Four Jacobean Sex Tragedies

by Martin Wiggins (Editor), John Marston (Contributor), William Barksted (Contributor)

Jacobean Tragedy explores the tensions between the disruptive energies of sex and seventeenth century social, cultural and political values with an exceptional frankness, and the plays collected in this volume demonstrate the genre at its most sinister and explicit. The plays included are The
Insatiate Countess , The Maid's Tragedy , The Maiden's Tragedy , and The Tragedy of Valentinian .

Genres: Plays, Drama

480 pages, Paperback

First published August 13, 1998

Reviews

[Aaron Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Honestly, these are four deeply underrated plays. The best play here is Beaumont & Fletcher's The Maid's Tragedy, which is truly outstanding, but this also includes the hilarious and depraved John Marston text The Insatiate Countess and the insane The Second Maiden's Tragedy by Thomas Middleton (here called The Maiden's Tragedy and elsewhere The Lady's Tragedy). John Fletcher's The Tragedy of Valentinian rounds out the four. In many ways, these four texts link up quite nicely. The plots of Valentinian and The Maiden's Tragedy pair up in intriguing ways, and the texts of both The Insatiate Countess and The Maiden's Tragedy both tell us very interesting things about how Jacobean tragedies worked on stage, how they were printed and preserved, and how they got to be cut in production.

As Jacobean sex tragedies, these texts of course have their share of ghosts, ingenious ways of murdering people, hiding in closets, theatricality, and revenge.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is excellently edited. But apart from the fact that these are four Jacobean plays that end unhappily and have sex (and even then, tenuously in some cases) in them, there doesn't seem to be a good reason to put them together, except that they are all quite difficult to get separately elsewhere (I had read The Maid's Tragedy separately, but the others are only available in either expensive or shoddy editions).

Valentinian and the Maiden are narratives about sexual obsessives/sybarites with enormous power; The Maid's Tragedy about sexual politics of keeping a mistress; The Insatiate Countess about a widow who is unwise in her choice of sexual partners. And they all end badly. Is that enough to put in a book together? And is that different from a lot of other Jacobean Tragedies? Do these plays together say anything about Jacobean authors' attitudes to Sex? to Violence? to Power? to Revenge?

Four Jacobean Patriarchy Tragedies? You certainly have to pity the women.

The Insatiate Countess: This is one of those Jacobean plays (like Tis Pity She's a Whore, or The White Devil) where you do wonder if the guy who gave it a title had actually read the play. Okay, Isabella is a lusty widow, and starts relationships she's not quite in a position to finish, but she's just come out of a marriage to an uber-controlling older husband, so is it any wonder she wants to see what's on the other side of the fence?

But what this play is really about is the crapness of men: men who swear unswerving loyalty to their BFF, only to ditch (and attempted-murder) him when his girlfriend comes onto him; men who say they love a woman, only to try and have sex with her best mate the day after the wedding; men who condemn their wives for cheating, at the exact moment that they themselves were cheating; men who on the strength of a promise of sex are prepared to shoot a stranger in the streets. Jesus, these men (with one exception, whom we don't really see until the last act) are crap.

And, like a large number of these plays, the ending is somewhat baffling: a few pages after we see a woman beheaded onstage (!), we have a delightful comedy of restitution of these clever women with their (frankly ghastly) husbands, all rounded off with a little poem.

John Marston never finished this play (he either got imprisoned, or got religion, or got something) about a third of the way through), and two actors finished it off for him: would it have been better if he had finished it? Possibly.

Oh yes: and there's a healthy dose of (the characters') antisemitism, which is irrelevant to the plot: the Jewish husband (if he even is Jewish, which is questionable) is no worse than any of the other characters, but there are lots of jokes about his Jewishness that go nowhere. He's certainly not Shylock or Barabbas: I suppose the message might be: Jew or Christian, men are just a bit crap.

The Second Maiden's Tragedy (also called The Maiden's Tragedy, or the Lady's Tragedy) is a grand guignol of a Gothic aberration. The men in it are (as in a lot of Middleton) largely human excrement, and to describe their behaviour as extreme doesn't quite do it justice.

The subplot (!) ends with six dead on stage, which is then followed with a necrophile scene prefiguring Psycho.

The men in this play are utterly useless, and the women get caught in their crossfire. But like a large number of these sort of plays, it is addictive, and I really want to see it done live.

What makes The Tragedy of Valentinian different is that, like a lot of Fletcher, it doesn't really go where you're expecting: there are some curves which you go "wow!"

There's a point where the expectation is that it's going to be Women Beware Women, then Cymbeline, then it slips into a soft Titus, then the Rape of Lucrece, then a bit of the Revenger's Tragedy, then swerves into Julius Caesar (with maybe a bit of Hamlet), then into the Spanish Tragedy.

What it seems to be is an exploration of the effects of rape of all the people around, not just the person raped, where all the characters have different responses, and Maximus (Lucina's husband) has the strangest reaction of them all. Is it a play about trauma? It seems to be. And the response of the rapist's wife is fascinating, and strangely convincing, defending her husband's "honour" against those who would impugn it.

What it isn't is a "Tragedy of Valentinian": there is nothing noble about Valentinian from start to finish, so nowhere for him to fall from, except untrammelled power. It may be "tragedy of monarchy" and it is a twisted Revenge Tragedy.

So I don't think this is Fletcher's best, but I would love to see it live. I can see it working really well on the stage.

[ML Character · Rating 5 out of 5]

Y’all, this one is some class action epic tragedy. Damn, like so hard to believe that the Insatiate Countess is practically going to be the tamest of these, but buckle up. Then we have Maid’s Tragedy (Beaumont & Fletcher), with the sister, Evadne, of hero, kinda, Melantius, turning out in the bedroom to haha be having an affair with the king who has sort of ruined Amintor’s life by choosing him for his affair-beard even though Aspatia was wandering around in love with him. The good news here is lots of girls get action, although Aspatia’s is tricking her ex into fighting her while in drag then not fighting so he accidentally kills her, but Evadne’s is pretty awesome, while meanwhile Melantius has repeated funny business with old coward, Calianax, the dad of Aspatia and inexplicably the king of a random tower. Then Maiden’s Tragedy (MIddleton) which I believe I’ve summarized elsewhere. The The Tragedy of Valentinian, which has the distinct honor of two Caesar deaths in one act 5! Valentinian is generally, laughably terrible. Rapes the wife of Maximus, only eventually after Maximus is like: wife, you gotta die and she’s like I want to die! And briefly Aetius (autocorrect HATES these names!) is like, uh, does she have to die? Then she walks off stage and it is promptly reported: oh, she fell over and died. So, there’s something off about Maximus, who is like: Aetius needs to die for this. Eventually I guessed this was because he had some unwitting part is delivering a ring to wife that caused her to go to court where she was raped? Unclear. Anyway, there is the most truly awesomely homoerotic scene I can remember between Maximus and Aetius, complete with ravishment, black-eyed boys, and eunuchs… 3.3: “Max: Pray tell me this: Do we not love extremely? I love you so. Aet: If I should say I loved not you as truly, I should do that I never durst do, lie.” …. Max: “Would he had ravished me, I would have paid him, I would have taught him such a trick his eunuchs Nor all his black-eyed boys e’er dreamy of yet. By all the gods, I am mad now.” Unbelievably, there’s so much more to go. There’s the hilarity of solider fired for rightfully hating the emperor killing himself rather than kill Aetius, then Aetius killing HIMself because everyone else is afraid to come for him, then people showing up and deducing the dead bodies mean they killed each other, then Maximus finally up and admitting: you know, if I can be Caesar, it will have been okay for my wife to be raped and then me insist she fall over dead for it. Which is exactly what happens after Valentinian is poisoned by fans of Aetius, whose death scene is hilarious and includes bringing one of the dying assassins on to laugh at how Valentinian still has dying left to do after the assassin finishes dying. And then Maximus is Caesar, but BOOM, Eudoxa out of nowhere is like- nah, he’s dead, because he basically admitted he orchestrated all this, and I was like, nope, no dice. You prolly need not kill me now. Honestly, Eudoxa for Caesar please.

“I have done, sit down, and let us
Upon that point fix all our eyes, that point there
[they sit on the ground]
Make a dumb silence till you feel a sudden sadness
Give us new souls.” [Aspatia, The Maid’s Tragedy, 2.2, 66-69]

[Gill · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting mix of mostly slightly bonkers plays, in the way only Early Modern plays seem to manage. Very good to share in the reading of one of t6hem with the editor himself!

[Roman Clodia · Rating 4 out of 5]

This contains the little known The Insatiate Countess, Beaumont & Fletcher's The Maid's Tragedy, Middleton's The Maiden's Tragedy, and Fletcher's The Tragedy of Valentinian.

I'm not completely sure I'd describe them as 'sex tragedies' - while they certainly have a sexual theme so, of course, do Othello, The Duchess of Malfi, Women Beware Women, and countless other Jacobean dramas. Wiggins attempts to justify this classification in the introduction and certainly does draw some parallels between these texts, but doesn't explain why he chooses these plays and not others.

Regardless of the categorisation, it's good to have some little known plays made available at a good price, and Oxford are reliable in terms of the texts used. The Maid's Tragedy is one of my favourite Jacobean dramas with an interesting view of the relationship between sex and politics, so this volume would be worth it for that alone.

[Jennifer]

Sadly, I must report that my original impression of Valentinian still holds: it's a pretty blah excuse for a tragedy. I can see why people studying rape like to examine it for its attitudes towards women and violence (and of course other things). The Maid's Tragedy continues to fascinate me, however. The Maiden's Tragedy is interesting but not my favorite, and The Insatiate Countess was better than I had expected. (That was the only one I was reading for the first time, I think.) I think only TMT is going to really stick with me, though.

[Keeley · Rating 2 out of 5]

Oh, the tedium of Jacobean and Restoration drama.