THE WIDOW AS PARADOX AND PARADIGM IN MIDDLETON'S PLAYS

Abstract

Women in the plays of Thomas Middleton (1580-1627) remain an enigma to most scholars. He offers interesting, vigorous women characters?superbly alive in their complex, intriguing humanity. But he also seems to reflect the misogynist and cynical attitudes of his time in prejudging women as morally frail, more likely than men to give in to the licentious swing of [their] own will.1 While the recent focus on Middleton's success in dramatizing the commercial nature of Elizabethan marriage and its effects on the choices avail able to women adds a necessary historical dimension, it may not answer questions about Middleton's intent and purpose.2 Middle ton's duality of attitude may merely reflect the contemporary atti tudes, or merely exploit the conventionally paradoxical nature of women (conceived as either daughters of Eve or Platonic patterns of virtue) for its artistic potential. If we are to claim that Middleton's plays instead reveal a sympathetic understanding of the pressures exerted on women, we must also determine the strategies he adopts to dislocate the traditional notions. The use Middleton makes of widows in his plays offers a particu larly convincing example of the ways in which he escapes, and even challenges, the infra-structure of conventional Renaissance ideas about women. In dramatizing the widow-hunt, he clearly empha sizes the economic and social factors that constrain women. In fo cusing on the widow's ability to act unconventionally, to belie ex pectations, he establishes the discrepancy between what women are and what the traditional authorities claim them to be. Finally, and paradoxically, in portraying the aggressive and sometimes villain ous widow, he forces his audience to reject the accepted notions of sex difference?the parallels, for instance, between such pairs of concepts as male/female, active/passive, reason/passion that are found in contemporary discussions of the psychology of women and extended into ethics, politics, and medicine. He leads us to recog nize, therefore, that women too are relative to their society, pro pelled and conditioned by its ideas and institutions. If they are weak