Four women who are changing the world

While the play is named after Hobson, and it is Willie Mossop's name that will appear on the sign at the end, the action of the play is driven by  women. It is Maggie's efforts that, as Willie says "taught [him] to rise", and it is the investment of a wealthy woman, Mrs Hepworth that allows them to open their new shoe shop. Maggie runs the new shop well and also helps her sisters to make matches of their own. The play is set in the 1880s, about eight years after the founding of the Women's Social and Political Union, a group that campaigned for votes for women. Women still had not achieved political equality when the play was written in 1914, but the first women would soon be allowed to vote in 1918. The play shows men's discomfort with women's power. Most of the action hinges on the fact that Maggie takes the lead, saying to Willie, "You're going to wed me, Will." This assertiveness is a source of comedy in the play, but also a portrait of women resisting a stifling society.

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Over the course of the play, Willie Mossop and Maggie rise to become successful businesspeople, while Hobson falls. The late 19^th Century was a time when few people were expected to change their class position, and the play depicts a world where small differences matter a lot. Hobson opposes Maggie and Willie's marriage because of Willie's origins, describing his father as "a workhouseAn institution where those unable to support themselves financially were housed and forced to work. Lambeth Workhouse, which Chaplin visited on several occasions, is now London's Cinema Museum. brat. A come-by-chance". Hobson, who says he  is "British middle class and proud of it", believes that people are meant to know their place, and that this place is determined by their birth. It is also this same sense of fixed place that he thinks gives him the right to control his daughters. At one point, arguing about their marriages, he says" I'll put you in your places," reinforcing his own need for things to be fixed. The divisions between himself and Willie, however, are smaller than those between Mrs Hepworth and himself, and when she brings her business to Willie rather than him, it is the beginning of the end. The play mocks Hobson's snobbery as it shows that  Hobson does not have the actual wealth or power to maintain his place. Even the social mobility on display serves to demonstrate a very unequal society.

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Hobson is not a good father. The play begins with his daughters talking about him, hoping that he will go out. It becomes clear that he drinks and treats them terribly. His daughters all work for him in his shoe shop, and he treats his family like a business. Ultimately, they end up preferring Maggie. Unlike Hobson, Maggie helps her sisters to find the husbands that they want, and to make new families that are happier than the one they came from. But that does not mean that Maggie is not herself a businesswoman; before she proposes to Willie, she tells him that she wants to "invest in him". The difference Maggie and Hobson embody is not between love and business but between better or worse business people. Brighouse deliberately sets up lots of similarities to Shakespeare's King Lear, a play about a king who fails to see that the daughter that flatters him the least actually loves him the best. Maggie values what Hobson says he values, and is, in the end the daughter who saves him from ruin.

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The title Hobson's Choice was inspired by Thomas Hobson, a man who ran a stables in Cambridge in the 17th Century. He would offer customers a "Hobson's choice" of the horses, which meant you took whatever horse was first in the line. In this play, Hobson wants to choose for other people. He thinks that he is the one who ought to make all choices. Early on, Hobson has an exchange with his daughter Alice that shows how controlling he is. Alice asks: "Can't we choose husbands for ourselves?" Hobson replies: "I've been telling you for the last five minutes you're not even fit to choose dresses for yourselves." But he does not really have the power to control people. He is himself without choices, bound both by his alcoholismAlcohol addiction. and his temperament to behave in self-destructive ways. We do, however, see other people making decisions. Maggie chooses Willie. Her sisters choose other husbands. Ultimately, Hobson is unable to control anything in his life because of his drinking. When the doctor comes to see him as a ruined man, he tells Hobson's drinking buddy, Jim, there's "not much to choose between you. You've both got your fate written on your faces." Hobson chooses to make up for his lack of self-control by controlling others and this is his undoing.

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While Hobson tries to control people, the play is a celebration of upsets. Like many traditional comedies, it is about children rebelling against their parents in their romantic choices. We enjoy the moments when characters swap positions; when Maggie proposes to her lover, William, or when Hobson is taken in hand by William at the end. We see the servant become the master, and we enjoy the anarchicLinked to anarchy, a situation in which there are no rulers. quality of this. While these reversals are movements across class and gender, they are also reversals in a dramatic arc in general. The play offers the pleasure of things not being fixed, whether gender, class or simply fate in general.

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