“Men Buy Their Slaves,Women Buy Their Masters”: Theories of Liberty in Thomas Middleton’s City Tragedy

I. City Comedy and City Tragedy

“City” or “citizen comedy,” a term first coined by Brian Gibbons, typically discusses a genre of plays produced by Thomas Middleton, Ben Jonson, and John Marston, which “articulated a radical critique of their Age” in representing “conflicting forces in the development from the England of Elizabeth towards the Civil War.” ¹ Of these three playwrights, Middleton has been characterized as being the most Puritan in his politics, and most anticipatory of the English Civil War’s anti-monarchical sentiment. Middleton’s tragedies, which Margot Heinemann has called “city tragedy,” are based upon a realist and even “plebian” depiction of social mobility, sex, marriage, ethics, and religion. Heinemann argues these plays run “closer to the concerns and values of a city and ‘country’ audience than to the diversion of a leisured and escapist court culture.” ² Citizenship served as a central focus of anti-monarchical conflict in these city tragedies.

The word “citizen” in the early modern period refers primarily to the right to participate in economic and political life—to work for wages, to trade for materials, and produce and sell one’s own products. In Middleton’s city tragedies, citizen liberty is questioned when the arbitrary desires of a sovereign require citizens to relinquish their economic and political autonomy. This defense of citizenship shows how the threat of interference places all subjected to it in a position of ultimate slavery. As Quentin Skinner points out in Liberty Before Liberalism, early modern pamphleteers and playwrights, in using such themes, invoked similar arguments to those used in the Roman republic against the unqualified right of the sovereign to seize the women and property of Roman citizens. This critique of arbitrary rule as threatening the protection of private property remains a driving force of both liberalism and libertarianism today. In the early modern period, this argument emerged alongside juridical definitions of the legal individual as one who participates in exchange relations across the public and private spheres. Ironically, however, this critique of the “slavery” of monarchy only extended to those able to own property. For those with no property to protect—women and actual slaves—such a critique is relatively meaningless. While women in this period are “largely but not totally excluded from the trades and citizen status,” they are ultimately subjects under their rulers and husbands, and if unmarried, their fathers. ³ Middleton, like his contemporaries, critiques the arbitrary power of the sovereign precisely at the intersection of the household and the state, where women hold a contradictory and precarious position as “property” in his city tragedies. As a result, Middleton uncritically reproduces the same problematic form of protectionism from the public sphere of political life to the private institution of the family.

Perhaps more so than his contemporaries, Middleton blurs the lines between domestic tragedy, revenge tragedy, and city tragedy in using rape as a political metaphor that exposes sovereign tyranny, and in using rape revenge as a metaphor for political revolution. Yet in representing the arbitrary power of the monarch as a threat to the private “property” of male citizens, the sovereign power of the husband and father is then mapped back onto private household in defense of women’s protection. In his thematic explorations of rape and revenge, Middleton presents women within the economy of marriage as a primary example of the need to protect private property from sovereign interference. As a result, his plays show women—more than men—to be subjects, servants, and even slaves under arbitrary rule. Thus, the same power structures that Middleton critiques from the position of discontented “citizens” are reproduced from the public to the private form. Yet reading Middleton’s city tragedies through a feminist lens can productively extend these same critiques of public institutions back through private ones.

II. Theories of Liberty in City Tragedy

The particular form of domination extended from the state to the family in Middleton’s plays uses gendered violence as a metaphor for political tyranny. As a result, Middleton’s female characters are often placed in the impossible position of Lucrece, the Roman symbol of arbitrary rule as well its revolutionary consequences. William Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece (1594), Thomas Middleton’s Ghost of Lucrece (1600), and Thomas Heywood’s Rape of Lucrece (1607) all speak to the metaphorical power of this “most chaste and pure” noblewoman of ancient Rome. Lucrece’s rape by Sextus Tarquinius, the son of a tyrant, caused a rebellion that led to Rome’s transition into a republic. This story permeated the early modern political imagination across literary and dramatic forms. It also captured an anti-monarchical sentiment which provided comfort in the knowledge that Lucrece’s violent assault was not only avenged, but led to the overthrow of a tyrannical state. Yet, true to Puritan form, Middleton condemns Lucrece at the end of his own narrative poem, damning her pre-Christian soul to hell and exposing the thinness of the metaphor in using either rape or its revenge to counteract tyranny itself. ⁴

In Liberty Before Liberalism, Quentin Skinner explores such republican ideas via a central tension between theories of non-interference—as initiated by Thomas Hobbes and inherited by classical liberalism—and neo-Roman theories of non-domination, as put forth by the most radical Puritan pamphleteers and Parliamentarians of the seventeenth century, who viewed themselves as “slaves” under the arbitrary rule of monarchy. While liberty as non-interference supports the status quo through the protection of goods and property, the lawful traffic of goods and persons, and legal formalism, liberty as non-domination invokes the argument of the citizen-slave to draw attention to a liberty beyond monarchical interference. According to Skinner, the Hobbesian view of liberty and constraint has been unfairly privileged in both history and in academic scholarship. Classical liberalism’s view of liberty as non-interference relies upon a negative orientation to the “force of coercive threat” while neo-Roman theories of non-domination move beyond protectionism to consider the very “condition of dependence” under monarchy. ⁵ Skinner’s account of the English Civil War’s revival of such neo-Roman theories of liberty centers on citizen-oriented arguments of a body politic, which, like a natural body, cannot be free if it can be “forcibly or coercively deprived of its ability to act at will in pursuit of its chosen ends.” ⁶ These neo-Roman definitions of liberty, which invoke slavery, rape, and rape revenge in critiquing the arbitrary rule of the sovereign, are shown by Skinner to be superior to those of Hobbesian liberalism because they use metaphors of the body to build arguments for non-domination in moving beyond the protectionism of the Hobbesian doctrine.

Yet, as Mary Nyquist has shown, similar problems between invoking metaphorical rape and slavery persist in theories of liberty against the tyrant’s sovereignty in the debates of the English Civil War. Skinner’s elevation of the neo-Roman impulse largely ignores actual chattel slavery in making use of a “figurative, political slavery” which “appears to stand free of significant ties to actual, human bondage” as well as “Roman republicanism’s aristocratic, masculinist character.” ⁷ As Ellen Mieksins Wood has also countered, if we look beyond the “most formal characteristics of a centralized state” in England and France, Skinner’s theories of liberty look very different from the origins of modern political thought which he claims that they shape, for such arguments did not guarantee “universal entitlements” nor “full political rights” nor “notions of natural equality.” ⁸ Wood also points out that Skinner tends to avoid the topic of domination in the family altogether. ⁹ We can find early threads of similar thinking in early modern city tragedy. Written several decades before the English Civil War, many of these dramas unwittingly anticipate Wood and Nyquist’s feminist critiques of Skinner’s notions of liberty. Middleton’s Isabella of Women Beware Women, for example, argues that the same slave-relation that Puritan critiques of monarchical government see defining the lives of “unfree” citizens persists in the private form of the family, where men may buy their slaves, but “women buy their masters.” ¹⁰ Following Nyquist and Wood’s critiques, we may ask how expedient the metaphor of slavery is in describing Isabella’s unfreedom, while also acknowledging that her interiority itself takes center stage in those few lines.

Despite Isabella’s momentary invocation of slavery, city tragedy primarily uses the metaphor of gendered violence at the intersection of law, government, and the household. This metaphor is used to critique arbitrary interference into the private sovereignty of (male) citizens. Women Beware Women and The Revenger’s Tragedy take stances of non-domination against monarchical sovereignty that predate radical critiques of law and government echoed later in the pamphlets of the English Civil War. Middleton’s own suspicion of such theories of liberty, like Skinner’s, is therefore a productive place to start in linking masculinist notions of law and liberty to the culture and customs of dramatic and representational form. Middleton’s plays allow us to ask if the neo-Roman theories of liberty praised so highly by Skinner can extend to non-male subjects without access to or dominion over their own private property.

In both Women Beware Women and The Revenger’s Tragedy, women are bound to a structure of domination that is secured on the basis of their own protection-as-property, leading to particularly gendered forms of unfreedom. This condition remains in place even when the sovereign is resisted or killed in revolutionary acts of vengeance. Whether in the country, the city, or court, Middleton depicts women as imprisoned by their own desire, by men’s desire, and by their over-determined position in the family form, where such desires are subordinate to the arbitrary rule of husbands and fathers. As Wood writes in Liberty and Property, property owners in England often sought to protect their private property from the Crown in thwarting “the consolidation of an absolutist monarchy” by establishing a limited government while also using the law in “staving off threats from below.” ¹¹ Rebellion from the family form is precisely one of these “threats from below” which draws attention to the fact that women continue to be theorized as mere placeholders for property, to the detriment of any real notion of liberty.

Women-as-property for the sake of their own protection functions as an allegorical device against political tyranny. The use of this metaphor—which is, indeed, no metaphor at all—places the subjectivity of those who participate in this allegory under the arbitrary pen of the male writers who wield its power. That Lucrece is so allegorized in Middleton’s own poem, only to be condemned to hell for her pre-Christian beliefs, shows the necessity of taking back these legal-political metaphors of protection, property, rape, revenge, and slavery from those for whom the metaphor would never become reality. Jennifer Einspahr has proposed that framing liberty in terms of individual gendered subjects is limiting, because it is so often conflated with individual agency. Instead, Einspahr argues, it is more useful for feminists to “treat both domination and freedom as structural concepts” that center the relative positions of individuals vis-à-vis other individuals and institutions. What follows therefore examines the possibility of a feminist theory of liberty from what is left out of such critiques of arbitrary rule. ¹²

While it may seem obvious that the plays of a seventeenth-century Puritan playwright would exhibit a kind of masculine formalism, Catherine MacKinnon has argued that the structural norms associated with such perspectives have not remained in the past. Instead, they have permeated through history and even contemporary legal discourse. The law’s formal reliance on precedent and analogy “means that new crimes or injuries committed against women must be like old ones (read: those committed against men) before they can be recognized as crimes or injuries at all.” ¹³ As MacKinnon has shown, the historical exclusion of women from a formative role in law has made legal discourse unable to respond to many crimes and civil injuries carried out against them—a fact we can easily map onto to raced and classed subjectivities as well as gendered ones. While the law “operates most visibly in the lives of women in officially recognized capacity” nothing so formal or “majestic” as the law is actually accessible to most of them. ¹⁴ We see this pointedly in Middleton’s plays, where the rape of Bianca and Isabella in Women Beware Women and the rape of Antonio and Vindice’s wives in The Revenger’s Tragedy critique sovereign power based upon neo-Roman theories of liberty, yet continue to elide questions of gendered domination. Following MacKinnon’s insights, we might argue that neither the chronological distance of Middleton’s plays nor their historical conceptions of law or liberty make them any less relevant to the present moment. Rather, Middleton’s contradictory politics provide an important point of reference for the fact that until the early 1970s (and in some cases, to this day) “a woman was not considered a reliable witness about her own rape, but the defendant was.” ¹⁵ Likewise, notions of liberty that rely upon political allegories of rape or rape revenge fail to account for any subjectivity or interiority of the women themselves.

III. Women Beware Women as City Tragedy

Jacobean tragedy is often connected to “growing tensions and conflicts within court and city. . .against the corruption and oppression of Stuart absolutism,” which is frequently expressed “in the towering individual, prepared at all costs, for good or ill, to vindicate his honour and his right to live out his life to the full.” ¹⁶ In The Revenger’s Tragedy, this figure is obviously the revolutionary Vindice, but in Women Beware Women, this “towering individual” does not appear to be any of the male characters. A feminist reading of the play might instead locate this individual in Isabella, who betrays both husband and father in asserting her own sense of sovereignty. Though others might read her malicious aunt Livia as a towering figure of resistance against the family form itself, Livia also upholds the sovereign’s arbitrary rule and right of dispossession by helping him to rape Bianca.

Women Beware Women begins when the rich and beautiful Bianca defies her father by eloping with a poor merchant clerk, Leantio. Bianca swears to leave all behind and adopt Leantio’s meager lifestyle when the two arrive home to meet his mother. But “Mother” chastises Leantio for his foolish naiveté in taking Bianca without the consent of her father, thus forfeiting all right to her dowry: “To draw her from her fortune, which no doubt,/At the full time, might have proved rich and noble:/ You know not what you have done.” ¹⁷ Here Leantio anxiously interrupts his mother, lest her critique reach Bianca’s ears, because he worries that Bianca will learn to resent him for such foolishness. He pleads, “I pray you do not teach her to rebel” for at the moment “she’s in a good way to obedience” and unlikely to “rise with other women in commotion.” ¹⁸ With this interruption, Leantio gives us some perspective into the anxieties of the seventeenth-century husband. He has married above his station, but had he been able to win over Bianca’s father, he may have had access to the money and status of her rank. Instead, in essentially stealing Bianca from her father, Leantio becomes anxious that he might be the next to lose her “obedience.” In thus re-performing the anxieties of the father-figure, Leantio shows that his greatest fear lies in encountering another version of himself, who might break his own sovereign authority over Bianca.

Bianca then becomes a precious jewel to be hidden, “a gem no stranger’s eye must see,” and thus he bids her stay indoors while he is away from home. ¹⁹ This plan backfires, however, when the Duke, Leantio’s own sovereign, rides through the city and sees Bianca through her window.

In contrast to Bianca’s voluntary marriage to Leantio, scene two presents Isabella, another young maid, whose father, Fabrito, decides to betroth her to a rich young Ward. Having been in the custody of “Guardiano” for 15 years, Ward is now eligible for marriage. In questioning Fabrito’s arbitrary rule of betrothal, Guardiano asks if Isabella should meet the Ward first, yet Fabrito swiftly responds, “No matter, she shall love him.” ²⁰ Livia, Fabrito’s sister, then jumps in to argue: “I must offend you then, if truth will do’t/And take my niece’s part, and call’t injustice/To force her love to one she never saw.” ²¹ As a wealthy widow, Livia has no “master” herself, and feels justified in critiquing her brother’s dominion. Yet because the Ward is rich, Fabrito sees the marriage as indisputable. Soon Isabella enters and the Ward also crashes into the scene. He appears unapologetic about having just beaten a child over the head in a game of cat-stick—“When I am in game I am furious;/came my mother’s eyes in my way, I would not lose a fair end”—which he reasons is simply part of his preoccupation to “think of nobody” because he is “so earnest.” ²² Here the Ward’s earnestness is equated with an aristocratic cruelty that cannot see past the joys of domination.

Isabella is humiliated by this spectacle, as the Ward not only appears frighteningly violent but also speaks bawdily of his desires at every opportunity: “I mar’l my guardianer does not seek a wife for me;/ I protest I’ll have a bout with the maids else, or contract my self at midnight to the larderwoman, in presence of a fool.” ²³ In thus adding insult to injury (or perhaps injury to insult), it is implied that Isabella will have neither safety nor bodily autonomy in her marriage. After this embarrassing encounter, and the Ward’s exit, Isabella’s father cruelly teases her. He asks, “How do you like him, girl?” and without waiting for her answer, continues, “This is your husband./Like him, or like him not, wench, you shall have him,/And you shall love him.” ²⁴ Isabella’s aunt Livia then remarks on the irony of this injustice in that her brother is a man of law, yet he seeks to contract his own daughter to an abusive marriage and deprive her of any legal rights to protect herself. Livia argues that this “warrant cannot be serv’d” and though Fabrito “may compel, out of the power of a father” he is “in another country” where Isabella’s love interests are concerned. ²⁵ The notion of “liberty” itself is therefore troubled here. Isabella’s autonomy as “sovereign” over her own emotions pushes back against that of her father’s sovereign power over her as his property. Fabrito’s command that she must love whether or not she “likes” also troubles his authority in that the word “love” falls outside of the realm of legal formalism. This is why Livia argues that Fabrito’s sovereignty as a father cannot compete with Isabella’s autonomy. We might read Livia here as subtly critiquing the institution of law itself, as it is held up and practiced by men like Fabrito, who also overextend their jurisdiction in private matters of sovereignty.

IV. Liberty and Tyranny in the English Revolution

The formalism of the early modern marriage contract presented a protective force of patriarchal authority to ostensibly shield women from violence and from a state of “war of all against all.” ²⁶ In the Hobbesian social contract, the same assumption of protection against arbitrary violence encourages the voluntarily placing of one’s freedom under the power of the sovereign, who is above the law. In order to counteract a natural state of war, Hobbes argues that sovereignty must be beyond civil law—“he that is bound only to himself is not bound to the law”—in protecting the vulnerable from the absence of law or government. ²⁷ Yet as a result, this social contract preys upon the dangers and vulnerabilities presumed to be most threatening to women and children, the most likely targets of arbitrary violence. We can see how these arguments were utilized by monarchists, and even the monarchy itself, in justifying early modern forms of sovereignty. King Charles I, for example, a student of Thomas Hobbes, articulates his own interpretation of the doctrine of non-interference, just before his beheading on 30 January 1649:

For the people, truly I desire their liberty and freedom as much as anybody whomsoever. But I must tell you their liberty and freedom consists in having government – those laws by which their life and their goods may be most their own. It is not to have a share in government. That is nothing pertaining to them. ²⁸

In this passage one can see Hobbesian theories of liberty posited as non-interference for those citizens willing to exchange their liberty for governmental protection. But beneath this definition is its opposite, for liberty as non-domination would mean direct participation in shared rule, and in protection from the arbitrary power of the state itself. King James I’s The Trew Law of Free Monarchies argues that “monarchie” itself is the “trew pattern of Divinite,” because it prepares subjects “not to resist God’s ordinance.” ²⁹ As Nyquist has observed, James I argues for divine right by “cannily co-opt[ing] contractualism so that the people themselves authorize their own nonresistance while God retains the sole power of appointing the king.” ³⁰ The same might be said for the position of the father or husband in the family.

Early modern adaptations of neo-Roman legal theory argued that the notion of a free citizen is inextricably linked to “what it means for a civil association to be free,” ³¹ so that possessing or losing one’s freedom is the same in the case of individual citizens as in the case of a commonwealth or state. ³² The ownership of property, the rights of the citizen, and indeed the rights and definitions of the individual based upon the Hobbesian social contract presuppose a social bond between the object owned and the person defined as the owner. Citizenship in the early modern period primarily concerned the “right to work for wages, to trade for materials, and to produce and sell one’s own products.” ³³ This social relation is “recognized in almost all bourgeois constitutions and connects ideals of individual private property with notions of individual human rights, the ‘rights of man’ and doctrines and legal protections of those individual rights.” ³⁴ This connection between individual rights and private property lies at the center of all Hobbesian social contract theories of government. Yet Isabella’s critiques of the marriage contract and her rebellion against both her father and husband provide us with a strong case of feminist resistance against her status as property under patriarchal sovereignty. These dramatic episodes can be brought to bear on both seventeenth-century and contemporary theories of liberty under law’s continued adherence to Hobbesian legal formalism.

V. Liberty and Tyranny in Women Beware Women

Isabella’s position exposes the fundamental contradictions between the possibility of her own liberty under the Hobbesian protection and care of her sovereign father, and the liberty of non-domination which her aunt Livia momentarily invokes. Isabella equates her impending marriage to a state of idolatry—“Marry a fool!/ Can there be greater misery to a woman/That means to keep her days true to her husband”—for how can she “obey and honour him” when she “must needs commit idolatry?” when “A fool is but the image of a man,/ And that but ill made neither.” ³⁵ Isabella thus extends the same Puritan critiques of monarchy to the “sovereignty” of the family form. Because the Ward is “the image of a man,” honoring him would be similar to honoring the King as a divine intercessor for God. ³⁶ Yet the inability of either her father or future husband to fulfill the basic contract of protection implies that Isabella is doomed to abuse, rather than protection. If one maps the same rights and privileges of citizens onto the “natural subjects” and “mutual duty” of the family, the same contradictions of tyranny appear between fathers/husbands and daughters/wives. Anticipating later Puritan critiques of monarchy, Isabella begins to critique the marriage relation itself, equating the position of women on the marriage market as mere blackmailers for their future jailers:

The best condition is but bad enough:

When women have their choices, commonly

They do buy their thraldoms, and bring great portions

To men to keep ‘em in subjection:

As if a fearful prisoner should bribe

The keeper to be good to him, yet lies in still.

And glad of a good usage, a good look sometimes.

By’r Lady, no misery surmounts a woman’s.

Men buy their slaves, but women buy their masters. ³⁷

Here Isabella argues that women are “fearful prisoners,” chained by the dowry system and the family form, yet obligated to pay their own ransom to perpetuate it. Her ending maxim that “men buy their slaves, but women buy their masters” equates this entire system to a state of perpetual imprisonment, arguing that women must ransom themselves in order to buy “a good usage” or a “good look sometimes” from their prison guards. The marriage contract, as Isabella points out, only protects even wealthy and aristocratic women as the property of their husbands. Such a system is predicated on the assumption that husbands will not abuse their power of arbitrary rule. Here we can map Isabella’s critique of the arbitrary rule of husbands back onto the arbitrary rule of tyrants, and even onto Giorgio Agamben’s notion of a “constant state of exception” built from the repeated abuse of sovereign authority. ³⁸ In Women Beware Women, the repeated abuse of a sovereign state of exception extends beyond the government and into every household.

Much like the citizens of the early modern English government, Isabella is advised that the best she can hope for is a lenient jail keeper. Fabrito counsels her that if she marries a foolish husband, she might actually have more power in the marriage: “For those that marry fools live ladies’ lives.” ³⁹ As with the weak absolutism of the Stuart monarchy, Isabella is told that the weaker and more foolish her husband, the more expansive her freedom will be. Yet Isabella feels trapped. She laments that she was ever “born with that obedience/That must submit unto a father’s will.” ⁴⁰ Then Livia reminds Isabella that she does not have to obey her sense of duty: “You have liberty enough in your own will; You cannot be enforced.” ⁴¹ Here the seeds of Isabella’s resistance are sown by her widowed aunt, who cheers her on:

How weak his commands now, whom you call father?

How vain all his enforcements, your obedience?

And what a largeness in your will and liberty

To take or to reject or to do both? ⁴²

Isabella follows this advice and decides to marry the Ward. She then makes use of his foolishness to mask a romance with her uncle, Hippolito. Shockingly, Livia then uses these same powers of persuasion to help the Duke rape the unassuming Bianca, coercing her into becoming his mistress. Bianca’s protection under her marriage contract then unravels as the Duke’s sovereign authority persuades her that every piece of property within his duchy is ultimately under his jurisdiction.

Neither Leantio nor the Ward are able to keep their precious “gems” hidden for long, due to the contradictions of sovereignty that preoccupy Women Beware Women. Bianca tries at first to fight against the Duke’s assault, but her rebellion only entices him further, and her rape is ironically couched in terms of the “liberation” of the Duke’s own desires, as he tells her, “Strive not to seek/thy liberty and keep me still in prison.” ⁴³ When the Duke ambushes Bianca, he uses his own metaphors of freedom and unfreedom to override her own sense of autonomy. This violent assault not only teaches Bianca to accept her position of subordination to the Duke’s will, but also eventually persuades her to internalize his desire as her own. The Duke bolsters his sovereign will with the threat of violence, warning that Bianca is so beautiful that he “should be sorry the least force should lay/An unkind touch upon [her].” ⁴⁴ When she pleads with him for the sake of her virtue—“Make me not bold with death and deeds of ruin” ⁴⁵ —he responds with delight:

Thou know’st the way to please me. I affect

A passionate pleading ‘bove an easy yielding,

But never pitied any; they deserve none

That will not pity me. I can command:

Think upon that. ⁴⁶

Middleton’s Puritan notions of “temptation” are shown here to originate from women, as Bianca is made entirely responsible for inciting the Duke’s lust. Yet Bianca’s own “deed of ruin,” in being unable to fight off her sovereign, reveals the contradictions of gender and power under the early modern revival of rape as a metaphor for political tyranny.

This scene also shows us the myriad ways that metaphors of liberty and freedom can be used to create arguments for their own acute forms of domination and subordination. Because the Duke’s sovereign power over the property relations of his citizens allows him to feel entitled to the wives of his subjects, he remains “in a prison” if they do not subordinate themselves to his desires. Women who plead passionately only excite him, and his appetite overrides even their most basic sense of autonomy: “I’faith, you shall not out till I’m releas’d now;/We’ll both be freed together, or stay still by’t;/So is captivity pleasant.” ⁴⁷ The Duke promises Bianca power and pleasure, arguing that he is a better match for her than Leantio, because he gives “better in exchange, wealth, honour” and anyone who “is fortunate in a duke’s favour/Lights on a tree that bears all women’s wishes.” ⁴⁸

Bianca has no choice here but to give in to the Duke, and so she does, dissociating. She then feels very out of place living with Leantio and his Mother, remarking in confusion, “This is the strangest house.” ⁴⁹ Yet she soon accepts her position as the Duke’s mistress, and remarks on the irony of leaving a situation of wealth and privilege, only to be moved through sexual coercion back into a rich one: “How strangely a woman’s fortune comes about!/This was the farthest way to come to me.” ⁵⁰ Ultimately, however, Isabella and Bianca’s shared desire to break free of patriarchal imperatives results in a bloodbath. When Leantio learns of the coercive affair between the Duke and Bianca, he begins courting Livia. Because Livia is wealthy and Leantio is poor, the Duke tells her brother, Hippolito, of this affair. Hippolito then kills Leantio in defense of his sister’s honor and, in response, Livia reveals that Isabella and Hippolito have been having their own affair. Isabella, whose early seeds of rebellion were sown by Livia against the coercion of the family form itself, responds by killing her own aunt. The ironic implication, according to the title, is that women are to blame for this chaos of jealousy, rape, and coercion. Yet a feminist reading would locate this chaos in the acute system of domination and subordination that first invites and then punishes these women for reaching beyond the desires of their tyrannous fathers and husbands.

We can also read Women Beware Women as a critique of the Hobbesian doctrine of non-interference. As Skinner argues, this theory is the foundation of modern theories of law and liberalism. In mapping out the history of liberal formalism, Stanley Fish equates morality in law to the “morality of the market” as accepted by Hobbesian formalists. In this account, law’s reliance on narrative and precedence, for example, depends not upon arguments explicitly presented in court or contract, but upon “more tacit arguments – tantamount to already in-place beliefs – that are not so much being urged as they are being traded on.” ⁵¹ Early modern critiques from the Levelers and Diggers against such formalism, however, were on behalf of a general population of “free citizens” that included women, children, the poor, and the property-less. Because non-interference is based upon a predetermined system of value, and remains subject to monopolized control in the hands of the most powerful and wealthy, they argued that it only encouraged the accumulation of power in the hands of the wealthy. Non-domination, however, “levels” out the playing field.

This is why the Levelers of the mid-seventeenth century argued that the “freedom” of non-interference is a false freedom. Gerard Winstanley, a “True Leveler” or “Digger” tells the opposite story from Hobbes, aligning himself with the non-domination thesis found in neo-Roman pamphlets. Winstanley argues in opposition to the social contract as a state of protection from a natural state of war. Instead, it is the “Earth” which must be the starting point of the social contract, for it is “made to be a Common Treasury for relief for all” but has since been “hedged in to In-closures” in order to make “Servants and Slaves” under the presumption of protection. ⁵² Against the social contract of which Hobbes and Fish speak, which has resulted in the “theft” of lands, rather than the preservation and protection of rights and common property common, Winstanley also theorizes a law of non-domination. This law will serve all who, “by their labours have lifted up Tyrants and Tyranny,” much like women whose care work and dowries, as Isabella argued, only contributed to their subordination. ⁵³

The critiques from Levelers and Diggers—particularly of law and its uses—were heavily anti-formalist on behalf of a general population of free citizens. This version of the republican theory of liberty argued that laws could only be made with the consent of the people, and if legislation could at any time be made or rejected by “the sole judgment of one man” then the nation by definition is not living in liberty. ⁵⁴ John Pym, for example, declared in parliament that the salus populi, or the health and safety of the people, should be suprema ex lesto—the supreme and highest law—for it is “the Element of all Laws, out of which they are derived and the End of all Laws, to which they are designed, and in which they are perfected.” ⁵⁵ Thus the end and purpose of the House of Commons for the Levelers was to govern for the people. And the right to participate in such government, under a politics of non-domination, must apply to all, owners of property or not. Those who critique these foundations of the law in private property, liberal formalism, and in the market—such as the Levelers and Diggers of the seventeenth century and even, at times, Middleton’s own characters—therefore reject the legitimacy of laws that must strive to assert their own formalism. ⁵⁶ The more radical Levelers’ complaint was that the Commonwealth often committed the same abuses it had condemned in the king, including arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, the imposition of taxes, the forcing of men into service, the seizing the property, and the granting of monopolies. The Diggers also argued against the institutionalization of law as a system of protection for private property, for such a system only reinforced the power structure that came before it. We can further extend this critique of law and government to more contemporary feminist theories of liberty, which have argued that one cannot be free in public unless one is also free in private. ⁵⁷

VI. The Revenger’s Tragedy as City Tragedy

We again find Middleton a predecessor to the anti-monarchical sentiment of the English Civil War in The Revenger’s Tragedy. ⁵⁸ In this play, women-as-property—and more particularly, their virtue-as-property—are again seized and abused by the sovereign. In The Revenger’s Tragedy, the interpretation of laws and justice is left to a Duke who assaults his female subjects. Because the Duke’s family remains protected by a structural position of power and wealth, where “Judgment in this age is near kin to favor,” and all final juridical decisions are bound up in his own office, he regularly uses them to rape his female subjects and encourages his sons to do the same. ⁵⁹

When the play begins, the Duke’s step-son, Junior, is on trial for a rape he does not deny. When asked what moved him to do it, he replies with an air of mockery: “Why flesh and blood. . .What should move men unto a woman else?” ⁶⁰ And when the Duchess urges her husband to acquit his son, he agrees, reasoning that it “well becomes a judge to nod at crimes/That does commit great himself” and notes that his own actions have “turn’d to poison. . .many a beauty.” ⁶¹ The Revenger’s Tragedy thus exposes the contradictions of personal and political sovereignty in a government based upon the doctrine of non-interference, where the self-interest of the Duke overrides that of his subjects. In the first lines of the play, Vindice calls the Duke a “royal lecher” whose family, including a son as “impious steept as he” and a Duchess “that will do with Devil” all contribute to the “marrowless age,” ⁶² which leads him to a fatalist vengeance, despite his premonition that such acts of revenge will always lead to tragedy. ⁶³ Vindice thinks of this revenge as a transaction or a debt owed—a “murder unpaid”—which must “give revenge her due.” ⁶⁴ He also uses the words “slave” and “uncivil” when referring to his law and government, yet sees women and money as “hooks to catch a man”:

O, more uncivil, more unnatural,

Thank those base-titled creatures that look downward;

Why does not heaven turn black, or with a frown

Undo the world? Why does not earth start up,

And strike the sins that tread upon’t? O,

Were’t not for gold and women, there would be no damnation.

Hell would look like a lord’s great kitchen without fire in’t. ⁶⁵

Vindice asks why heaven does not “turn black” and “undo the world,” because if the Duke is supposed to act as a vehicle of God’s sovereignty on the earth, but remains corrupt, then there is no hope for righteous justice on earth. Vindice, however, also perpetuates these corrupt systems of domination. He sees the actions of the Duke and his sons as unjust primarily because they “poisoned” the virtue—and thus the value—of his wife as his property. Vindice implies that gold and women are interchangeable in a world where women sell themselves to their husbands and must continue to preserve their worth like jewels. As discussed, the notion of liberty as non-interference is based upon the idea that property owners should act as their own sovereigns. As with Women Beware Women, however, such property includes people, and rape again appears as a metaphor of tyranny. In turn, rape revenge is a metaphor of political revolution.

In The Revenger’s Tragedy, chastity and beauty are commodities to be valued, traded, and protected or possessed by husbands. They are also key objects in the argument against the unqualified right of the sovereign. Having such possessions subject to arbitrary seizure by the Duke is akin to slavery for Vindice and Antonio. The Duke’s son, Lussurioso, likewise speaks of Vindice as a slave, arguing that he must kill Vindice for giving him too much information:

He that knows great men’s secrets and proves slight,

That man ne’er lives to see his beard turn white.

Ay, he shall speed him, I’ll employ the brother,

Slaves are but nail to drive out one another. ⁶⁶

One cannot doubt Lussurioso’s capacity for abuse when he speaks of his own subjects as slaves who are merely “nails to drive out one another.” For Lussurioso, anyone below his family’s rank who “knows great men’s secrets” must be disposed of, for their only use is to bolster his family’s tyranny.

Lussurioso, like the Duke of Women Beware Women, treats anyone outside his family as a pawn for his own self-interest. When he asks a disguised Vindice to help him “foul” Vindice’s sister, Vindice again invokes the metaphor of slavery: “another might have had the self-same office,/Some slave that would have wrought effectually.” ⁶⁷ As a revolutionary figure whose sense of injustice pervades the social and political fabric around him, Vindice makes a strong case for why the repeated abuse of the system itself necessitates an entire restructuring of government. In this way, Vindice’s vigilante attitude at first appears to be a necessary defense of justice. Yet because his obsession with his wife engenders this political attitude, Vindice broods and obsesses over her in an unsettling parody of Hamlet’s own dilemmas of revenge. Like Hamlet, he addresses the skull of his former wife, saying: “Thou sallow picture of my poison’d love,/My study’s ornament, thou shell of death,/Once the bright face of my betrothed lady.” ⁶⁸ Here, Vindice espouses Puritan ideals of virtue that also border upon idolatry, fixating on the former animation of his wife’s face as an object of pure value:

When two heaven-pointed diamonds were set

In those unsightly rings – then ‘twas a face

So far beyond the artificial shine

Of any woman’s bought complexion. ⁶⁹

As a result, Vindice’s critiques of sovereignty, while they eventually lead to a revolutionary act, fail to extend to any real form of justice. First, they are built upon the same Hobbesian contract of liberty as non-interference, which insists that Vindice’s wife, as his property, should remain under his own jurisdiction. Second, he fails to connect his wife’s rape with the violation of her own bodily autonomy and instead takes the assault as an attack on the honor and worth of their marriage. Third, as Vindice himself predicts, his obsession with revenge leads him to engage in the same horrors of those who wronged him, implying that justice cannot be achieved either within the available juridical channels or through the paid “debt” of vigilantism.

Ultimately, The Revenger’s Tragedy suggests that it is impossible to reward or maintain justice in a community where the fabric of social order is based upon notions of sovereignty as a protective social contract, and where women are mere metaphors for tyranny and liberty. As a foil to the vengeful Vindice, Antonio controls his desire for revenge after his wife’s own assault and subsequent suicide, and thus becomes the new Duke at the end of the play. Antonio is therefore rewarded for his ability to preserve and reassert social order after the chaos and smoke of revenge clears. As such, he takes his position as sovereign seriously in abruptly calling for Vindice’s own execution on the grounds that “You that would murder him would murder me.” ⁷⁰ Antonio’s wife’s suicide, like the suicide of Lucrece, invokes republican ideals of liberty and the overthrow of tyranny. Yet rather than guiding a transition into republicanism, Antonio becomes the new Duke, and he jealously guards his new position of authority like the young Leantio of Women Beware Women.

Like many early modern writers and political theorists taken with the political import of the rape of Lucrece, Antonio relishes in his wife’s suicide. He is happy that she would rather kill herself than go on living as a tainted woman: “I joy/ In this one happiness above the rest, /Which will be call’d a miracle at last/ That, being an old man, I’d a wife so chaste.” ⁷¹ Antonio finds more relief in the “miracle” that he could never be known as a cuckhold as his wife’s chastity becomes cultural currency for him. His friends agree that she, like Lucrece, is a “wondrous lady; of rare fire compact” for “Sh’as made her name an empress by that act.” ⁷² In a world structured by the doctrine of non-interference, where women are already signified as property and defined by their chastity, the only way to protect one’s “value” after sexual assault is to end one’s life. The men of The Revenger’s Tragedy thus agree that it is “better to die virtuous than to live dishonored” for Antonio’s wife lives on through her husband’s canonizing words, her iconic martyrdom, and the community’s sympathy for her after her death, which is then re-located in respect for their new sovereign lord, Antonio. ⁷³

V. Liberty and Tyranny Beyond City Tragedy

Ultimately, both Women Beware Women and The Revenger’s Tragedy fail to fully critique the position of the sovereign because of its correlation with sovereignty in the household. This aligns with Quentin Skinner’s insight that “what it is possible to do in politics” is always limited by “what it is possible to legitimize” and that what one hopes to legitimize will always depend upon a negotiation of “existing normative principles.” ⁷⁴ In keeping with an early modern politics of non-domination, pamphleteer John Warr argued that the Hobbesian idea of law as non-interference, even when based upon the principle of choice, becomes “anything, or nothing, at the courtesy of great men, and is bended by them like a twig,” for while laws and government should be made to protect the people from those in power, they too often exist to perform the opposite function. ⁷⁵ In these plays, we can see this point exemplified in Vindice, Leantio, Fabrito, and even Antonio, all of whom “see nothing but their own [property] round about them, and make it their design to subdue laws as well as persons, and enforce both to do homage to their wills.” ⁷⁶ Instead, what Milton calls “common liberty” or “free government” would ideally “enable each citizen to exercise an equal right of participation the making of the laws.” ⁷⁷ Yet the word “citizen” here should continue to give us pause. It is not only the two Dukes of Middleton’s plays but also the private patriarchs of each individual household who are bound by self-interest and by an obsession with their private possessions.

The critique emanating from the more radical Levelers and Diggers requires us to envision a kind of liberty that could move beyond this Hobbesian protectionism of private property. This holds especially true when it involves people-as-property. As Middleton’s plays suggest, “citizens” who wish to move toward neo-Roman theories of liberty would do well to ensure that their politics of non-domination are not based upon the protection of private dominion, property, or the use of people as metaphors for political tyranny and revolution. We can see how the concept of the citizen itself becomes a method of retaining private power over public interest in modern versions of libertarianism, with the aim of furthering domination in the private spheres. A feminist critique of Middleton’s plays should naturally take the theory of non-domination a step further, showing that it is the family-form itself, rather than the state, which leads to domestic and political tragedy in each of these plays.

While Middleton’s Puritanism prevents him from arguing for such a feminist politics of non-domination, we might read such critiques of monarchical liberty back through early calls for the protection of private property. Here, the head of household is effectively in place as a sovereign lord, and those without access to property are left at the whims of their own property-owning sovereigns. As Middleton’s plays teach us, only definitions of liberty which begin with access and autonomy, rather than protection, have the potential to move beyond these pitfalls of private interest and private domination. Against Hobbes, John Milton further argues that public institutions must remain equally subject to the laws which they impose. Above all, citizens must be encouraged to participate in acts of “speaking and acting as conscience dictates in the name of the common good,” and to participate in promoting the policies they believe to be of greatest benefit to all, regardless of precedent, exception, and all previous modes of domination. ⁷⁸

In these two city tragedies, both men and women are shown to be bound to utterly false narratives of freedom. While this might be unsurprising to any avid reader of seventeenth-century drama, what is surprising is that all articulate attempts to resist powerful structures of domination. This is why Middleton’s own theories of liberty, which are, to be clear, full of misogyny, are also productive fodder for theories of liberty that could move beyond protection towards access and autonomy. Isabella’s speech against the arbitrary rule of marriage, for example, extends Middleton’s own monarchical critiques to the system of law itself, as well as to the institution of the family. Both are built upon the same relations of domination. This speaks both to Skinner’s formulation of liberty as non-domination, and the critiques from Wood and Nyquist, which argue that theories of non-domination should interrogate the very definitions of privacy, property, and possession. ⁷⁹

Because early modern law practiced a Hobbesian approach to marriage that placed women under the protection of sovereign rulers, Middleton’s plays reflect an early modern fascination with rape as a gendered metaphor for the dangers of tyranny. Rape exemplified an arbitrary display of force which threatened the property of free citizens. As a result, Middleton’s plays support the private rights of citizens, yet also hint at the consequences of seeing women and servants as property. A feminist reading of the play cannot fail to observe that such arguments of liberty are premised on classed and gendered assumptions of natural subordination. Nor could a truly feminist reading look past the metaphor of chattel slavery in a world already making use of transatlantic slave labor. ⁸⁰ These plays thus teach us that a politics of liberty-as-non-domination cannot be practiced within the framework of protectionism when the same politics of domination are practiced within the family. Feminist definitions of liberty as a politics of non-domination must therefore necessarily push further than Skinner, and even Winstanley, in order to see the contradictions of subordination under law’s formalism. We might even go so far as to critique Isabella’s own invocation of slavery, in seeing how the metaphor of chattel slavery is invoked at the expense of those for whom this metaphor is no metaphor at all.