A Presentist, Palestinian, Pedagogical Reading of Language and Gender Politics in Middleton’s Women Beware Women

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ABSTRACTIn addition to the methodology of new historicism, this article deploys feminism, performance studies and presentism to discuss the effects of the masculine practice of enforced marriage and turning a deaf ear to the female voice in Thomas Middleton’sWomen Beware Women and contemporary Palestine. I explain that Middleton’s Women Beware Women criminalises the absolute right of the monarch to command through a critique of Renaissance practice of enforced marriage and of male figures’ deafness to the female voice. I argue that Middleton’s tragedy questions and interrogates the dominant patriarchal discourse by locating subversion within the dominant discourse. While Middleton shows that women are complicit with male figures’ voices, male figures show no recognition of the inadequacy of their voices. The eclectic range of critics I am using in this article opens up gender-based readings in the teaching context of An-Najah University where I teach Renaissance Drama. This article seeks to modify the feminist view that tragedy merely suggests that female characters face verbal and physical circumscription. Rather, tragedy ensues because male figures are deaf to female figures’ voices and such deafness breeds female figures’ subversive plots.