This thesis explores the ways in which masculinities are imagined, staged, articulated, and problematised as intersubjective in the writings of Thomas Middleton. It considers his representations of and engagements with masculinities that resist containment and fixity, arguing that he persistently tropes masculinity as something processual, contingent, contested, and fragmented. It examines how the precarious reality of the body in Middleton clashes with any stable model of masculinity, tracing the various discourses and practices of unequal interaction between the body and the world that underpin these constructions of gender.
This thesis situates Middleton within a collaborative and mutually influential network of writers and social, civic, and political institutions in early modern London. This thesis is split into three sections. The first (‘Collaborations’) considers the significance of collaboration as a model for approaching Middleton’s texts. The second (‘Assembled Subjects’) interrogates how materiality and material culture constructs and contests masculinities across Middleton’s texts by exploring prosthetics, stage props, and crossdressing. The final section (‘Fantasies of Authority’) considers how models of masculinity and power are set up and then disrupted by bodily realities in Middleton’s writing.
This thesis argues that Middleton resists fortifying individual male agency, and instead draws out the complex role that social, corporeal, and material structures play in constructing embodied masculinities. For Middleton, masculinities are constituted across and between bodies through a relationship of interaction, exchange, and transaction that I argue throughout this thesis is never mutual. By attending to these varied embodiments of masculinity, this thesis will further an understanding of the importance of of gender to the Middletonian canon, as well as highlight the significance of Middleton to broader questions surrounding early modern subjectivity, embodiment, and masculinity.
