Rhodes’s “Fair Example”: Tyranny, Race, and the Orient in <i>The Maid’s Tragedy</i>

This essay argues that the setting of Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy (1610) on Rhodes is significant for the play’s representation of tyranny. In it the royal mistress, Evadne, kills her lover in an act the new monarch deems “a fair example” for “lustful kings” (5.3.292–93). The essay’s first section demonstrates that via Rhodes—Ottoman territory since 1522—the play affiliates “lustful kings” with proto-Orientalist textual and performance traditions, linking despotism and decadence. Parallels with Kyd’s Soliman and Perseda (1592) support this claim. The second section identifies a symbolic expression of the play’s racial geography in Evadne’s wedding masque (1.2). Styling the King as an overly bright sun blackening Night (i.e. Evadne), the masque parodies Jonson’s Masque of Blackness (1605) to render tyranny’s effects as a somatic mark. Dramatizing the racialization of religion, the masque manifests the intemperate sexuality that proto-Orientalism associated with Islam as darkened skin. The third section argues that when Melantius convinces the once “fair” Evadne that the King’s lust has made her “foul,” thereby spurring her to revenge, the play presents a scene of conversion. In this way, by killing the king—and ridding Rhodes of tyranny—Evadne washes herself and the island white. [B.S.]