Title: Society and politics in the plays of Thomas Middleton
Description: A comprehensive reassessment of Middleton's cultural importance, this wide-ranging study examines the writer's dramatic and non-dramatic texts to show how he laid bare the complicit interests at work behind assumptions about sex, morality, society, and politics in late feudal culture.

Middleton's importance has long been acknowledged in the modern theatre, but academic criticism still seems distracted by questions regarding his morals and 'Puritanism'. Swapan Chakravorty argues against the reductivism of such enquiries, and demonstrates the complexity behind the texts' disengagement from received ideological premisses and generic formulae.

Combining close reading with lively historical analysis, Society and Politics in the Plays of Thomas Middleton reveals Middleton to have been a pioneer of politically self-conscious theatre. Full of insight, this study brings alive the plays' meanings by engaging with the social, political, and cultural concerns of Middleton's day.
Subjects: English Political plays, History, History and criticism, Literature and society, Political and social views, Politics and literature, Social problems in literature, Middleton, thomas, -1627
Places: England, Great Britain
People: Thomas Middleton (d. 1627)
Time periods: 17th century