Women Beware Women

by Thomas Middleton, Colin Counsell (Introduction)

Women Beware Women tells the story of Brancha, a woman who escapes from her rich home to elope with the poor Leantio. Fearful and insecure, Leantio requires that his mother lock Brancha up while he is away. While locked up, the Duke of Florence spots Brancha in a window and attempts to woo her with the help of Livia, a widow. When Leantio returns he discovers that Brancha has been corrupted and no longer loves him because he lacks wealth and fortune. Hippolito, Livia's brother, is tormented because he is in love with his niece Isabella. Isabella returns the love to her uncle but to keep their relationship a secret Livia encourages Isabella to marry the Ward, a young heir. Busy putting together illegitimate relationships, Livia discovers that she is also able to love again and as a result, she seeks the love of Leantio. However, as affairs and relationships are exposed, one of the bloodiest Jacobean tragedies is created.

Genres: Plays, Classics, Drama, Theatre, Fiction, 17th Century, British Literature

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1657

About the author

Thomas Middleton (1580 – 1627) was an English Jacobean playwright and poet. Middleton stands with John Fletcher and Ben Jonson as among the most successful and prolific of playwrights who wrote their best plays during the Jacobean period. He was one of the few Renaissance dramatists to achieve equal success in comedy and tragedy. Also a prolific writer of masques and pageants, he remains one of the most noteworthy and distinctive of Jacobean dramatists.

Reviews

[Esdaile · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thomas Middleton's "Women beware Women" strikes me as a good instance of new wine in old bottles, in this case Puritan polemicism in the old vessel of Revenge Tragedy. Middleton attracts and repels me at the same time. For my university dissertation, written many many years ago, I chose as my subject "Drama as a Vehicle of the Political Idea in Jacobean drama". I argued that Thomas Middleton was a Puritan in all but name, concealing his republican and Puritan sympathies for reasons of political expediency and writing plays for a living by with a certain distaste for the entire procedure. I did not realise at the time an interesting fact which struck me on my recent second reading of this play. "Women beware Women" was first published in 1657, thirty years after the author's death and during the years of Cromwell's Protectorate. Theatrical performances were not allowed under Cromwell, which makes the publication of the play at the very time it could not be performed quite remarkable. However, this is less remarkable when we consider the play itself and what Middleton was trying to do. This play, ostensibly a kind of grotesque revenge tragedy in the tradition of Shakespeare or Webster, is in reality closer to Milton's Comus or Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress in both mood and intent. It is a moral tale of the corruption of the Catholic court and by implication all courts and all monarchies. Once someone is corrupted, like the innocent Bianca, whom her hsuband vainly and for entirely selfish reasons, try to hide from prying eyes, they swiftly fall to the corruption of the flesh, which is sin.

"Sin tastes at the first draught like wormwood water,
But drunk again, 'tis nectar ever after."

This tragedy presents us with a Catholic city, Florence, which is veritable vanity fair of corruption.
Women are chattels and have to fend as best they can by selling themselves at the highest price and to their best advantage. The characters intrigue against one another in true Renaissance fashion and doom themselves by their own ambition and finally all perish in Middleton's shalf satirical tragedy in a bizarre and wildly implausible murderous masque in which each character perishes "in character" according to a poetic cum divine justice. As Roma Gill rightly notes in her introduction in the The New Mermaids series, "the play is cruel but oddly unmoving."

T.S. Eliot famously wrote that "Webster was much possessed by death" but Webster's characters are doomed but while they are alive, they thrive. It strikes me that it is Middleton's characters who are truly possessed by death from their beginning. Their psychological swerves are bewildering and implausible but in a deeper sense, their fates all seem inevitable, they are predestined to damnation.
The writer seems to have been very familiar with Shakespeare’s plays, since the echoes of Shakespeare's writing can be found throughout this play. However, the echoes are also parodies. It is easy to find Shakespeare parodies "Oh affinity, What piece of excellent workmanship art thou?" declares the scheming Guardiano recalling "What a piece of work is man, How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty" (Hamlet) "He likes the treason well, but hates the traitor" recalls Shakespeare's Bolinbroke in Richard II: "Though I did wish him dead, I hate the murderer love him murdered." . The several love themes are snide parodies of Romeo and Juliet.

This is a truly distasteful work in the tradition of European puritanism. It is a cry and mocking of life, a republican call to arms. Remember Malvolio's warning in "Twelfth Night": I'll be revenged on the lot of you". The writer here delights in the doom of the characters. We are worlds part from Shakespeare's tragic victims. Even Webster's characters are capable of more humanity. If Middleton had written "The Duchess of Malfi", I have no doubt the Duchess would have been protrayed as the whore, as described by her cruel brother.

So I find this play repellent, yet I am drawn to it and I ask myself why. I think the reason is its intensity. We are as human beings fascinated by the fanatical, the committed, the intense. "Women beware Women" is nothing if not intense, with the intensity of a sickness, of a writer who finds the world here repugnant. This play is not lyrical as Shakespeare or in a different manner Webster were lyrical, but the language is nevertheless compelling. I found the complexity of the plots and machinations of the protagonists confusing but some lines echo after the final curtain, as this true observation from the cuckolded Leantio, Middleton's Othello parody, who unlike Othello has good reason to be jealous:

"For nothing makes man's loss grievous to him
But knowledge of the worth of what he loses"

[jules · Rating 3 out of 5]

girl WHAT was that ending. um. okay. listen i'm not gonna call this play good female representation but sometimes i simply want to witness women's wrongs. sometimes that's fun. livia you've done everything wrong in your entire life but are you free on thursday night? and bianca babygirl i'm so fucking sorry

[Zoey · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very good demonstration of why the archaic traditions of marrying young without really knowing yourself, much less knowing the other person, only results in dissatisfaction and adultery. It might also have something to do with older men taking advantage of younger women, but as history has shown, that’s not a particularly original concept.

[Florence Ridley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unhinged and brilliant. Everyone is terrible. The masque at the end is totally bonkers. It's definitely over-complicated but as early modern drama goes... I've certainly been more confused. I NEED to watch this now.

[Stephen Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Was there a rule in Jacobean England stating that respectable people could only murder each other under the guise of acting within a play(-within-a-play)? It happens here and there in most of the revenge tragedies, from Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy on, but in this particularly ultraviolent bloodfest, every single character latches onto the same modus operandi at the climax. I'm not sure how any viewer could take the fifth act seriously; I imagine it would've had to have been played for laughs even on its opening night. If so, it's particularly hilarious, especially as the Duke scans his playbill with bewilderment and wonders aloud why so many characters are dropping out of accordance with the plot. But why such a ridiculous fifth act when the preceding four don't suggest any parodistic intent?

In fact, the first four acts contain some of the strongest characterizations and writing of the era. Livia, a twice-widowed manipulator (it's never fully explained how she managed to lose two husbands, but I think that's a delicious bit of intrigue to ponder over), is a fascinating role for an older woman, roles which were scarce in that time period when female roles were performed by young boys. As a widow, she is truly powerful (only widows controlled their own destinies, whereas other women surrendered their lives to husbands, fathers, and other male guardians), but her mastery of speech, her pragmatic attitude, and her genuine wisdom supplement that power to make her the most dominating presence in the play. That she is merciless and evil seems secondary to how likeable she is, and even her most despicable act--deceiving her young niece into an incestuous affair with her brother/the niece's uncle--is kept from seeming completely disgusting by a number of complex, contradictory, and overlapping motivations: namely, the love for her brother (and a desire to see his happiness) which outweighs her responsibility over the niece she hardly knows, a deconstruction of what she considers the unnecessary restrictions of the incest taboo (perhaps colored by her own incestuous inclinations) in a world where any sexual relationship is doomed to misery anyway, and a desire to overthrow the silly moral superiority of a girl who'd happily commit adultery and fornication yet so easily labels abominable a man who mournfully confesses his unshakable incestuous yearnings.

The play's treatment of Hippolito, the lovestruck uncle haunted by his own "aberrant" sexual desires, is also notable. Painting him first as a shameful penitent and then as an overjoyed lover--just about the only lover in the play who truly loves his mate--the play never attempts to assign guilt to him for having the desires he has, except insofar as society as deemed him unacceptable. Even the actual seduction of his niece is removed from him so that he can remain untarnished by the deception. Middleton has structured the play so that we must judge him based solely on our opinion of a sexual desire that he presumably cannot control, as evident by his anguish in the beginning. Can we blame him for sleeping with his niece when she so happily agrees to it?

WOMEN BEWARE WOMEN is a wonderfully complicated tragedy about sexual frustration. Middleton's Florence is a world of unhappy compromises and miserable sacrifices, where wise women must wed jackasses, where material temptations take a constant toll on the happiness of poor young couples, where powerful men naturally exert sexual control over powerless women, and where even happy pairings are thwarted by everpresent societal judgments. The fifth act is completely absurd and challenges how graceful and subtle the first four are, yet WOMEN BEWARE WOMEN still remains one of the most powerful of the Jacobean revenge tragedies.

[Sherry Wang · Rating 2 out of 5]

you can find this play next to the dictionary definition of “not a girl’s girl.”

[Gab! · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.25/5⭐️

Rating is currently subject to change! Such an interesting play!!

I have never read any early modern plays aside from Shakespeare’s but I do see some similarities. Like there are so many mentioning of blood in relation to sexual appetite, demeanour and familial relations.

Livia is a MENACE

Middleton is obsessed with sexual innuendos and puns it’s hilarious

Fave quotes:

“But I must needs commit idolatry?” - Isabella
“Sure I think ‘Tis harder to dissemble grief than love” - Livia

[Bea · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is so confusedly plotted it is almost funny, if it was not laden with murder and misogynistic themes. A proper Jacobean tragedy, they say

[Madeline · Rating 3 out of 5]

The ending of this is so absurd i love it

[sasha]

very good!

[Ava Camille · Rating 3 out of 5]

The SCANDAL. The INTRIGUE. The INTERPERSONAL RELATIONSHIP CONFLICT. dang…..

[Gill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superb classically gory tragedy by one of the best in the business. Based loosely on events in Florence around fifty years earlier, but with added violence and extra death. Some amazing roles for women - Livia and Bianca both offer a range of emotions, a real challenge for a young man.

Read as part of the ongoing REP King's Men Repertoire Zoom group read in the bleak winter of 2021.

[erynde · Rating 3 out of 5]

This play is a fun play and I had a hard time considering it as a tragedy. The revenge plot in general was unnecessarily funny and I couldn't really figure it out generally.

Middleton's plays are always amazing. I always have so much fun while reading them because I share his extreme pessimism on life (I see it as an art). Middleton has amazing metaphors, great characters and incomparable tragedies. This doesn't mean I'm going to love all of his plays of course and unfortunately, this play just didn't do it for me.

The characters are great, of course. There are some really fun characters and I enjoyed reading the play in general. But when it was over, I didn't feel the awe I am used to feel in Middleton plays. The play, when looked from the lens of a contemporary critic, has pointed out great social issues: there is the objectification of women, the hidden faces of people, the contrast between nature and artificial societal rules, the issue of rape and psychological responses given to traumatic occurrences. But when these things are pointed out, they are supposed to be fulfilled too.

I didn't enjoy Middleton's way of fulfilling these issues - especially when it comes to rape. Of course, I should have known what to expect from the play because of its name but I was hoping to be surprised. I wasn't, not necessarily. I expected Bianca to be portrayed different. I wanted Livia to be a stronger character (as in, not strong because she is so evil but strong because she is independent). I wanted to see Isabella not simply as a vile woman in an incestuous relationship but as a person who is suffering under the tyranny of her father. It's not impossible to read the play as a criticism of these points by showing them in such a way but I guess it wasn't enough for me.

One thing I loved especially about this play was how it used a sort of after-Romeo and Juliet approach with Bianca and her lover(s). "The harsh truth after a happy ending" is a great topic and Middleton's play is great in showing that.

I also liked how rape wasn't shown as something to be taken lightly. Bianca does suffer PTSD. What happens after that is merely disgusting. This is a sensitive topic and I was too sensitive about it.

Spoilers: everyone dies and it is not even remotely tragic.

I'm not going to get in too much depth with this review (while this play surely can be review extensively). Generally, this was a play I didn't enjoy as much as I expected to enjoy a Middleton play. If it wasn't Middleton's play (I know I'm using the author as an indicator of the quality of a work here but bear with me), I would say it was a great play. This is, therefore, a very subjective review.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

'Women Beware Women' is a really intriguing Jacobean tragedy.
Set in Florence, it follows the stories of Bianca and Leonato (I think), who elope from Venice and when they arrive in Florence, Leonato becomes paranoid that someone will see Bianca and want to steal her so insists that she stay indoors, or wear a mask if she leaves the house. However, Bianca appears on the balcony of their house and The Duke spots her, and instantly falls in love.
Elsewhere, Hippolyto realises that he is in love with his niece, Isabella, but knows that he cannot act on his desires, as that would mean going against nature.
However, both the Duke and Hippolyto have links to the widow Livia, who agrees to 'help' both men. She distracts Bianca's mother-in-law with a chess game, which mirrors the seduction of a frustrated & trapped Bianca by the Duke-and Bianca becomes his mistress. She also informs Isabella that Hippolyto is not really related to her; meaning that Isabella accepts his advances. Of course, as is typical of Jacobean tragedies, there is a masque where everyone meets quite brutal ends.
Middleton crafts a very twisted world, and Livia struck me as an almost female Iago; controlling the other characters around her. I really enjoyed reading this.

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

(from 1989 notebook):
saw WBW at the Birmingham Rep last night. Strange play: Catholic and Roman deities mixed up in the confused minds of the men and women, here dressed in 19th century costume. Sat right in the front row, to one side. I was absorbed, puzzled too. All was money, value of women seen in terms of money, jewels. Bianca locked away, then seduced, easily, into becoming a mistress of the court. Toadies and dandy-ism, strong women. The first killing scene done well, a screech of music as the sword cuts neck, leg and body. Powerful stuff but the end is weird, kind of funny, play-within-a-play, Juno descending in a giant hand, incense, explosions. Trapdoors, bloody spikes, poison, smoke.

[Ewan Bruce · Rating 4 out of 5]

Treachery, incest and meter - very up my alley

[David]

I love this editorial note following the final scene: “It is perhaps unnecessary to remark that the incidents in this last act are by far too crowded, or that the means by which they are produced are not sufficiently explained.” The revenge tragedy increasingly tries to out-shock all its predecessors, which is, ultimately, the death of the revenger’s play itself. Middleton does nothing terribly unexpected here. Lots of self-hoisting onto in-house petards, etc. Also not a triumph for feminism!

[Katie R. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'd like to see this on stage-- I listened to it on tape but was lost. I missed a lot, probably the important things, but I know the summary and the ending-- though, all tragedies are the same.

I will probably read this in the future, I'm intrigued and know I didn't get the fullness of it while listening.

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

The curiously unpunctuated title of Thomas Middleton’s play Women Beware Women is teasingly ambiguous. Is it a caution for women to beware, or a warning to beware of women? My personal guess is that the title is warning women to beware of other women.

All three interpretations fit the play, as we shall see. Women must beware of disgrace and seduction by cynical males. Men must beware of faithless wives who are easily tempted by other men. Most of all, women must beware of the scheming and intrigues of other women, who wish to bring them to dishonour or even death.

Middleton’s play (if indeed it is Middleton’s – critics tend to think he did write it) revolves around two stories of unfaithful wives, united by a central schemer.

The schemer is a cunning and manipulative widow, Livia. Struggling to find a man she likes, Livia takes pleasure in bringing about the seduction of two women, one of them her own niece.

Livia’s niece is Isabella, and she is being forced into marrying an oafish heir. We do not learn his name, and he is referred to as the Ward. The marriage is being pushed by her father, because it is a financially beneficial match, so Isabella is being whored in the acceptable legal manner that many respectable women had to endure at that time. Isabella comments: “Men buy their slaves, but women buy their masters”.

Comfort is to be had from her uncle Hippolito – until he shocks his young niece by telling her that his feelings for her are rather more than those that an uncle should have. Isabella spurns an incestuous match, but Livia is curiously sympathetic to her brother’s plight. Does she perhaps have feelings of attraction for Hippolito?

Livia agrees to help Hippolito to debauch his niece. This proves surprisingly easy. All Livia has to do is tell Isabella that she was born of a different father, and suddenly Isabella is only too keen to believe this lie. She is then immediately interested in having an affair with Hippolito behind her doltish suitor’s back without any further prompting from Livia.

Isabella’s easy seduction might have garnered some sympathy since she is being forced into a loveless marriage if she was not so quick to enter an incestuous relationship. What are we to make of Bianca, who married for love?

Actually Bianca has some good cause to turn against her husband too. She married a man beneath her socially, and has been happy to live in comparative poverty for love. This makes her situation the opposite of the one faced by Isabella. So why is she easily seduced?

The problem might be her husband, Leantio. He keeps his wife under lock and key to keep her away from other men, and makes his mother enforce this rule. Still Bianca is obviously highly-sexed in her relations with Leantio, so perhaps his fears are not without ground, even if his internment of his wife is appalling.

Once again Livia is the bawd who brings a lover to Bianca. The Duke of Florence sees Bianca from her balcony, and conceives a great lust for her. Livia persuades Leantio’s mother to play a game of chess with her, and to invite Bianca along.

So while Livia distracts the mother with a game of chess, Bianca is shown an art gallery (with plenty of lewd pictures to get her in the mood), and the Duke slips in and seduces her. The scene is one of Middleton’s most memorable, as it is slyly mixes the chess game with the sexual act. The language used by the two chess players is laden with innuendoes that hint at what the lovers are doing.

Matters become more complex when Livia becomes attracted to Leantio, one of the less convincing moments in the play, and the Duke and Hippolito conspire at Leantio’s death, bringing about a violent conclusion, as the various characters seek revenge on one another. The various methods of murder carry a strongly symbolic element – poisoning, a trap door, liquid gold, and Cupid’s arrows.

While Women Beware Women is classified as a tragedy, it lacks the most important ingredient for a tragedy – sympathetic characters whose unjust deaths will evoke our compassion. Here all the characters are rotten except for the Lord Cardinal, and he is not a significant character for much of the book.

The characters have no restraint in their lust for money, place, sex or murder. There is little regard for honour, morality, decency, compassion or even self-preservation, since many of the character’s actions can only bring harm on themselves.

Redemption is missing here. Only one character is influenced by the preaching of the Lord Cardinal, and his plans to marry the woman he seduced can only be made possible after he has arranged for the murder of her husband.

Middleton’s play has a certain amount of gratuitous nastiness in it. The incestuous storyline is clearly intended to titillate audiences, and the violence is included for sensationalist purposes, hence the peculiar nature of the final deaths.

Nonetheless Middleton has a moral purpose here too. He satirises the greed, lechery and moral hollowness of the ruling classes. The play also makes telling points about gender and class, though I am not sure that Middleton intended the work to be as radical as it eventually turns out.

[Lachlan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Howard Barker's version. Good ol' confusing database!

[Nisa]

and so i didnt really read it, i saw the gender- and era-swapped performance of it in duke. interesting. i might borrow it from nus library to see how the original storygoes.

[Annisa]

and so i didnt really read it, i saw the gender- and era-swapped performance of it in duke. interesting. i might borrow it from nus library to see how the original storygoes.

[Tslyklu · Rating 3 out of 5]

OK Thomas Middleton

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an incredibly bloody play. The ending masque scene is incredible for all the different ways people get killed. Bonus points for the play for its use of chess as a plot device.

[Anna C · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very disturbing play. And I mean that in the best way possible. Call me a Shakespeare fangirl, but I just can't get into Middleton. The lyricism isn't there.

[Erika · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 Stars

[Indigo Wayworth · Rating 4 out of 5]

What just happened. This was a wild ride.

Read for ENGL 3015: Renaissance Drama

[Mrs. C. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Of social class, incest, and mass murder. And yet it dragged!

[Alexandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sexy Hamlet

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my third time of reading WBW in about two years (plus seeing a video of the short-lived Shakespeare's Globe production) and it keeps getting better and better. Two years ago, I would probably have gone for three stars: now I think it's a masterpiece.

Imagine if Romeo and Juliet had gone off to live in Mantua, and 15 year old Juliet had caught the eye of the local Duke (55) who decided to keep her in the style to which she had been brought up, rather than the poverty Romeo was now offering. The Duke is a serial procurer of young girls, and his ex-girlfriend, a Ghislaine Maxwell-like Livia, gets the 15-year-old into a compromising position with the Duke, from which there is only one way to go.

A tale of humiliation, sexual abuse, violence, and that intangible thing called 'honour', which nobody has, but everyone is prepared to kill for.

A play where a secret affair, even between uncle and teenage niece, is more 'moral' than an out-in-the-open relationship, where Eros Vincit Omnia.

A play where the word 'Love' is used more in the first two scenes (and throughout) more than any other play I've read, but where there is no character behaving from anything other than utterly selfish motives. Seventeenth century version of 'Succession', anyone?

A play where compromised women use any means at their disposal to survive the abuse they get at the hands of men.

A play which has more seventeenth century euphemisms for 'vagina' than I was aware existed.

Gosh, this is a nasty play. Read it, then read a couple more times. If you're expecting Shakespeare, you're going to be a bit bemused. I was the first time: now I'm expecting Middleton.