Middleton, Thomas - Margot Heinemann (essay date 1980)
Margot Heinemann (essay date 1980)
SOURCE: "Money and Morals in Middleton's City Comedies," in Puritanism and Theater: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama Under the Early Stuarts, Cambridge University Press, 1980, pp. 88-106.
[In this excerpt from her highly influential treatment of Middleton's plays, Heinemann argues that the playwright's "city comedies" satirize both city-dwellers and landed gentry.]
To see Middleton as merely 'anti-citizen' is an oversimplification. Villain-citizens in Middleton's plays, as in most Jacobean comedy, are more often moneylenders than mere merchants: for it was in this capacity that the powerful citizen most menacingly confronted the easygoing gentleman at the end of his resources. The mechanism which enabled a rich man to become richer purely by lending money, without obvious risk or industry on his part, was still regarded as something of a mystery at this early stage of capitalist development. Although...
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