Maid's Tragedy Research Articles

"An Artificial way to Grieve": The Forsaken Woman in Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger and Ford

The figure of the forsaken woman is a distinctive and recurring landmark in the world of Jacobean and Caroline tragedy. She may take the form of a wife betrayed, a mistress discarded, or a virgin scorned, but she is always a woman cut loose from her social moorings and set adrift in a vortex of pathos. Typically, she is the victim of collaboration between a repressive social system and an aggressive male ego. Her complaint is hardly new: her classical ancestors include Procne and Dido, her Elizabethan sisters range from Ophelia to Anne Frankford. But her voice takes on a special resonance in the Jacobean and Caroline years, and her actions produce a decisive change in the shape of tragedy as a whole. In order to assess the rhetorical effect and the structural position of the forsaken woman figure, I have selected three plays for particular attention-The Maid's Tragedy (c. 1610), The Duke of Milan (c. 1621), and The Broken Heart (c. 1630). Roughly speaking, the forsaken women in these plays are representative of their larger sisterhood, while at the same time they resist classification as mere stereotypes. Indeed, the forsaken woman's plaintive voice is, at least in part, a cry of protest against a social order and a masculine world that expects and condones only stereotypical female behaviour.

"The Simetry, Which Gives a Poem Grace": Masquej Imagery, and the Fancy of "The Maid's Tragedy"

"The Simetry, Which Gives a Poem Grace": Masquej Imagery, and the Fancy of "The Maid's Tragedy"

The Text of "The Maid's Tragedy"

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Text of "The Maid's Tragedy"Howard B. NorlandHoward B. Norland Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America Volume 61, Number 3Third Quarter, 1967 Published for the Bibliographical Society of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/pbsa.61.3.24300857 Views: 4Total views on this site PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

John Fletcher and the Art of Declamation

In a recent note on The Double Marriage I suggested that the plot of this tragedy was derived from two declamations (Numbers 48 and 64) in The Orator (1596), Lazarus Pyott's translation of the Epitomes De Cent Histoires Tragicques (Paris, 1581) by Alexandre van den Busche, called Le Sylvain.11 was even tempted by the notion that the form of this collection of speeches influenced Fletcher's dramatic methods. Each “declamation” begins with a brief summary of the circumstances leading up to some extraordinary situation; then follow the speeches of two characters who present exactly opposite views in a formal debate. The emphasis of the book falls, as the title itself indicates, on these speeches. In a foreword to the reader (Sig. A4) Pyott says of them: “In these thou maiest learne Rhethoricke to inforce a good cause, and art to impugne an ill.” The dazzling improbability of The Orator's situations, the irreconcilable oppositions of the chief characters, and the concern with oratorical eloquence correspond so closely with the dramatic technique of the “Beaumont and Fletcher” plays that it would have been easy to imagine Fletcher and his collaborators discovering here the formula which was to be the basis of their success. There was only one inconvenience—a fatal one—to this theory: I had no evidence that Fletcher was familiar with The Orator when he was working with Beaumont on Philaster, The Maid's Tragedy, and A King and No King, in which the “Beaumont and Fletcher” genre takes its characteristic shape.

On the Sources of The Maid's Tragedy

On the Sources of The Maid's Tragedy

The Second Maid's Tragedy

The Second Maid's Tragedy

The Second Maid's Tragedy

The Second Maid's Tragedy