THOMAS MIDDLETON lived and worked in London nearly all his life.1 Born in 1580, he was christened at St Lawrence Jewry on 18 April, and was buried on 4 July 1627 at his parish church in Newington Butts, where he had lived from at least 1609. His father, William, was a bricklayer and gentleman with his own coat of arms; he died in January 1585/86, and in November 1586 his widow, Anne, married Thomas Harvey, who had just returned, impoverished, from a voyage to Virginia. Within weeks of the marriage, Harvey was revealed to be an unscrupulous adventurer, almost solely interested in gaining control of his wife’s estate. A protracted, confusing and ugly series of lawsuits engulfed the family over the next two decades, all beginning with Harvey’s attempt to take over the property which Anne had put in trust for her children before she met him. Allen Waterer, who married Middleton’s sister, Avis, in 1596, immediately became a party to the lawsuits as well. By 1603, when both Anne Harvey and Allen Waterer died, Middleton had spent a good part of his time assisting his mother in the various legal battles. Even after Waterer’s death, Avis and her second husband, John Empson, continued legal action over the family property.
Middleton’s life was early and frequently connected to the professional theatre. A large part of the family property at question in the various lawsuits was ‘the grounde called the Curteyn where now comenlye the Playes be playde’ – that is, the Curtain Theatre (built in 1577). After matriculating at Queen’s College, Oxford (the most popular college of the time) in April 1598, moreover, Middleton was forced in June 1600 to convey his half-share of the Curtain property to his brother-in-law Waterer for money ‘paid and disbursed for my advauncement & preferment in the university of Oxford where I am nowe a student’. Some time during the next eight months, however, he had to return to London to deal with the continuing series of lawsuits, and it was reported, as of 8 February 1600/1, that Middleton ‘remaynethe heare in London daylie accompaninge the players’. In a final twist, Middleton’s brother-in-law, Thomas Marbeck, was an actor for the Admiral’s Men; Middleton thus may have met his wife through this association. Middleton in any event never graduated from Oxford, and was already a professional playwright at the time he would have been receiving his diploma.
Since his son Edward was aged nineteen in 1623, we assume Middleton was married about 1602. His wife, Magdalen (she is ‘Maria’ or Mary in one document), was the granddaughter of the famous composer and organist John Marbeck; Eccles believes she was probably the Maulyn Marbeck christened on 9 July 1575 at St Dunstan’s in the West. Middleton’s widow petitioned in February 1627/28 for a gift of money from the city of London, which suggests that his estate had been small. She died five months later, in July 1628, and was also buried at Newington.
Middleton published one book of verse, The Wisdom of Solomon Paraphrased (1597), before he entered Oxford, and two more, Micro-Cynicon (1599) and the Ghost of Lucrece (1600), while presumably still a student. In 1602 Henslowe recorded that he was working on three plays: a collaboration with Dekker, Munday, Drayton and Webster on Caesar’s Fall (now lost); Randal, Earl of Chester (also lost); and an unnamed play. Two years later, in 1604, he published two satiric prose pieces, The Black Book and The Ant and the Nightingale. His earliest surviving play, The Family of Love (c. 1602–3), also dates from this period. If the quality of these early works is debatable, it is clear that, after he left Oxford, Middleton was both an active and a highly productive writer. Beginning in 1613 and continuing until his death, he also wrote a number of civic pageants and entertainments; as early as 1604, he had written a speech given as part of Dekker’s The Magnificent Entertainment for King James’s official entry into London. Middleton was appointed City Chronologer in 1620, to record the memorable acts and occurrences of the city; he was succeeded in this position by Ben Jonson.
Middleton wrote in a variety of genres, but his greatest achievements came in two distinct dramatic forms: (1) city comedies, including Michaelmas Term (c. 1605), A Mad World, My Masters (c. 1605), A Trick to Catch the Old One (c. 1606) and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (c. 1611–13); and (2) tragedies, including The Revenger’s Tragedy (c. 1606–7), Women Beware Women (c. 1621) and The Changeling with William Rowley (1622). Middleton’s accomplishments in tragicomedy – The Witch (c. 1615), A Fair Quarrel (c. 1615–17) and The Old Law (1618), among others – were also substantial. In 1624 he wrote the political satire A Game at Chess, which had the longest consecutive run of any play in the Jacobean period (indeed, the first long run in English theatrical history), nine days at the Globe, and caused a sensation in London; the play was finally suppressed by the government, though it had been properly licensed. Middleton and the players were summoned before the Privy Council (his son Edward answered for him, as Middleton seems to have been lying low), but no action was taken.
Middleton wrote for the children’s companies of Paul’s and Blackfriars, and after they disbanded, for Prince Henry’s (formerly the Admiral’s) Men, the Lady Elizabeth’s company, and for Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men. He collaborated on plays with many other dramatists of the period, possibly with Shakespeare himself on Timon of Athens, and seems to have revised Shakespeare’s Macbeth some years after its first performance.2 From his inheritance in The Curtain to his pageants for the city, Middleton’s whole life traces the arc of the recently invented career of the professional playwright.
There is no record of Women Beware Women until long after Middleton’s death: it was entered in the Stationers’ Register in 1653, and published in 1657. In his commendatory poem (usually dated c. 1640) to the 1657 edition, Nathaniel Richards mentions seeing it performed, but does not say when; no other contemporary reference to the play exists. Dating the play must therefore be done by internal evidence and by a sense of Middleton’s canon and development. Scholarly opinion has focussed on two possibilities: a relatively early date (1613–14), though one after Middleton had already written several extraordinary plays; and a late date (c. 1621), placing the play just before The Changeling.
The argument for the earlier date, advanced most recently by J. I. Cope3, is based on a few similarities between Women and the masque The Triumphs of Truth (1613); earlier arguments by Fleay and Schelling for this date were based on an alleged allusion to a Dekker masque of 1612.4 None of these parallels is particularly convincing, and few scholars now agree with either theory.
The argument for the later date is based on not much greater evidence. Women alludes to the Virginia Company, which was highly topical in 1621, but so too does The Roaring Girl, published in 1611. The Duke’s age —‘about some fifty-five’ (I.iii.92) – would have coincided with James I’s age in 1621; but Holdsworth points out Middleton’s ‘odd fancy for the number fifty-five’, noting its use in five other works, dating from 1604.5 Another argument once advanced was that Sir Henry Herbert, who became Master of the Revels in 1622, kept note of the plays he licensed for performance, and Women Beware Women is not listed – suggesting that it was performed prior to 1622; but only a selection of Herbert’s office-book was ever printed.6 Middleton’s apparent use of Fynes Morison’s Itinerary (c, 1619–20) as a source also points to the later date. Finally, Middleton may be alluding to a line from Swetnam the Woman-hater in his title (see the discussion below); that play was performed c. 1618, and published in 1620. The evidence is admittedly slight, but what there is points to a date c. 1621, and most modern editors agree. The preference for the later date is usually also based on a sense that the play reflects a style and sophistication similar to that of The Changeling.
Middleton’s main source for the story of Bianca and the Duke was novelle 84 and 85 of Celio Malespini’s Ducento Novelle (Venice, 1609). The main outlines of the story adopted as the plot of Women Beware Women are clear enough: Bianca Capello, a Venetian heiress, falls in love with Pietro, a bank clerk, and elopes with him to Florence. There she is seen by the Grand Duke Francesco, who falls in love with her, and – with the aid of his friend Mondragone’s wife – surprises Bianca in Mondragone’s house and offers her his protection and comfort. In Malespini’s account, no rape or force is involved: after many conversations, he says, ‘Bianca at length consented to bestow her love on the enamoured Grand Duke. Her indulgence of this passion, and her most happy familiarity [with the Duke], she increased from day to day. Mutual love grew between them’.7 Bianca’s husband, Pietro, accepts his cuckoldry, but eventually boasts that he is the lover of Cassandra, a wealthy widow; her outraged family complains to the Duke, who arranges Pietro’s murder. Bianca’s grief over his death is consoled by the Duke.
The story of Bianca and the Duke was also briefly told by Fynes Moryson, in his Itinerary (completed c. 1619–20, though not published until 1903); Middleton’s use of Moryson is highly probable. Moryson continues the story beyond Malespini’s account with the entrance of the Duke’s brother, the Cardinal: Bianca sends him poisoned marzipan, but when he sends it back untouched, the Duke meets the messenger and eats a piece of it. Hearing that the Duke has eaten of it, Bianca ‘with an unchanged Countenance tooke another peece, and having eaten it, locked herself in a clossett, and hereupon the Duke and shee dyed in one hower’.8
Still a third source for the play is a short novel, published in 1628, entitled The True History of the Tragicke Loves of Hipolito and Isabella Neapolitans, which tells the basic story of the Hippolito-Isabella sub-plot, with Hippolito’s sister a nun. Middleton could have read the novel in manuscript, or he could have read the original version (published in 1597) in French. The correspondences are so extensive, at any rate, that there is no doubt that Middleton used the True History in one version or another.
Middleton thus took a good deal of his plot from these sources, but the most distinctive scenes in the play – the chess scene, the Ward’s inspection of Isabella, the masque scene – are Middleton’s own invention. Similarly, perhaps his most memorable character, Livia, a composite of different figures in the sources, is also his own creation. Finally, it is worth noting that Middleton makes the Duke’s encounter with Bianca in the chess scene far more threatening and sinister than it is in his sources.
Women Beware Women has increasingly been recognized as a major achievement of tragic drama. While Middleton was ‘clearly not ranked with Jonson or Shakespeare’ in his lifetime9 (Ben Jonson called him a ‘base fellow’),10 and his work fell into relative neglect until the later nineteenth century, his reputation in general, and for Women Beware Women in particular, has risen substantially since – and to some extent, in spite of – T. S. Eliot’s essay in 1927.11 Scholarly consensus now ranks Middleton and Ben Jonson as the major playwrights, after Shakespeare, of the English Renaissance. The chief authorizing document hitherto lacking in Middleton’s case – a modern, scholarly edition of all his works – will be provided by the imminent publication of a collected works. Since the joint or sole authorship of several texts remains in dispute,12 there will be further debate about the extent and identity of Middleton’s canon, but there can no longer be serious doubt about Middleton’s range, productivity and achievement. It is already clear that Middleton’s three great tragedies – The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), Women Beware Women (1621) and The Changeling (1622) – rank him with Marlowe, Shakespeare and Webster as pre-eminent in his time for tragedy.
Nathaniel Richards provides the only seventeenth-century evidence that Women Beware Women was actually staged, and was a success: ‘I that have seen’t can say, having just cause, / Never came tragedy off with more applause’. Yet while he refers to the play simply as a ‘tragedy’, recent criticism, though agreeing in its general estimation, shows little agreement about just what kind of tragedy it is. Schoenbaum credits the play with verging on the creation of ‘a novel kind of drama – a drama that occupies a middle ground between comedy and tragedy’.13 And in this vein, the play has recently been classified as a ‘realistic bourgeois tragedy’, a ‘city tragedy’, a ‘tragedy of judgment’, ‘an anticourt tragedy written from a citizen’s perspective’ and a ‘domestic tragedy’.14 It is said both to have ‘many affinities with satiric comedy’, and to begin ‘where a romantic comedy might have ended’.15 Nicholas Brooke concludes, more radically, that in Women Beware Women Middleton ‘demonstrates the absurdity of worshipping tragedy as a moral force’.16 Even the play’s title – taken straightforwardly by earlier generations of scholars – now seems generically problematic: the title is said to be, variously, ‘misleading’, possibly ‘conceived in a spirit of parody’, perhaps ‘a comedy title’ or ‘shar[ing] the ambivalence’ of the rest of the play.17 The modern critical history of Women Beware Women may suggest a generic incoherence or instability, perhaps resulting from the dramatist’s own ‘ambivalence’ of values. It may also be argued, however, that it is not that the dramatist’s values are ambivalent, but that the values traditionally inherent in the genre of tragedy no longer seemed plausible or sustainable in the London of the 1620s.
The title’s irony (or lack of it) may be clarified if one accepts the likelihood that it echoes a speech by Misogynos in the anonymous play Swetnam the Woman-hater (c. 1618; published 1620):18
And Fortune, if thou be’st a deitie,
Give me but opportunitie, that I
May all the follies of your Sex declare,
That henceforth Men of Women may beware. (III.ii.90–3)
A vigorous dialogue – or rather, shouting match – between misogynist literature and defences of women may be traced back to the Middle Ages; but it had been re-energized in the early Renaissance, when new theories concerning the education of women were debated in Humanist writings.19 The social and political events of the previous decade, then, particularly the revival of the women’s controversy, could have had as much to do with an evolving conception of the dramatic subject as any conjectural psychological ambivalence in Middleton himself.20
The controversy in England over a woman’s place became sharply focussed during the Reformation, as largely Protestant ideas – of a woman’s right to choose her own husband, of a woman’s relative equality within marriage, of the possibility of divorce – came into widespread conflict with the medieval tradition. Queen Elizabeth’s ascent to the throne (1558) and eventual political dominance added contradictory ingredients to the debate: Elizabeth was, on the one hand, the Virgin Queen, the quintessence of the feminine; yet she also claimed to have the soul of a man, and preserved her virginity partly because she would not surrender her political power as the head of one hierarchical system for the domestic subjection of another. During the reign of James I the voices of controversy were even more frequent and strident. In The Roaring Girl (c. 1608–11), Middleton (with Dekker) reflects an awareness of these contemporary debates, particularly the king’s own condemnations of women dressed as men. In the years immediately preceding the writing of Women Beware Women, however, the controversy became extremely pointed and topical. In 1615 Joseph Swetnam’s The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward, and Unconstant Women, a bilious misogynist attack, launched a pamphlet war. Swetnam’s attack was highly popular (ten editions had been published by 1637), and was quickly followed by defences of women by Daniel Tuvil in Asylum Veneris (1616), Rachel Speght in A Muzzle for Melastomus (1617), Esther Sowernam in Esther Hath Hanged Haman (1617) and Constantia Munda in The Worming of a Mad Dog (1617). All but Tuvil directly refer to Swetnam. Finally, the anonymous play Swetnam the Woman-hater was written around 1618. As James himself attacked women’s style of dress, two further pamphlets appeared in 1620: Hie Mulier; or, the Man-Woman and Haec Vir; or, the Womanish Man. In that same year, John Chamberlain commented to Sir Dudley Carleton on the extent and virulence of the controversy: ‘Our pulpits ring continually of the insolence and impudence of women: and to help the matter forward, the players have likewise taken them to task, and so too the ballads and ballad-singers, so that they can come nowhere but their ears tingle. And, if all this will not serve, the King threatens to fall upon their husbands, parents, or friends, that have, or should have power over them, and make them pay for it’.21 It was in this context, then, that Middleton wrote Women Beware Women.
The play takes up several issues central to the contemporary women’s controversy, especially the arranged or enforced marriage and the right of women to choose their husband.22 When Fabritio insists Isabella must marry the Ward, Livia corrects him:
Oh soft there, brother! Though you be a Justice,
Your warrant cannot be served out of your liberty.
You may compel, out of the power of father,
Things merely harsh to a maid’s flesh and blood,
But when you come to love, there the soil alters;
Y’are in another country. (I.ii. 131–6)
Isabella’s plight was a familiar one in Jacobean drama, which frequently depicted the evils of enforced marriage:
Oh the heart-breakings
Of miserable maids, where love’s enforced!
The best condition is but bad enough:
When women have their choices, commonly
They do but buy their thraldoms, and bring great portions
To men to keep ’em in subjection –
…
By’r Lady, no misery surmounts a woman’s!
Men buy their slaves, but women buy their masters.
(I.ii. 166–71, 175–6)
As Bianca remarks to Mother,
Wives do not give away themselves to husbands,
To the end to be quite cast away; they look
To be the better used, and tendered rather,
Highlier respected, and maintained the richer;
They’re well rewarded else for the free gift
Of their whole life to a husband, (III.i.47–52)
so (in a passage quoted below) she also rejects the close, possessive confinement of young girls as counterproductive, and in any case futile. Livia – her very character being perhaps the greatest testament to Middleton’s interest in the condition of women – articulates the classic double standard of a patriarchal
society:
FABRITIO Why, is not man
Tied to the same observance, lady sister,
And in one woman?
LIVIA ’Tis enough for him;
Besides, he tastes of many sundry dishes
That we poor wretches never lay our lips to –
As obedience, forsooth, subjection, duty, and such kickshaws,
All of our making, but served in to them. (I.ii.37–43)
Such complaints and pleas for women’s freedom in Women Beware Women are intense, but they are also all compromised and subverted even as they are expressed. Isabella’s rejection of enforced marriage may be compelling, especially given the Ward’s brutal idiocy, but it also serves as a rationalization for an adulterous liaison with Hippolito. Livia’s often witty defiance of the constrictions of female convention may make her an attractive figure, almost another Beatrice, yet she uses her freedom to play the bawd for the Duke and Bianca, and does even worse to Isabella with her false story.23 Bianca herself, once she is raped, turns willing adulteress and murderess. Middleton’s sympathy for these women seems genuine, and he reveals how they often act on unconscious motivations they cannot recognize or control, but the play also understands how subjection and weakness can turn to special pleading, sexual licence and violence. Livia wants equality for women, but in all the wrong things: a man may taste of ‘many sundry dishes’, she argues,
And if we lick a finger then sometimes
We are not to blame: your best cooks use it. (I.ii.44–5)
Those who are subjected and victimized, it appears, simply want a chance at running the same hypocritical game.
Middleton’s title therefore suggests that the play represents a deliberate intervention in a contentious contemporary discourse, one that had a direct connection to the ‘subject’ of tragedy – that genre in which the organs of increase always dry up. If there is one thing predictable about the tragic drama of the English Renaissance, it is that the women will all be dead at the end. In Middleton’s play, women must beware of men as much as of women; Livia is horribly destructive, but no less so than the patriarchal structure of society as a whole. The warning to beware of women, after all, derives from Misogynos himself. Perhaps we should also hear in the title a less directed warning: Women, beware! Women!
Middleton has, from the beginning, always been praised for his creation of memorable, psychologically complex female characters. Nathaniel Richards’s commendatory verse singles out this quality: ‘He knew the rage, / Madness of women crossed; and for the stage / Fitted their humours, hell-bred malice, strife / Acted in state, presented to the life’. Rather like Misogynos, Richards singles out the destructive energies of Middleton’s women, also remarking on the ‘plots, poisons, mischiefs that seldom miss / To murder virtue with a venom kiss’, but he also, however tentatively, registers some of the causes for their violence and fury: the murderous ‘drabs of state’ are ‘vexed’, the mad women ‘crossed’. In this same tradition, Una Ellis-Fermor’s comment of 1935 became the authorized version of praise: ‘Middleton’s capacity for tragedy is inseparable from his other supreme gift, his discernment of the minds of women; in this no dramatist of the period except Shakespeare is his equal’.24
Such panegyric has frequently accompanied discussions of Middleton as a realist, or ‘merely a great recorder’ of life, in Eliot’s phrase, a kind of ‘seventeenth century Ibsen’.25 Middleton’s representation of female psychology, however, no longer appears as such an isolated phenomenon; it can now be seen, rather, to be inextricably linked to a recognition of women’s social and economic positions in a patriarchal society. Women Beware Women exposes the destructive effects of the com- modification of women as powerfully as anything in Jacobean literature. His female characters openly reflect on their exploitation and appropriation by men and the culture men have created – and some of them turn their subjection into a weapon of malice. ‘They are the creatures of their environment’, Margot Heinemann has noted, ‘as well as of original sin’.26 Tlius, the nature of Middleton’s ‘realism’ has been readjusted in recent criticism, from that of the precursor to Ibsen who brought us memorable women and realistic social detail, to that of the sympathetic dramatist who also understood that ‘the best condition’, for most women, ‘is but bad enough’.
Nicholas Brooke has claimed that Middleton was ‘the most controlled artist’ of the Jacobean dramatists, and the carefully articulated structure of Women Beware Women reflects his claim.27 The play enacts an ascent of class, social custom, and hierarchy which is simultaneous with, and indistinguishable from, a debilitating moral decline.28 It is impossible to say which is cause and which effect. The play opens in Leantio’s house; he is a ‘factor’, a low-level commercial agent, and the values associated with him and his house in the first scene are commercial and bourgeois. The site of the second scene, Fabritio’s house, technically constitutes a rise on the social scale, but in reality there is little to differentiate it from Leantio’s house. Act I, scene iii moves outside Leantio’s house for the first time, with catastrophic results, when the progress of the Duke and the nobility of Florence passes in the street. The second and third acts of the play move entirely to Livia’s house (except for the final return in III.i to Leantio’s house). Livia’s house is clearly yet another notch higher on the social scale. Here the Mother may visit but she feels out of place; here the Duke can be entertained, and aristocratic games of chess and seduction can be discreetly played out. When Bianca returns for the play’s final visit to Leantio’s house in III.i, it has become ‘the strangest house’ (1. 16), no longer in her view a place of middle-class comfort but one of déclassé confinement; Leantio’s first thought, on hearing that the Duke has seen Bianca at the window, is to ask ‘Is the door fast?’ and to propose the ‘conveyance’ ‘at the end of the dark parlour’ where he would, too late, ‘lock my life’s best treasure up’ (11. 240–6). In the return to Livia’s house in III.ii, Bianca arrives not with Leantio but with the Duke, and is now openly his mistress. Acts IV and V complete the play’s social ascent by first placing Bianca in the Duke’s palace, with the regal marriage procession in IV.iii confirming her new status, and then installing her ‘above’ with the Duke and the rest of the nobility. This social trajectory is marked by acute observation on Middleton’s part: clothing, possessions, imagery and rhetoric are all carefully calibrated to register social difference. Even the loutish Ward, as Brooke has noted, ‘is usefully as well as symbolically placed below stairs’ in the final scene.29
Middleton’s precise manipulation of the play’s social setting corresponds of course with Bianca’s social rise to marriage with the Duke, but it also corresponds with an equally precise employment of the upper stage, as Marjorie S. Lancaster has demonstrated. Arguing that Middleton’s use of the upper stage reflects ‘his characters’ inverted morality’, Lancaster demonstrates the recurrent irony in the play’s ‘placement of the two lovers, one positioned on the upper stage and the other below’ in three crucial scenes.30 Thus, Bianca is ‘above’ with the Mother and the Duke is below in I.iii, when he first sees her. In the famous chess scene of II.ii, Bianca enters below but is led above, where she is surprised by the Duke. Finally, Bianca enters ‘above’ with the Duke and the entire court in the final scene; they view the court masque, staged below, while seated above. Bianca and the Duke thus act out a demonic parody of the lovers’ elevation in Romeo and Juliet. (Whether they die on the upper stage or descend to the main stage is unclear.)31
The play’s social and physical progressions develop simultaneously with morally debilitating regressions. Bianca, again, is at the centre of them. The very young girl (‘about sixteen’, III.i.180) of the first act, who ran away and married for love, is ‘strangely altered’ (III.i.7) by the third act, and in the fourth act is a ‘glist’ring whore’ (IV.ii.20), in Leantio’s words, fully capable of turning the language of Christian charity back against the Cardinal while secretly plotting his murder by poison in the final scene. To say that Bianca’s morality ‘descends’ while her social position ‘ascends’ in the play is a useful enough formulation of the play’s strategy, but such a formulation does not adequately represent the deep identity of these processes. The play is not simply a study of moral loss, as earlier commentators tended to argue, but also a study of the social conditions which permit, perhaps even generate, the moral chaos of the play.
There is one final simultaneous ‘descent’, which other commentators have not, to my knowledge, previously mentioned: the play articulates an ugly escalation in sexual violence against women. Marriage to Bianca is exhilarating for Leantio, but it is also a ‘sin … the best piece of theft / That ever was committed’, yet pardoned, he believes, through marriage (I.i.35, 43–4). A figurative rape, in short, in the same sense that Saturninus terms Bassianus’s seizure of Lavinia in Titus Andronicus a ‘rape’, to which Bassianus replies, ‘ “Rape” call you it, my lord, to seize my own, / My true-betrothed love and now my wife? / But let the laws of Rome determine all; / Meanwhile am I possessed of that is mine’ (Titus Andronicus I.i.405–9). Like Shakespeare, Middleton reveals the male ‘possession’ of the female body in marriage to be a form of rape. The commodification of the female body – Leantio calls Bianca a ‘purchase’ (12), a ‘treasure’ (14) a ‘masterpiece’ (41) and a ‘jewel’ (162) in the first scene alone – makes it a potential site of violence; objectified thus, it may be seized, locked up, put on display, fingered and inspected, penetrated.
Middleton’s play also follows Titus (I am not suggesting any direct influence) in matching this opening marriage/rape with an actual rape just before the middle of the play. In an important article, Anthony Dawson has thoroughly examined what he terms ‘the economy of rape’ in Women Beware Women, seeing rape as ‘an emblem of hierarchy’, and he exhorts that we ‘first rid ourselves of the idea that the Duke’s action constitutes a seduction (which is what virtually every critic calls it) rather than a rape’. Middleton, he argues, ‘locates the issue where it belongs – in the area of power relations’, and leaves the question of consent ambiguous.32
The site of the Duke’s assault on Bianca is the famous chess scene (Il.ii), its lower-stage chess game and upper-stage and offstage rape of Bianca one of the most brilliantly managed pieces of stagecraft in all of Jacobean drama. Many critics of the play once argued the supposed question of Bianca’s ‘consent’ to the Duke – Schoenbaum, in a notorious phrase, said she ‘is able to lose her virtue only because she never really possessed it’33 – but their encounter is usually read with a different sensibility now. The Duke’s cunning is paralleled with Livia’s below, in any event, and his language is filled with the rhetoric of masculine power (‘Strive not to seek / Thy liberty’, ‘you shall not out till I’m released’, ‘I should be sorry the least force should lay / An unkind touch upon thee’, ‘I can command: / Think upon that’) which asserts a familiar pattern of masculine domination/female subjection as well as the more gender-neutral master/subject hierarchical relation. In such a context, Bianca’s ‘choice’ is really non-existent.
Middleton’s patterning of sexual violence finally leads to a third rape in the play, one that no other commentator has explored: the murder of Isabella by ‘burning treasure’ in the masque scene (V.ii).34 Here Middleton directly equates rape and murder.35 What actually happens on stage during the masque scene remains somewhat obscure, as the scene is famously bereft of stage directions to guide a director through its carnival of violence. Livia, however, is costumed (in a savage irony) as ‘Juno Pronuba, the marriage-goddess’ (IV.ii.214) who ‘descends’ (V.ii.98 s.d.) from above to choose between two lovers/shepherds (Hippolito and Guardiano), both in love with a nymph (Isabella). As she descends, Livia breathes in poisoned incense prepared by Isabella (in revenge for having lied to her, thereby permitting her incest with Hippolito). As she recognizes that the incense ‘overcomes’ her (V.ii.114), Livia says,
’Now for a sign of wealth and golden days,
Bright-eyed prosperity which all couples love,
Ay, and makes love, take that!
With no stage direction in O, the verse continues,
Our brother Jove
Never denies us of his burning treasure,
T’express bounty’.
DUKE She [Isabella] falls down upon’t;
What’s the conceit of that?
FABRITIO As over-joyed, belike.
Too much prosperity overjoys us all,
And she has her lapful, it seems, my lord. (V.ii.115–22)
The interpolated stage direction, after Livia’s ‘take that!’, is ‘Throws flaming gold upon Isabella, who falls dead’. This stage direction derives from an annotation, in a seventeenth-century hand, in the Yale copy of the 1657 octavo.36
Even without the Yale annotation, we can infer the stage action from Livia’s lines. Huston D. Hallahan has noted the traditional symbolism of such treasure, a double-edged ‘sign of wealth that seems positive but in fact is deadly’, linking it to ‘the materialism that dominates the society of the naturalistic plot’.37 True enough, but Middleton’s allusion to Jove makes clear that Livia’s action concerns more than just a ‘sign of wealth’, for what is being represented here is yet another rape – one of the most famous rapes of antiquity, in fact: Jove ‘came / To Danae like a shoure of golde’, according to Ovid.38 The ‘lapful’ of ‘burning treasure’ in Women Beware Women is the image of a violent phallic penetration. Fabritio’s comment even suggests that Livia may have thrown the gold at Isabella’s genitals, as ‘lap’ had a bawdy as well as a more innocent meaning. As ‘Juno’, moreover, Livia delivers her ‘brother Jove[’s]’ sexual assault, thus replicating her role as bawd between her own brother and Isabella. Thus Isabella dies – in the physical as well as sexual sense – during a rape. Livia, moreover, is herself killed by a ‘precious incense’ (V.ii. 100) which has been poisoned by Isabella; ‘the action’, John Potter has noted, ‘is a kind of pun on incense/incest; like the incest, the incense is poisoned, and so Livia dies from her own corruption’.39
The allusion to Danae carries additional irony when her full story is considered. It was prophesied to her father, King Acrisius of Argos, not only that he would not have a son, but that his daughter would have a son who would kill him. Rather than kill his daughter, the King confined her to an underground chamber, with a single hole open to the sky for light and air. Through this entrance, Jove visited her as a shower of gold, impregnating her with the son, Perseus, who one day indeed killed his grandfather by accident. The story of the father who would confine his daughter lest he die resonates with several elements of Middle-ton’s play, including Bianca’s reflection,
’Tis not good, in sadness,
To keep a maid so strict in her young days;
Restraint breeds wandering thoughts…
…
I’ll nev’r use any girl of mine so strictly;
Howev’r they’re kept, their fortunes find ’em out –
I see’t in me. (IV.i.30–6)
Bianca’s confinement – first by her parents, then by Leantio – also leads to the murder of her ‘father’, the Duke, a man nearly forty years her senior (he is ‘about some fifty-five’, which is ‘no great age in man’, she says, for ‘he’s then at best / For wisdom and for judgement’ [Iiii.92–4]). Isabella’s case is the inverse of Bianca’s here, as she is publicly shopped by her father, to be married to the foolish Ward.
The images of rape in Women Beware Women are surrounded by various other forms of sexual violence and perversion. The Ward represents a vulgar and grotesque phallicism, with his incessant references to sticks, holes and games, embodying the notion of marriage as nothing more than sexual intercourse (‘My wife! What can she do?’ [II.ii.84]). Yet the Ward’s crude desires differ only in degree from Leantio’s boastful sexual preening (‘I have such luck to flesh. / I never bought a horse but he bore double’ [I.iii.51–2]). Leantio’s figurative buying of a ‘horse’ is more literally acted out by the Ward, whose inspection of Isabella’s body in III.iii (checking her hair, nose and teeth, peeping under her skirt) is a fantastic instance, at once comic and horrifying, of the male commodification of the female body. Adultery, on the other hand, is a relatively minor sin in the play, and Isabella and Bianca succumb to it for different reasons; the Duke’s response to Bianca’s protest, ‘I have a husband’, is a morally hollow glibness: ‘That’s a single comfort; / Take a friend to him’ (II.ii.347–8). The Cardinal’s denunciation (IV.i) of his brother’s adulterous lust will be neutralized, in the Duke’s perverse plan, by the murder of Leantio, and then the Duke’s making Bianca ‘lawfully mine own, / Without this sin and horror’ (IV.i.272–3).
The real ‘sin and horror’ in Women Beware Women, though, is incest. Isabella rejects Hippolito’s declaration of love in I.ii, but once deceived by Livia’s story of her mother’s infidelity in II.i, she gladly embraces Hippolito, adding to it the hypocrisy of marriage to the Ward as a cover-story; mere adultery is evidently more acceptable to her. Hippolito, on the other hand, simply accepts the incest. When Isabella hears the truth in IV.ii, she acknowledges ‘sin enough to make a whole world perish’ (IV.ii.132) and plots her revenge. It has also been argued that Livia herself harbours incestuous desires for her brother Hippolito, to whom she says, ‘Thou keep’st the treasure of that life I love / As dearly as mine own’ (II.i.26–7); she provides for his sexual satisfaction as a displacement of her own desire.40 And Livia’s role in the masque is that of Juno, who was both ‘sister and wife to Jove’ (V.ii.86). But Women Beware Women offers us multiple versions of the parent-child incest configuration. As Stephen Wigler has noted, regarding the final sexual pairings in the play, ‘the ages of the partners in each liaison differ substantially’, and the older partners ‘possess parental stature’.41 Thus the Duke, as we have seen, is fifty-five years old and Bianca not yet sixteen; Middleton, moreover, has increased the age of the historical Duke considerably.’42 Livia – who has already ‘buried my two husbands’ but ‘never mean more to marry’ (I.ii.50–1) – is ‘nine and thirty’ years old (II.ii. l57), and Leantio perhaps in his early twenties, while Hippolito is the uncle of Isabella, presumably old enough to be her father. The repeated pattern is that the older partner offers peace, comfort, protection, wealth and power to the younger partner.
It is part of Middleton’s irony that in each of these cases of real or quasi-incest, something like real love does occur: Livia is sincerely distraught over the death of ‘My love’s joy’ (IV.ii.50), Hippolito embraces Isabella’s body and kisses her ‘cold lips’ (V.ii. 134) and Bianca, after kissing the poisoned lips of the Duke, seizes the poisoned cup and drinks. The Liebestod motif is very prominent. Yet Middleton’s irony extends even further to encompass the means of death for these lovers: Isabella dies from her lapful of burning treasure, Livia is poisoned by incense/incest, Hippolito is shot with poisoned arrows by the Cupids in the masque (he then runs himself upon the guard’s weapon) and the Duke drinks from the poisoned chalice. Each of their deaths is sexually inflected, not only a punishment for but also a fulfilment of their sexuality. This bloodbath (and we have not even mentioned Guardiano) has often been attacked as a dramatic failure, but whatever it is, it is surely not ‘the work of a dramatist who had lost interest in his characters as soon as their emotional development – or deterioration – was complete’.43 Rather, it seems the work of a dramatist who wanted to drive his characters to the catastrophic completion of their emotional states. The punishment for sexual transgression, it turns out, is sexual punishment.
It is time to step back and consider these interrelated patterns of social and sexual action more generally. Women Beware Women represents a striking range of sexual and moral transgression. It is moreover one of the few Jacobean plays which actually feature rape or incest instead of merely threatening them. At the same time, the structure of the play raises central questions of social class and economic position, with Middleton’s considerable powers of cultural analysis registering minute social distinctions. The relations between class and sexuality in Women Beware Women are too complex to describe simply, but certainly part of their logic is that sexual transgression is expressed as social displacement, and vice versa. The sexual violations in the play may be read under the rubric of the social/political categories of hierarchy and authority: Bianca’s rape is more an assertion of the Duke’s status than of his desire (‘I can command: / Think upon that’ [II.ii.362–3]), and adultery is a lesser sin than incest because it does not subvert natural hierarchy, yet still involves the strong older/weak younger lover dynamic (Livia tells Fabritio, ‘you’d command love – / And so do most old folks that go without it’ [I.ii. 142–3]). When the Duke decides to eliminate Leantio, he decides to ‘flatter’ Hippolito with an alleged favour to Livia which he has thought of, ‘but nev’r meant to practise – / Because I know her base’ (IV. i. 135–7), a social sneer which would certainly have surprised the woman who provided for the Duke in her house. When he informs Hippolito of his sister’s new ‘bedfellow’, the Duke inflects his account in class terms: Leantio is ‘an impudent boaster’ who raises ‘his glory from her shame … [and] wastes her wealth’; worse, the Duke claims, he ‘had picked out / A worthy match for her, the great Vincentio, / High in our favour and in all men’s thoughts’ (IV.i. 145 – 58). Hippolito’s reaction to Leantio’s name as his sister’s sexual partner is all about his class status and youth: ‘He’s a factor! … The poor old widow’s son!’ (IV.i. 162–3).44 At her death, Bianca realizes that her status at the Duke’s palace – indeed, in Florence itself – is artificial and false: ‘What make I here? These are all strangers to me, / Not known but by their malice’ (V.ii.206–7).45 The Cardinal’s final lines are for the most part conventional piety, but in them Middleton presses, one last time, the play’s linking of sexual transgression and social/political hierarchy:
Sin, what thou art, these ruins show too piteously.
Two kings on one throne cannot sit together,
But one must needs down, for his title’s wrong;
So where lust reigns, that prince cannot reign long. (V.ii.222–5)
‘Sin’ and ‘lust’ conspire against sovereignty, but fail because one must down while the other is up, and as for lust, like a would-be royal successor, ‘his title’s wrong’. So also Leantio argued, at the beginning of the play, when he told his Mother to lower her voice lest Bianca hear her:
I pray do not you teach her to rebel,
When she’s in a good way to obedience,
To rise with other women in commotion
Against their husbands …
…
If you can but rest quiet, she’s contented
With all conditions that my fortunes bring her to:
To keep close as a wife that loves her husband;
To go after the rate of my ability,
Not the licentious swinge of her own will. (I.i.74–7, 88–92)
Leantio’s dream of a love that defies social class and wealth is mocked by his own petty possessiveness, of course, but his vision of disorder here is of the unruly ‘will’ of the desiring woman; again, the ‘licentious’ is translated into the social/political, for the assertion of a woman’s ‘will’ would lead her to ‘rebel … To rise with other women in commotion [i.e. insurrection]’. Their ‘obedience’ is as devoutly wished for by Leantio as by the Cardinal. Here is the stereotyped spectre of the unruly woman perpetrated by Swetnam and others in the pamphlet wars. The lesson drawn is the misogynist one implied by the play’s title, echoed in Bianca’s dying words:
Oh the deadly snares
That women set for women, without pity
Either to soul or honour! Learn by me
To know your foes. In this belief I die:
Like our own sex, we have no enemy, no enemy! (V.ii.211–15)
The misogynist position, the play makes clear, is one of hypocrisy.
Middleton, it should be emphasized, never excuses the evil his women do in this play. Isabella’s plight is terrible, but adultery and incest are equal if not greater horrors; Bianca has no alternative to or escape from the Duke, but her attempted murder of the Cardinal is indefensible and given no rationalization. Livia – a powerful, witty, theatrical woman – turns her considerable gifts to the basest uses more or less on a whim. But what Middleton has done in Women Beware Women is to expose the world in which women must live, one in which they are property, and to show how the social structure of this world generates and feeds women’s ‘rage’, ‘madness’, ‘malice’ and ‘plots’. He stages both their victimization and their self-generating evil; above all, he stages their self-destructiveness, and hence their tragedy.
Two scenes in Women Beware Women deserve special attention for their unique interest.
First, there is the celebrated chess scene (II.ii), in which Livia engages the Mother in a game of chess on the stage below while the Duke surprises Bianca on the upper stage. This scene has been universally praised for different reasons. Wholly apart from the elements already mentioned above, for example, Livia’s encounter with the Mother is a masterful dialogue reflecting the most minute distinctions of personality and social class; Middleton’s brilliance in revealing Livia’s ability to manipulate the Mother almost blinds us to her cruelty.
The chess game itself continues the demonstration of Livia’s mastery over the Mother, for chess was considered a game appropriate for a higher social class than the Mother inhabits. Middleton has received special praise for the choice of the chess metaphor itself, and for the counterpointing of the two games played above and below. Chess itself is a game which requires extreme aggression within a set of rigid rules and movements – a powerful metaphor for the social dynamics at work among the supposedly friendly enemies of Women Beware Women. Middleton has loosely followed the rules and tactics of an actual chess game, moreover, though with far from complete or consistent accuracy. Bianca, whose name means ‘white’, is ‘simplicity’ (II.ii.306) or innocence as the white pieces, while Livia is the black queen (‘quean’ = whore) who defeats white. As the goal of any chess game is checkmating your opponent, so the goal of the Duke’s game is sexual mating; the ‘death’ of the King in chess is simultaneous with the Duke’s sexual ‘death’ offstage. Chess is a game of unusual intellectual violence, then, which Middleton simultaneously produces on the stage. Taylor and Loughrey also point out that ‘the world of the chess pieces is hierarchical’46 – thus the game is an intensely concentrated paradigm of the play’s fusion of sexual and social hierarchies.
Chess is, finally, a ‘game’ – which is, in the play’s insistent rhetoric, a sexual term (‘game / In a new-married couple’ [I.iii.9–10]; ‘wise gamesterss’ [III.iii.107]). Women Beware Women is filled with references to games, some of them rustic sports, some upper-class pastimes: Tip-Cat (I.ii.87n.), ‘hot-cockles’ (I.iii.25n.), ‘court-passage’ (II.ii.42n.), ‘shittlecock’ (II.ii.79n.), lawn-bowling (III.i.213n.), fowling (III.iii.17n.), archery (III.iii.19n.), ‘stool-ball (III.iii. 87n.) and acrobatics (IV.ii. l04n.), among others. What all these games have in common in the play is that they openly, often crudely, figure sexual intercourse. The play’s language often becomes extraordinarily dense with obscene innuendo, as a glance at any of the passages listed above will reveal; the very idea of a game is contaminated in the play, as something almost exclusively sexual. Most of the games are initiated by, or won by, men; Livia’s mastery at chess is impressive, but it is only over the Mother. Middleton would employ chess as a political allegory to much greater effect a few years later in A Game At Chess (1624), but though chess is used in only a single scene in Women, it is overwhelming in its effect, a theatrical tour de force.
The masque scene (V.ii), by contrast, has been on the receiving end of some extraordinary vituperation even as the play as a whole was being praised. Swinburne termed it ‘preposterous beyond extenuation on the score of logical or poetical justice’.47 J. D. Jump termed it a ‘ridiculous holocaust’, David Frost saw it as ‘arbitrary, an almost farcical tidying up of loose ends’, and Schoenbaum felt, simply, ‘the last act is a failure, and with it the play collapses’.48 The most elaborate put-down of the masque scene actually gets at something important about it; for G. R. Hibbard, the play ends ‘as a kind of mongrel, the illegitimate offspring of an incongruous union between The Revenger’s Tragedy and A Warning for Fair Women’.49 The scene’s mixture of elements of savage, violent farce and domestic tragedy has struck more recent readers of the play not as a weakness, but as a strength, a mark of Middleton’s willingness to experiment; Shand terms the scene ‘one of the most daring’ finales in Jacobean tragedy.50 Implicit in many of the criticisms of the scene is a sense of disjunction between dramatic styles felt when the scene begins, an unexplained shift from the supposedly Ibsenesque realism of the first four acts to the final strange mixture which defies a label. Brooke has argued convincingly that, in parallel to its progression up the social scale, the play also moves through ‘a progression of dramatic modes … from comedy through high comedy to tragi-farce’.51 The amateur play-within-the-play is deliberately awkward, unreal, the genre unable to contain the emotion and violence within it.
The masque scene has always had its defenders. What might be called the ‘moral’ line of criticism on the play is well represented in Irving Ribner’s rigid argument that ‘the final scene of mass murder is necessary and proper. It is not to be explained in terms of logical credibility, but rather as the dramatic symbol of the inevitable collapse of a society which by a faulty choice of values inherent in the very nature of humanity has devoted itself to its own destruction’.52 Batchelor goes so far as to claim that ‘each death is a moral emblem, a carefully worked model of appropriate retribution seen from the perspective of orthodox Christian dualism’, but few have agreed that this perspective is a consistent one, or even ‘orthodox’.53 Many recent defenders of the masque have articulated the links between it and the main play, and especially the logic which drives the death-punishments of each character.54 Hallahan has further argued that the end of the play conforms to a contemporary ‘practice of juxtaposing the unrealistic and extraordinary with the realistic and ordinary’.55 Jacobean playwrights frequently display a highly self-conscious sense of theatricality, finally, and a play-within-the-play, as here, would hardly have seemed unusual to contemporary audiences.
Middleton’s strategy in the masque goes beyond the usual contrasts and parallels of any inner play/outer play dynamic, then, though those links are substantial and important. But Middleton also creates an alternative dramatic model – pastoral, mythological, allegorical – in which women must still beware. The gap between representation and reality seems intentionally large in this other model, but it inscribes, and completes, women’s self-destructiveness no less than the rest of the play does.
In terms of more general stagecraft, Women Beware Women is exceptional in a number of ways. The play has four major women’s parts, for example – perhaps not surprising, given its theme, but certainly a large number compared with most drama of the period. The play as a whole is generously populated with parts large and small, and requires a larger cast than many plays. Middleton also makes extraordinary use of the aside and ‘isolation blocking’, in Shand’s phrase, as a way of enacting alienation: ‘the play’s tragic figures speak apart almost habitually, even at moments of great intimacy, the effect being that they stand divided from one another, from themselves … and, at last, from the audience’.56
The stage history of Women Beware Women is disappointingly slight.57 Except for Nathaniel Richards’s comment, there is no evidence that the play was professionally performed until the 1960s. The first major production was the 1962 Royal Shakespeare Company production at the New Arts Theatre Club in London, directed by Anthony Page; Nicol Williamson played Leantio. Granada Television filmed a heavily cut version of the play in 1965, with Diana Rigg as Bianca and Clifford Evans as the Duke, and the Traverse Theatre Company performed the play in Edinburgh in 1968. A second Royal Shakespeare production at Stratford in 1969, directed by Terry Hands, was by all accounts highly successful; Richard Pasco played Leantio, Judi Dench Bianca and Brewster Mason the Duke.
Since 1969, the play has received mostly amateur or university stagings. Future stars such as Kevin Kline (as Guardiano, City Center Acting Company, New York, 1972) and Sigourney Weaver (as Mother, Yale School of Drama, 1973) have acted in the play. The film director George Roy Hill set the play in the New Orleans of 1900 in a Yale School of Drama production in 1979. Undoubtedly the most controversial staging of the play was Howard Barker’s 1986 adaptation at the Royal Court Theatre in London. Part I of Barker’s version was a condensation of the first three and a half acts of Middleton’s play; after the intermission, though, the play is entirely by Barker. In Barker’s new ending, Sordido becomes a major figure who rapes Bianca on the eve of her wedding; the play now ends with the Duke’s cry, ‘Don’t love! don’t love!’.58 One of the most successful productions of the play was at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in 1989, directed by John Adams; here, the production was punctuated by ‘images of confinement’, and the chess scene was played as ‘half rape, half seduction, but neither one nor the other’.59
Compared with The Revenger’s Tragedy and The Changeling, which have received numerous important productions in the twentieth century and frequent amateur performances, Women Beware Women has scarcely been staged at all.
The earliest known text of Women Beware Women is the octavo printed for Humphrey Moseley in 1657: ‘TWO NEW PLAYES. / VIZ. More DISSEMBLERS / besides WOMEN. / WOMEN beware / WOMEN. / WRITTEN / By Tho. Middleton, Gent.’ Mulryne lists twenty-one surviving copies of this octavo, and he has collated twenty of them. No significant variants have been reported. The present text is based on the Huntington Library copy; the Folger, Harvard and Yale copies have also been consulted. I have also profited from consultation of the recent Revels (1975), Cambridge (1978) and Penguin (1988) editions of the play, and of course from Roma Gill’s edition of the play (1968) for this series.
Moseley’s edition presents an exceptionally clean text. It is likely that the manuscript used in printing was either a scribal transcript of the author’s manuscript, or (much less likely) in Middleton’s own hand, with perhaps a few annotations by a theatrical book-keeper. For this edition, the spelling has been modernized, some contractions expanded and the punctuation considerably lightened. The play is remarkable for its many asides; they have been marked in the text where there is little doubt of their occurrence. The text presents some difficulties in its erratic intermingling of prose and verse spoken by the Ward and by Sordido; this edition follows, with minor exceptions, the display indicated in the octavo. Thus, there are sometimes prose to verse shifts within a single speech. The justifications for retaining such a display are, first, that the Moseley text is otherwise so meticulous; and second, that the awkward intermixing is a specific rhetorical device to help characterize these low characters. Unless there is strong reason otherwise, the octavo has been followed in such matters as contractions (thus O’s ‘nev’r’ rather than ‘ne’er’).
Additions or emendations to the text are either indicated in the notes, or indicated by square brackets [ ]. Stage directions present a particular problem here, as they are relatively full but not always clear earlier in the text, and virtually absent during the confusing final scene; all supplementary directions are given in square brackets.
The previous modern editions listed above have done substantial and important work in providing accurate annotation of the text, and I have consulted all of them in preparing this annotation; in addition to adding many of my own notes, I have attempted simply to gloss many words which seem to me now somewhat arcane to the general reader, in the hope of making the play as readable as possible.