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“As Tame as the Ladies”: Politics and Gender in The Changeling

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