Nor hell a fury like a man scorned

As soon as Anna Zelbst came forward as the source of this website’s report that Central Bank deputy governor Alfred Mifsud had taken cash bribes of several hundred thousand euros from businessman Ronnie Demajo, when he was Mid Med Bank chairman in 1997/1998, I knew that the internet comments boards would be full of tedious references to “hell hath no fury” by the sort of middle-aged Maltese men who really know how to take a hackneyed phrase and do it to death.

And of course, not only do they misquote it as ‘hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’ when it is actually “Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned”, but they are oblivious to the fact that the sentiment is a reflection of 17th-century society, when William Congreve wrote his play The Mourning Bride. Those two lines are spoken by Zara in Act III, Scene VIII.

Both the misquotation and the obliviousness to (and lack of curiosity about) the source point to an inadequate education. But by far the greater shortcoming of those who have been peppering the comments-boards with this misogynistic reference is that they are completely blind to the reality of life and crime in the Mediterranean region, which is that – to adapt their misquotation – hell hath no fury like a man scorned.

Right round the Mediterranean littoral, almost all women and girls who are murdered are murdered by their estranged husband, boyfriend, lover or a man with whom they have had no relationship but who is erotically obsessed and thinks he has been spurned. And in every case where the man does not simply want to get rid of the woman or girl because she has become inconvenient, the motive is rejection. In other words, he feels he has been scorned.

The woman need not even have been involved in a sexually intimate relationship with the man. In Malta some years ago, a man shot dead his sister, with whom he lived, because she burned his breakfast toast and mended his jumpers badly, which he took to be an insult. I have lost count of the number of women who have been murdered in Malta, within my own living memory, by estranged husbands or boyfriends. We have yet to read about a Maltese man who was murdered by his ‘scorned’ wife or girlfriend.

The most you might get from a “scorned woman” is some harsh words, a bad row, a couple of angry telephone calls and a law suit. But from a scorned man, what you will get is the blunt end of a gun – that is, if you don’t actually end up flung by him off a cliff. And those who don’t murder you will use money to torture you instead, leaving you dangling at the end of their malicious string while spitefully and deliberately depriving you of the means of survival.

William Congreve: men in Malta in 2016 are still quoting a reference he made to angry women in 1697.