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 medieval canon law had frowned on it, lending at interest had long been...