Abstract
The deep-rooted sense of corruption that pervades the world of Thomas Middleton, John Webster and John Ford finds expression in British political writers of the 1970s and 1980s, including Caryl Churchill, Barrie Keeffe, Edward Bond, and Howard Baker, all of whom engage with Jacobean drama through both homage and aggressive re-interpretation. Focusing specifically on Barker’s Women Beware Women, this essay argues that Barker's dramaturgical principles – among them, that true tragedy resists the comfort of reconciliation – insist on the contemporary relevance of seventeenth-century drama to an England falling apart at the economic seams.