Middleton’s Workweek
摘要
The next two chapters move from clocks to calendars. While clocks’ alienating function was disconnected from its narrow role in disciplining labor and only legible within the broader economic structure of reproductive futurism, calendars, because they recorded and constructed the difference between work and leisure, were explicitly linked to class concerns. This chapter discusses how protestant calendar reform and the changing role of work and leisure in the sixteenth century led to the development of the seven-day workweek. I then offer an extended reading of Women Beware of Women with this change in temporality in mind. The play offers a rare glimpse into how the workweek was experienced at the cusp of its inception. The text begins with Leantio complaining about his job and describes his experience of the week in strikingly modern terms. I read his temporality against some of the aristocratic character’s experience of time, like the Ward, to show how Middleton was exploring the way that class inflected temporality.