Middleton And Ecological Change

AbstractThis article discusses the environmental themes in Middleton's plays. Middleton depicts the natural world as a resource that Londoners, both citizens and courtiers alike, exploit with cynical rapacity, consuming it to fashion an urban order that precisely inverts its values. But while Middleton's plays engage what we would now call ecological subjects, the playwright's sensibility is by no means ecological in the current sense of the term. His concern with human souls far surpasses his combined interest in plants, animals, minerals, water, the air, the earth, and its climate. Middleton does understand that the natural world is changing, and that the growth of London has something to do with that change, but he understands these developments through early modern Europe's residual master-code of religious experience. He sees them, that is, as essentially spiritual rather than scientific events.