To make someone a widow by causing the death of their spouse.
From Middle English 'be-' (prefix meaning 'to cause to be') + 'widow' (a woman whose husband has died). This archaic verb was formed using the productive 'be-' prefix that allowed English speakers to create new verbs from nouns in the 16th-17th centuries.
This haunting word shows how the 'be-' prefix could turn any noun into a verb—it's the verbal equivalent of saying 'to make into a widow,' capturing the tragic causation of death in a single word. Shakespeare and his contemporaries loved these creative formations, and 'bewidow' appears in period literature as a poetic way to describe the tragic consequence of war or loss.
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