Performing Widowhood: Liminality, Agency, and Patriarchal Control in The Old Law

Abstract

This paper argues that the character of Eugenia, in Middleton and Rowley’s (and possibly Heywood’s) The Old Law (c. 1618), threatens patriarchal assumptions about female wit by demonstrating that women can analyse, manipulate, and exploit legal structures through deliberate calculation rather than impulse. Epire’s statute condemns men at eighty and women at sixty, a threshold that Eugenia – young wife of the aged Lisander – turns to her advantage. By occupying the widow’s “liminal status between death and life, chastity and sexual availability, or past and future” (Kimura 2023, 67), she converts her legal predicament into a performance, rehearsing widowhood before it even arrives. Though legally still a wife, she positions herself as a widow-in-waiting, wielding “dissembling” as an “art” to navigate patriarchal structures for personal gain. Yet the play refuses to reward such self-fashioning: Eugenia’s audacious pose as “strumpet”, as “whore”, is punished by a ten-year ban on remarriage, which suppresses female strategic wit and re-inscribes patriarchal control precisely at the threshold she sought to manipulate, reinstating passive virtue as the approved model of femininity.