num_pages: 36
description: Middleton's Women Beware Women portrays, like other Jacobean plays, a ruling class unable to divorce power from lust and therefore unable to embody the State as a rigid absolutism. Upstarts such as Leantio and Bianca are casually allowed to penetrate deep into the magic circle of the aristocracy, whose public debauchery shows nothing but contempt for the people it is supposed to be fit to rule. At the end of this play all the principal characters die, but the Cardinal is left to announce the moral. Howard Barker has seen in this drama an analogue for today's political mix of austerity and profligacy. For this brilliant 'collaboration' with a dead fellow-professional predecessor, he has retained, in the first part, substantial sections of the first three and a half Acts of Middleton's work, then written his own second part where Middleton's characters speak Barker's language and enact Barker's plot. There is no clear moral and none of the Jacobean's courtly diction, but an inspired re-ordering of the characters. The Ward and Sordido play a key role in exploring the demarcations of pleasure, purity and bliss, while Bianca, Livia and Isabella move sometimes towards power and sometimes towards sisterhood. The State survives but who rules it and with what mandate are questions that Barker both poses and answers. His conclusions are uncomfortable for both democrats and authoritarians but Barker has always subordinated didactic simplicity to aesthetic complexity.
language: English
title: Women Beware Women: Playscript 111
titlecomplete: Women Beware Women: Playscript 111
genres: Fiction, Plays, Theatre, Grad School, British Literature, Drama, 17th Century, Literature, Read For School, Classics
ratings_count: 479
publisher: Riverrun Pr