A devil to relish

Anne McElvoy

● JACOBEAN PLAYWRIGHTS ran the Horror Channel of the late seven teenth century, imbued with an appetite for incest, poisoning, and corpses as hearty as any twenty-first century television drama executive in search of a postwater-shed audience. Whenever someone complains that our screens are full of sex, death and female suffering, we might refer them to John Webster’s bone-chillers, The Duchess of M a l fi and The White Devil, or Thomas Middleton’s Women Beware Women. Long before the jargon of “female empowerment” took hold, these stories also tell us that women are damned if they play the game of sexual availability and just as doomed if they don’t. Yet unlike their Shakespearean predecessors, referenced and parodied by contemporary dramatists, the great playhouse bodice-poisoners get infrequent attention. EMERGING TALENT AND…

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The Critic (Digital) - 1 Issue, April 2023

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