'A Whore You Are, Madam' or, the Binary That Wasn't: Female Dyads and Doubling in John Fletcher's The Chances and Women Pleased

Abstract

This essay engages in a feminist transnationalist reading of two plays by John Fletcher set in Italy, The Chances and Women Pleased, paying particular attention to the author's subversive use of female doubling and dyads, as well as the way in which ethnic or othering language presents femininity as a 'country' of its own.  The essay also highlights these later plays' echoes of Fletcher's The Woman's Prize, or The Tamer Tamed, his response to Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, in arguing for Fletcher's surprising resistance to both Italophobia and misogyny.