“Men buy their slaves, but women buy their masters.” – Isabella

Shakespeare gets all the love when it comes to Elizabethan theatre, but that’s because people tend to forget that the stage was the television of its time, cheap and plentiful, aiming only to get bums on benches and crowds in the yard. They were up against bear baiting and the groundlings cried for more jokes and more violence. One of the crowd pleasers getting revived of late is Thomas Middleton.

Women Beware Women is a great example of Middleton’s work. Like last years’ The Revenger’s Tragedy, the National Theatre gives Middleton an enthusiastic outing that makes the most of his brutal phantasmagoria. Marianne Elliott directs the production with a kind of gleeful decadence (why is it that there are more women directors at the NT than on the whole of Broadway?).

Loosely based on some of the Medici family goings-on, the plot is a bit complicated: trying to summarize it to a friend, I quickly saw his eyes glaze over…