ABSTRACT
John Fletcher’s Women Pleased (c. 1619-1623) exploits the interpretive uncertainty of its historically remote medieval romance sources to situate itself within contemporaneous Jacobean debates on women and their reading material. The play adapts and combines two highly ambiguous and popular romances-Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale (c. 1390-1396) and the Spanish Grisel y Mirabella by Juan de Flores (c. 1495)—crafting them into a defense of the romance by demonstrating the genre’s ability to articulate pervasive social commentary. While for many dramatists the enduring appeal of the romance is its abundance of plot material, Fletcher’s Women Pleased suggests a mode of reading and rewriting romance that does more than avail itself of a good storyline. The drama plays with the interpretive ambiguities of its sources, expanding on the space to act and space to speak that they provide for their female protagonists. The play’s heroine, Belvidere, is cast as the dreaded female reader whose exposure to romance makes her “resolv’d to run out of her selfe, and become a Ladie Errant” (Overbury 243).1
