This may be the biggest But it is far from the first sacrifice I've made for this house And I'm sure it won't be the last But don't fret. I'm ready. England, 1640. A war is brewing. Rumours are flying. A household is in crisis... and the Devil's having some fun. For Lady Elizabeth, nothing is more important than protecting her family's legacy and their ancestral home. When that comes under threat, she elicits the help of Agnes, a young servant suspected of witchcraft. But Agnes has dark dreams of her own for this house. Women, Beware the Devil is a deadly new play of treachery and trickery by The Sunday Times Playwriting Award-winner Lulu Raczka, author of Antigone and Nothing. This edition was published to coincide with the world premiere at the Almeida Theatre, London, in February 2023.

This may be the biggest But it is far from the first sacrifice I've made for this house And I'm sure it won't be the last But don't fret. I'm ready. England, 1640. A war is brewing. Rumours are flying. A household is in crisis... and the Devil's having some fun. For Lady Elizabeth, nothing is more important than protecting her family's legacy and their ancestral home. When that comes under threat, she elicits the help of Agnes, a young servant suspected of witchcraft. But Agnes has dark dreams of her own for this house. Women, Beware the Devil is a deadly new play of treachery and trickery by The Sunday Times Playwriting Award-winner Lulu Raczka, author of Antigone and Nothing. This edition was published to coincide with the world premiere at the Almeida Theatre, London, in February 2023.

One of the great Renaissance playwrights, Middleton wrote tragedies essentially different from either Marlowe's or Shakespeare's, being wittier than the former and more grittily ironic than the latter. The genre of 'citizen tragedy' came into its own in the eighteenth century, but Middleton can claim to have created it: Bianca, wife of a middling commercial agent, arouses the lust of the Duke of Florence and becomes his mistress, first secretly, then openly and finally, after her husband has been seduced by the scheming Lady Livia and stabbed by Livia's brother, the Duke's wife. Livia plots her revenge, and the play ends with a banquet and a masque that are a triumph of black farce. Middleton's powerful, psychologically complex female characters and his clear-sighted analysis of misogyny are bound to impress today's audiences, but it is the pervasive irony - cynicism, even - with which he dissects the motivations of both oppressor and victim that makes him so eerily modern.

A comprehensive introduction to Thomas Middleton's Women Beware Women - introducing its critical history, performance history, the current critical landscape and new directions in research.

"A pioneer work in…the sexual structuring of society. This is not just another book about witchcraft." —Edmund S. Morgan, Yale University Confessing to "familiarity with the devils," Mary Johnson, a servant, was executed by Connecticut officials in 1648. A wealthy Boston widow, Ann Hibbens was hanged in 1656 for casting spells on her neighbors. The case of Ann Cole, who was "taken with very strange Fits," fueled an outbreak of witchcraft accusations in Hartford a generation before the notorious events at Salem. More than three hundred years later, the question "Why?" still haunts us. Why were these and other women likely witches—vulnerable to accusations of witchcraft and possession? Carol F. Karlsen reveals the social construction of witchcraft in seventeenth-century New England and illuminates the larger contours of gender relations in that society.