The Economics of Intellectual Labor in Thomas Middleton’s City Comedies

This article focuses on Thomas Middleton’s engagement with the economic value of intellectual work and university learning in his city comedies The Puritan Widow, Your Five Gallants, and No Wit/Help Like a Woman’s. It explores Middleton’s representation of the pecuniary dilemmas of university wits cast adrift in a changing society that saw the wane of aristocratic patronage and the rise of new commercial outlets for learned and literary works. Middleton’s city comedies, the article shows, use the figure of the scholar in order to articulate their extended reflection on the commercialization of intellectual labor and literary production.