● 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
