Women Beware Women

One of the great Renaissance playwrights, Middleton wrote tragedies essentially different from either Marlowe's or Shakespeare's, being wittier than the former and more grittily ironic than the latter. The genre of 'citizen tragedy' came into its own in the eighteenth century, but Middleton can claim to have created it: Bianca, wife of a middling commercial agent, arouses the lust of the Duke of Florence and becomes his mistress, first secretly, then openly and finally, after her husband has been seduced by the scheming Lady Livia and stabbed by Livia's brother, the Duke's wife. Livia plots her revenge, and the play ends with a banquet and a masque that are a triumph of black farce. Middleton's powerful, psychologically complex female characters and his clear-sighted analysis of misogyny are bound to impress today's audiences, but it is the pervasive irony - cynicism, even - with which he dissects the motivations of both oppressor and victim that makes him so eerily modern.

Author: Thomas Middleton
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Published: 12/20/2002
Pages: 160
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.40lbs
Size: 7.85h x 5.27w x 0.35d
ISBN13: 9780713666632
ISBN10: 0713666633
BISAC Categories:
- Drama | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh

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