The Relationship of Lust's Dominion and John Mason's the Turke

Abstract

The late Professor Adams in the introduction to his edition of John Mason's The Turke writes that Mason seems to have had no source for the play and that The plot of the play, indeed, is slender enough to have been invented by Mason, with the help of a few conventional ideas. 1 As far as I know, no one has contradicted Adams' rather summary dismissal of Mason's sources. The plot of The Turke (1606-8) is not, however, entirely the invention of Mason; there is considerable evidence that it was strongly influenced by, if not deliberately modeled upon, an earlier tragedy of blood, the anonymous Lust's Dominion (c. 1600). This evidence consists not of the usual verbal parallels, but of similarities in the conception and handling of character, situation, and plot devices which go far beyond the obvious resemblances arising from two tragedies' being part of a contemporary villain play tradition. The purpose of this article is to examine the most important of these extra-traditional parallels. The most obvious similarity between Lust's Dominion and The Turke is that in both plays the action centers around the attempts of a dark-skinned Mohammedan villain to seat himself upon the throne of a Christian state.2 The importance of this is minimized, however, by the contemporary popularity of the Mohammedan as a stage character,' and the similarity can only be considered, along with the two villains' cruelty, ranting speech and Machiavellian sentiment, as another characteristic of the villain of tradition, Much more impressive is the very strong resemblance between the villains' relationships to other members of the Christian courts in which they live, for both Eleazar, the black Moor of Lust's Dominion, and Mulleasses, the swarthy infidel of The Turke, are in the midst of adulterous