The introduction establishes how and why I focus on chronometry in Middleton. I assert that Middleton dramatized the use of clocks and calendars more often and in greater detail than his fellow early modern playwrights. I then show how these representations of chronometries logically result in a depiction of time consciousness, which I define as the experience of time as opposed to the philosophical concept of time. The distinction is established by contrasting this book’s approach to time and temporality with previous scholarship, arguing that critics tend to focus on the rhetorical and poetic history of the idea of time, often ignoring the way that early moderns (and not just artists) actually experienced time. This experience was shifting in the seventeenth century because of changes in chronometry. Middleton grasped this shift and so foregrounds the use of clocks and calendars in his plays, while showing how they alienate their users from their own experience of time, drawing a distinction between emerging modern forms of temporal alienation and older more embodied and subjective experiences of time.