

The original reception of The Honest Whore was successful enough for Dekker to write a sequel on his own, and Jack Shepherd's current production is a conflation of the two plays, lasting less than half the total time of the original. Would that it had been shorter. How infinitely distasteful it is to listen again and again to gallants snarling, spitting and abusing the very whores they patronise. At that welcome reversal in the second half Dekker shows himself a dab hand at dramatic irony, so that when Sonia Ritter turns the emotional tables on Rylance (playing her hypocrite husband) the audience applauds in gratitude that the imbalance towards male chauvinism has been adjusted.

The plot entwines three threads. At the court of Milan a proud duke pretends his daughter is dead in order to frustrate an unwanted suitor, Rylance's Hippolito, in these early days still an honourable man. He links us to the story of Bellafront, a whore, and through her admirers we encounter Marcello Magni's Candido, a linen draper so patiently enduring all ills that his wife commits him to the mad-house. After a tirade of abuse from Hippolito scorches  Bella-front's soul she too is prepared to endure all things, even marriage to the ghastliest of her customers, Clarence Smith's Mattheo. He goes from bad to worse, like everyone else save Candido and the women, leaving Lilo Baur to utter a declaration of loyalty to her man that could have been sung by Tammy Wynette.

Played in glamorous 1960s dress, the play offers the occasional shrewd line. What it lacks, though, is any character who can charge the blank verse with a touch of poetic daring. A Mad World treats what it calls "adulterous  motions" very differently, as a feature, of the world that must he viewed in a spirit of tolerance. Occasionally the strands of the plot echo those in the Dekker play, but the engine that moves them is the argument that tricksters will be hoist by their own petard. Such is the fate of Wil Johnson's Follywit who, gulling his rich grandsire out of gold and jewels, ends by marrying the old man's mistress without realising that she is a successful whore. In a sublimely funny scene Belinda Davison, perched outside a four-poster, must incorporate the grunts and squeals from within its curtains into a monologue that will lull the suspicions of John McEnery's spying husband. Performances in Sue Lefton's jolly staging include some awkwardly broad acting, but the jokes at women's expense are genial, sexual puns are legion, and Jonathan Cecil's Sir Bounteous, beaming over the top of his beribboned silk pyjamas, is a heart-cheering performance of benign dottiness.