A Presentist, Palestinian, Pedagogical Reading of Language and Gender Politics in Middleton’s Women Beware Women

ABSTRACT

In addition to the methodology of new historicism, this article deploys feminism, performance studies and presentism to discuss the effects of the masculine practice of enforced marriage and turning a deaf ear to the female voice in Thomas Middleton’sWomen Beware Women and contemporary Palestine. I explain that Middleton’s Women Beware Women criminalises the absolute right of the monarch to command through a critique of Renaissance practice of enforced marriage and of male figures’ deafness to the female voice. I argue that Middleton’s tragedy questions and interrogates the dominant patriarchal discourse by locating subversion within the dominant discourse. While Middleton shows that women are complicit with male figures’ voices, male figures show no recognition of the inadequacy of their voices. The eclectic range of critics I am using in this article opens up gender-based readings in the teaching context of An-Najah University where I teach Renaissance Drama. This article seeks to modify the feminist view that tragedy merely suggests that female characters face verbal and physical circumscription. Rather, tragedy ensues because male figures are deaf to female figures’ voices and such deafness breeds female figures’ subversive plots.

KEYWORDS:

• New historicism
• presentism
• speech
• silence
• gender
• absolute authority
• masque

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Notes on contributors

Bilal Tawfiq Hamamra

Bilal Tawfiq Hamamra has published articles on Shakespeare, Webster and Thomas Heywood. His research interests are in Early Modern Drama, Shakespeare and Women’s Writings. He is a presentist who uses an eclectic approach to analyse early modern literature from a Palestinian perspective. He has a PhD in Early Modern Drama from the University of Lancaster, UK and works currently as an assistant professor of English Literature at the Department of English Language and Literature, An-Najah National University, Nablus, Palestine.