"Men Buy Their Slaves, Women Buy Their Masters": Theories of Liberty in Thomas Middleton's City Tragedy.

This article offers a feminist critique of theories of liberty in Thomas Middleton's city tragedies, *Women Beware Women* and *The Revenger's Tragedy*, situating them within neo-Roman republican ideas of liberty as non-domination, as discussed by Quentin Skinner in *Liberty Before Liberalism*. It argues that Middleton’s plays expose contradictions in liberty by linking the arbitrary power of the sovereign state to patriarchal authority within the family, where women are depicted as property subjected to coercion and servitude. The analysis highlights how Middleton’s use of gendered violence and metaphors of rape and revenge reflect early modern tensions between public political liberty and private domestic domination, anticipating feminist critiques by Mary Nyquist and Ellen Mieksins Wood regarding the limitations of classical liberalism’s focus on property-owning male citizens. Ultimately, the article suggests that feminist theories of liberty must extend beyond Skinner’s framework to address structural domination within both state and family institutions.