SOURCE: "Women Beware Women and the Economy of Rape," in Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 27, No. 2, Spring, 1987, pp. 303-19.

The following essay asserts that Women Beware Women presents its audience with a purposeful incoherence, generating contradictory interpretations of power relations and sexual violation.

In February 1986 the Royal Court Theatre in London presented a new version of Middleton's Women Beware Women, reshaped and substantially rewritten by the English dramatist Howard Barker. His version ends with a rape, carried out presumably in the interests of some kind of enlightenment, a gesture which he seems to think valuable and necessary. In a violent world, only a violent act can split sex off from what drags it down and under—its linkage with money and power. Thus Barker, a male playwright, claims to bring liberation to a woman through sexual violence. As male author of this paper, I'm afraid I lack...