"This For the Most Wrong'd of Women": A Reappraisal of The Maid's Tragedy

Havelock Ellis's Literary Criticism, Canon Formation, and the Heterosexual Shakespeare

“…One of the authors' most perceptive and sensitive critics, John Danby (1968), writes that "Beaumont and Fletcher's work indicates the collapse of a culture; an adult scheme is being broken up and replaced by adolescent intensities" (p. 280). Succinctly summing up such charges, Shullenberger (1982) writes that "[e]verywhere one looks, one finds the playwrights fixed on the disparaging side of dichotomies: craftsmanlike rather than poetic, theatrical rather than philosophical, sensationalistic rather than morally serious" (p. 132). The Jacobean twins, rivals in their own time to the gentle Shakespeare and the rare Ben Jonson, became in the twentieth century representative of a moral decline from the great works of their era.…”

'[N]or bear I in this breast / So much cold spirit to be called a woman': The Queerness of Female Revenge in <i>The Maid’s Tragedy</i>

“…This productive demonstration of these multiple positions enables us to complicate readings like that offered by William Schullenberger, who reads Evadne's claim, 'sure, I am monstrous, / For I have done those follies, those mad mischiefs, / Would dare a woman' (4.1.182-4), as an indication that she 'accepts and conforms to the masculine terror of unbridled sexuality in women'. 12 In Schullenberger's reading, the utterance simply makes Evadne more female, whereas Tassi helps us to see that actually such an utterance highlights the construction of gendered subjectivity.…”