This chapter gives an extended discussion of Middleton’s treatment of almanacs. While rehearsing historians’ arguments about how almanacs functioned, I argue that in The Owl’s Almanac and No Wit/No Help like a Woman’s, Middleton explores how these texts fragment the population, in part, by assigning different temporalities to different social classes. In his mock almanac, he gives a hyperbolic depiction of this fragmentation, and in No Wit/No Help, he gives us a character, Weatherwise, who is alienated as the result. I then show how The Masque of Heroes, whose main character is the personification of almanacs, attempts to unify fragmented time by asserting a more universal temporality built around the natural rhythms of the seasons. This attempt is ultimately unsuccessful, because the temporality the masque envisions necessarily excludes non-elite figures. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Michaelmas Term, which unites Middleton’s interest in the alienating nature of clocks and calendars by connecting urban labor with non-normative sexuality.

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Middleton’s Almanacs

  • Eric Dunnum

摘要

This chapter gives an extended discussion of Middleton’s treatment of almanacs. While rehearsing historians’ arguments about how almanacs functioned, I argue that in The Owl’s Almanac and No Wit/No Help like a Woman’s, Middleton explores how these texts fragment the population, in part, by assigning different temporalities to different social classes. In his mock almanac, he gives a hyperbolic depiction of this fragmentation, and in No Wit/No Help, he gives us a character, Weatherwise, who is alienated as the result. I then show how The Masque of Heroes, whose main character is the personification of almanacs, attempts to unify fragmented time by asserting a more universal temporality built around the natural rhythms of the seasons. This attempt is ultimately unsuccessful, because the temporality the masque envisions necessarily excludes non-elite figures. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Michaelmas Term, which unites Middleton’s interest in the alienating nature of clocks and calendars by connecting urban labor with non-normative sexuality.