Abstract
In their recent books on seventeenth-century drama, Margot Heinemann and Jonathan Dollimore have characterised Thomas Middleton as a Puritan writing ‘opposition drama’ and a playwright composing ‘radical tragedy’. Heinemann sees Middleton appealing to and encouraging ‘“anti-establishment”, generally Parliamentary Puritan sympathies’. Dollimore understands Jacobean dramatists to be engaged in the ‘demystification of state power and ideology’, and a ‘contemporary critique of power relations’. Both encourage critics to identify drama during this period as potentially subversive, and to recognise the extent to which plays by Middleton and others actively stimulated, as Dollimore puts it, ‘the crisis in confidence in the integrity of those in power’.1
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Notes
Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Chicago, 1984), pp. 4, 231;
Margot Heinemann, Puritanism and Theatre: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge, 1980), p. 16. I am indebted to the following colleagues who discussed these issues with me or reviewed earlier versions of this essay: Murray Biggs, Richard Burt, Jill Campbell, Richard Dutton, Patricia Klindienst Joplin, John Morrison, Peter Stallybrass, and Valerie Wayne.
Sandra Clark, ‘Hic Mulier, Haec Vir, and the Controversy over Masculine Women’, Studies in Philology, 82 (1985), 157–83;
Katherine Usher Henderson and Barbara F. McManus, Half Humankind: Contexts and Texts of the Controversy about Women in England, 1540–1640 (Urbana, IL, 1985);
Mary Beth Rose, ‘Women in Men’s Clothing: Apparel and Social Stability in The Roaring Girl’, English Literary Renaissance, 14 (1984), 367–91;
Linda Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540–1620 (Urbana, IL, 1984), pp. 139–51.
Louis B. Wright, Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England (Chapel Hill, NC, 1935), pp. 481–502.
See Rose, ‘Women in Men’s Clothing’, and J. R. Mulryne (ed.), Women Beware Women (Manchester, 1975), pp. xxxv–xxxvi.
Rachel Speght, A Mouzell for Melastomus, The Cynical Baytor of, and foul mouthed Barker against Evah’s Sex (1617), p. 18.
Edward F. Rimbault (ed.), Crumbs Fallen From King James’s Table, Or His Table Talk, in The Miscellaneous Works… of Sir Thomas Overbury (1856), p. 265.
G. P. V. Akrigg, Jacobean Pageant (Cambridge, MA, 1962), pp. 180–204;
William McElwee, The Murder of Thomas Overbury (New York, 1952);
Beatrice White, Cast of Ravens: The Strange Case of Sir Thomas Overbury (London, 1965).
For other interpretations of this sexual imagery, see Barbara Joan Baines, The Lust Motif in the Plays of Thomas Middleton (Salzburg, 1973), pp. 114–15;
A. L. and M. K. Kistner, Middleton’s Tragic Themes (New York, 1984), p. 161;
Christopher Ricks, ‘The Moral and Poetic Structure of The Changeling’, Essays in Criticism, 10 (1960), 290–306.
For other interpretations of the image of the castle, see Thomas L. Berger, ‘The Petrarchan Fortress of The Changeling’, Renaissance Papers (1969), 37–46;
G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England (Cambridge, 1933), pp. 77–83.
The Voice of the Shuttle is ours’, Stanford Literature Review, 1 (1984), 38. This article and my discussions with Patricia Joplin alerted me to the central role that the exchange of women plays in The Changeling, the public reaction to Frances Howard, and the Spanish marriage. For another reading of the significance of the body in The Changeling, see Frank Whigham, ‘Reading Social Conflict in the Alimentary Tract: More on the Body in Renaissance Drama’, English Literary History, 55 (1988), 339–43.
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (1966; London, 1980), p. 115.
Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols (1970; New York, 1982), p. 70.
Peter Stallybrass, ‘Patriarchal Territories: the Body Enclosed’, in Margaret Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan and Nancy Vickers (eds), Rewriting the Renaissance: the Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (Chicago, 1986), p. 129.
Thomas Robinson, The Anatomy of the English Nunnery at Lisbon in Portugal (1622), p. 30.
Gee, Foot out of the Snare, pp. 65–6. See also John Gee, New Shreds of the Old Snare (1624).
William Prynne, Hidden Works of Darkness Brought to Public Light (1645), p. 1.
Charles H. McIlwain (ed.), The Political Works of James I (Cambridge, MA, 1918), p. 272.
John Reynolds, The Triumph of God’s Revenge (1621; 1640), pp. 41–56.
Leonard Digges, Geraldo: The Unfortunate Spaniard (1622), pp. 89–108.
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Malcolmson, C. (2001). ‘As Tame as the Ladies’: Politics and Gender in The Changeling. In: Simkin, S. (eds) Revenge Tragedy. New Casebooks. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-21397-5_8
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