ABSTRACT
At the climax of Thomas Middleton’s Women Beware Women, deadly mayhem infiltrates the stately rhythms of court theater. The performance in question is a “marriage-triumph”: a masque staged by a group of aristocratic performers to celebrate the “hasty nuptials” of the Duke of Florence to his recently widowed mistress, Bianca (IV.ii. 150–51). With its lofty goddess, heartsick shepherds, and beautiful nymph—not to mention its bow-bearing cupids and showers of divine largesse—the masque appears at first sight to be a predictable compendium of spectacle, flattery, and neoclassical romance. As it unfolds, however, all hell breaks loose. The goddess slays the nymph with a hail of burning gold, not realizing that the nymph has already poisoned her with a cloud of toxic incense. As the ducal couple watches, one lovesick shepherd is shot by the cupids’ poisoned arrows, while the other unexpectedly falls to his death through a trap door. Finally, just as this fatal performance seems to be winding down, the duke himself is felled by a gulp of poisoned wine—unwittingly administered, as it transpires, by his new bride, who had meant to murder his brother. The marriage-triumph, designed to affirm established norms of class and gender, turns out to be a stage upon which, as the duke puts it, “great mischiefs/Mask in expected pleasures” (V.ii. 171–2). As such, it squares perfectly with the complex Jacobean tragedy to which it serves as denouement—for although Women Beware Women appears to affirm the “expected pleasures” of familiar theatrical tropes and moral precepts, both its form and its content permit a far more subversive reading.
