“What pretty new device”: Bondage and Liminality in Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy

[print edition page number: 133]

It is easy to overlook the potential for kink in revenge tragedy. This should come as no surprise given the importance of norms, particularly regarding gender and violence, to most readings of the genre. In fact, the celebration and stabilization of heteronormative, cis-gendered masculine violence is so fundamental to a great deal of discourse on revenge tragedy in Renaissance England that it has become a critical commonplace. As Roxanne Grimmett astutely observes, “Revenge tragedy is a dramatic sub-genre that conventionally develops an unsettling level of audience sympathy for male characters who are, essentially, murderers.”^[1] The figure of the revenger has in fact become so closely aligned with masculinity in the discourses on the genre that twentieth-century critics have largely ignored the unique qualities that differentiate autonomous female revengers from their male counterparts. This is completely [134] understandable given that so many of the great female roles in revenge tragedy participate in the revenge plot by acting as agents for the primary male protagonist or rely on male characters to act as intermediaries who carry out violence on behalf of a female character. Bel-Imperia (The Spanish Tragedy), Lavinia (Titus Andronicus), and Castiza (The Revenger’s Tragedy) all inhabit this role by acting as the primary male revenger’s “girl Friday”; Maria (Antonio’s Revenge) and Domitia (The Roman Actor) similarly participate in their respective revenge plots but only as co-conspirators in a plan that the reader is meant to associate with the male protagonist. In the case of characters like Beatrice-Joanna (The Changeling) and the Duchess of Malfi (The Duchess of Malfi), male characters act in their name to enact the violence of the narrative. In other words, the English early modern tradition of revenge tragedy has very few characters like Medea, the autonomous female revenger of antiquity that John Kerrigan uses to organize his chapter focused on feminism in Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon.^[2]

That is not to say that autonomous female revengers are absent from the period; in fact, when they do appear, they have a profound ability to highlight the systemic misogyny of early modern culture. One of the primary examples, Evadne in Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy, is a particularly nontraditional revenger who utilizes her liminal position as the King’s paramour to invert traditional erotic power dynamics through the overt use of sexual bondage. And, interestingly, it is her relationship to this early modern expression of kink [135] that serves as the foundation of her resistance to immoral patriarchal authority in the climactic moments of the play. Beaumont and Fletcher’s portrayal of Evadne clearly demonstrates that kink, rather than being anachronistic, is an important lens for discussing early modern culture due to how explicitly The Maid’s Tragedy engages with BDSM practice. The play’s utilization of the logic of bondage indicates not only that kink existed in the period but also that it was recognizable enough to the London theatre-going public to be referenced by popular writers without need for explanation.

The challenge for modern readers when discussing any female autonomous revenger in early modern drama, like Evadne, is that it is difficult to divorce ourselves from the expectation that revenge tragedy revels in inherently masculinized fantasies of violence. This is part of the reason that the lens of kink, and more specifically in this case BDSM, is so valuable as a critical tool when reading texts like The Maid’s Tragedy; these frameworks, because of their investment in inverting power dynamics and nontraditional sexual identities, offer a uniquely effective means for discussing cultural resistance to the overreach of normative patriarchal power structures. The limitations of viewing revenge tragedy as inherently masculine are particularly apparent in the work of a number of recent critics who have discussed the manner in which Evadne’s role as female revenger allows her to transcend and critique traditional gender roles. They understandably tend to read her violent actions in terms of this same traditional gender model and also tend to pass over the importance of her sexual practice. For example, Alison Findlay goes so far as to posit that “Evadne becomes a monstrous parody of phallic power” and sees her violent behavior as inherently driven by the manner in which the text masculinizes her.^[3] While others don’t necessarily go as far as Findlay, they do often describe Evadne’s behavior in terms of [136] standard masculine narratives or as an absolute rejection of traditional femininity. For example, Janet Clare’s position that The Maid’s Tragedy is “the only play of the period in which a woman avenges her own honour” shows this inclination to inscribe Evadne within traditional gender models.^[4] Instead we should build on readings like Cristina Leon Alfar’s, which invites us to see Evadne’s struggle with identity in masochistic terms, when she points out that Evadne’s desperate attempts to salvage her marriage with Amintor are based on a need to reclaim a patriarchally sanctioned feminine role within the marriage economy “because otherwise she is nothing.”^[5] The text of the play invites an alternative interpretation of Evadne’s navigation of gender that destabilizes a standard gender binary. Evadne certainly describes the loss of her chastity, her preparation for revenge, and her act of regicide as separating her from her femininity, but instead of replacing her femininity with masculine discourse, she utilizes her mastery of kinky sexual practice to leverage her suspended gender position in a futile attempt to repair her relationship to her femininity. This embracing of what twenty-first-century readers might recognize as a genderqueer construction of identity in which her gender position is inherently protean, even if the play characterizes it as dehumanizing, points to the text’s investment in a more nuanced interrogation of early modern gender models.

English forays into revenge narratives in the early modern period are often preoccupied with inherent social critiques housed in the genre’s basic assumptions, which they see outlined in the precedent set by Seneca. Both metatheatrical devices and alternative inset cultural performances act in these plays to reduce the immediacy of the seditious [137] potential latent in the staging of regicide, cannibalism, and private revenge.^[6] The Maid’s Tragedy uses kink, in particular BDSM, as one such cultural performance, which in this particular case generates the same stabilizing aesthetic distance that a play like The Spanish Tragedy creates through the use of the-play-within-the-play. [147] This use of kink in Beaumont and Fletcher’s play also serves to justify and stabilize the violence perpetrated by an autonomous female revenger against the man who benefits from exerting patriarchal authority over her and demonstrates the lack of recourse that women in the period had when it came to the problematic ways that they were trafficked.^[7] The limited authority that female characters like Evadne are able to generate in these moments is largely due to the revenge tragedy genre’s investment in the restaging of cultural performance as a medium for exploring how individuals negotiate cultural competence.^[8] Beaumont and Fletcher negotiate the relationship between feminine authority and cultural competence in the play through language that elides violence, sexuality, and ritual, which in turn blurs the boundaries between them and contextualizes all three practices as forms of performance. And it is through the play’s investment in the performative and ritualized nature of sexuality, as well as the importance of Evadne’s skill as a sexual practitioner, that the centrality of kink to the text and its strategies for generating aesthetic distance become all the more apparent. [138]

For Evadne in The Maid’s Tragedy, the kinky performances she uses to manipulate the plot and the cultural competence necessary to do so are byproducts of her atypical position within the early modern marriage economy. Much like another autonomous female revenger, Bianca in Thomas Middleton’s Women Beware Women, Evadne is removed from the traditional patriarchal hierarchy because of the sexual desire of a patriarchal authority figure, all of which leads her to become functionally independent of masculine oversight. Evadne’s apparently consensual involvement in state-sanctioned cuckoldry and extramarital sexuality are foundational to her occupying a sexual identity outside the norm of early modern conceptions of sexuality. Evadne is alienated from the traditional gender position of woman by her unchaste past, not her mastery of kink, but kink does complicate her relationship to gender as she tries in vain to recover an unproblematic feminine identity. While her practice of kink marks her as aberrant, it also allows Evadne to generate a uniquely subversive authority, which empowers her to resist tyranny and certain patriarchal power structures.

Kink as Cultural Performance

Evadne’s sexual practice is not only central to her character but also foundational to the manner in which she perpetrates her revenge. In order to expand on these ideas and given the relative obscurity of The Maid’s Tragedy, summarizing the details of Evadne’s portion of the plot is particularly important. The play begins with a marriage between Evadne and Amintor, who had until very recently been engaged to Aspatia, who is still in love with him. Amintor’s marriage to Evadne has been arranged by the King, and Amintor discovers on his wedding night that the marriage is intended as a means of concealing a long-standing extramarital affair between Evadne and the King. Evadne goes so far as to rebuff Amintor’s sexual advances and to tell him that she intends to have sexual relations exclusively with the King. Amintor plays along with the charade, [139] in fact feigning an active sexual relationship with his new wife well enough that it elicits jealousy from the King, who briefly believes that Evadne has slept with Amintor. While Amintor’s loyalty to the King keeps him silent about the farcical nature of his marriage at first, the dejection brought on by it catches the attention of Melantius, Amintor’s close friend and Evadne’s brother. When Melantius presses Amintor on the cause of his ill humor, Amintor eventually explains the situation, which, understandably, angers Melantius, who later confronts Evadne and urges her to kill the King. Once devoted to the King, Evadne vows to kill the King to avenge her honor. She enters the King’s bedchamber while he is asleep, ties him to the bed, and, once he is awake, stabs him to death. She then escapes the bedchamber and seeks out Amintor in an attempt to salvage their marriage. Amintor, who is increasingly remorseful for his treatment of Aspatia (though he has just, unbeknownst to him, mortally wounded her in a duel while she was disguised), rejects Evadne’s offer of reconciliation and she, in turn, kills herself. Soon after, the dying Aspatia reveals her true identity and dies, which leads Amintor to commit suicide.^[9] As the play’s plot makes plain, the practical details of Evadne’s sex life are not only central to her narrative, but they serve as the catalyst for the play’s justification of her ability to take on the role of revenger. In fact, it is her sexuality that aestheticizes and ritualizes the violence that she perpetrates in the play and creates the representational distance that mediates the taboo and destabilizing nature of those acts.

Unlike the bulk of the female revengers in the period, Evadne’s act of revenge is framed by intimacy and directly embedded in sexual practice. Most female revengers, and in fact the bulk of male revengers, take their revenge publicly in scenes that are often stabilized by inset cultural performances. Revenge tragedy, at its heart, is a genre engaged [140] in social critique, though not always related to gender, which in the genre’s early modern form relies on stock strategies to mediate the taboo potential of each play’s plot. The core of the revenge formula is that the revenger takes action to right a wrong that existing power structures are unable or unwilling to punish. The seditious potential of this foundational plot led playwrights in the period, following Thomas Kyd’s example, to use restaged moments of cultural ritual as screens that generated representational distance between the act of revenge and the real world of the actual audience. This results in English Renaissance revenge tragedy’s inherent investment in inset logics with codified protocols that revengers can manipulate. Whether we look at Hamlet’s fencing match, Titus and Lavinia’s feast in Titus Andronicus, Hieronimo and Bel-Imperia’s play-within-the-play in The Spanish Tragedy, or the masque that ends Women Beware Women, this tendency to use ritualized moments with discreet social rules and expectations creates a space within the play’s narrative where a revenger’s mastery of those rules, or that character’s cultural competence more generally, allows them to invert the traditional power structures that protect and empower those who have wronged the play’s protagonist. Evadne’s murder of the King is equally screened, but the social ritual that provides the necessary framework is sex, specifically extramarital sex infused by the ritualized rules of one type of kink play, the power dynamics of bondage. The Maid’s Tragedy encourages the spectator to view the sexual subject matter of the play as inherently ritualized and performative from its opening act. Beaumont and Fletcher’s play consistently displays the ritual importance of sexuality in early modern English culture in order to prepare the viewer to see Evadne’s binding of the King in the bedroom as analogous to screening strategies used by other revengers in the period. The Maid’s Tragedy’s primary strategy for conditioning the audience to view the kink space of the King’s bedchamber as a ritualized performance space is to consistently collapse the language used to describe sexuality, violence, ritual, [141] and performance throughout the text. This in turn invites the viewer to see Evadne’s use of bondage and her general sexual skill as evidence of her cultural competence within the kinky sexual performance space of the bedchamber.

From the first act of the play, The Maid’s Tragedy invites the viewer to see sexuality, and in particular Evadne’s sexuality, as inherently connected to performance and ritual. The inset masque in act one, scene two, which is a play-within-the-play and constitutes the kind of metatheatre that is so common in revenge tragedies, invites us to view the sexual consummation of the marriage between Amintor and Evadne as an extension of the marriage ceremony that the play-within-the-play effectively replaces. Specifically, the three songs that are performed within the masque each center the sexual act of the wedding night as the marriage rite’s literal and figurative climax. The first song bids the day not come “Till the rites of love are ended” (1.2.218), while the second bids the Night, a character in the inset masque, to

confound her [the bride’s] tears and her shrill cryings,
Her weak denials, vows, and often-dyings;

Stay, and hide all,

But help not though she call.

(1.2.237–40)

Here the masque sets the linguistic tone that will follow by actively asking the audience to see the act of consummation as a rite and to associate that ritual logic with its evocative descriptions of coitus. The second song goes so far in its discussion of the sounds that unwilling brides make, with a coerciveness that for modern readers almost certainly evokes rape, to invite both the staged audience and the actual viewer to imagine the sound of the bride’s orgasms, or “often-dyings.” The third song completes the process by inviting Hymen, the classical god of marriage, to escort the bride to the marriage bed and highlights [142] the liminal nature of the wedding night as a space that acts as the threshold between maidenhood and the bride’s new role as wife,

That they may kiss while they may say a maid;
Tomorrow ’twill be other kissed and said.
(1.2.251–52)

Here the play makes plain the manner in which the wedding night acts as a coming-of-age ceremony for the bride, whose social transformation is largely a byproduct of sex.^[10] This emphasis on the social transformation of maid to wife through the culturally sanctioned sexual act embedded in the marriage ceremony also highlights how Evadne’s unchaste relationship with the King prevents her from accessing traditional womanhood through the nuptial ritual.

Just two lines after the completion of the masque, the play transitions this ritual logic out of the inset masque and into the main action of the play. The King approaches Evadne and Amintor and tells them,

[To Evadne] We will not see you laid. [To Amintor] Good night, Amintor;
We’ll ease you of that tedious ceremony[.]
(1.2.285–86)^[11]

Here the King indicates that they will not observe the tradition of the bedding ceremony, which involved wedding guests escorting the bride and groom to their bed and in some European cultures observing or overhearing the couple’s intercourse. The King’s line has an immediately apparent double meaning within the context of the plot, which points [143] to him literally calling off the bedding ceremony and also reminding Evadne of her vow not to sleep with Amintor. That said, it also reminds the audience of the possibility of sex as a literal performance as well as consummation as a component of a ritualized cultural performance. And it is this blended emphasis on the sexual act as performance, with its inherent voyeuristic implications, that permeates the explanation of the social implications of sex in much of the rest of the play.

This discussion at the outset of the plot regarding the performance of the sexual act is further developed throughout the text by its focus on female sexual competence. Dula’s humorous comments on Evadne’s wedding night are of particular interest. Dula is one of the ladies who helps Evadne prepare and during that process mocks her relentlessly. When she banters with Evadne about sex, Dula says, it is a “trick” (2.1.17, 19), and that

A dozen wanton words put in your head
Will make you livelier in your husband’s bed.
(2.1.20–21)

Here we get the play’s first reference to sex as a performance for one’s sexual partner. This is an idea that Evadne echoes later as part of a rather mercenary exchange with the King:

Why, it is in me, then,

Not to love you, which will more afflict

Your body than your punishment can mine.

(3.1.180–83)

While much is made throughout the play of Evadne’s beauty, this scene invites the viewer to see her as a character whose allure to the King goes beyond her physical appearance and begins to hint at the importance of kink to their relationship. Evadne explains the power she holds over the [144] King in terms of the pain her absence would cause him, but importantly she does so not by talking about longing, loneliness, or sadness; instead, she focuses on the language of physical “punishment.” In particular, she observes that the retribution of the state would be less torturous to her than the suspension of her affections would be to the King. Her use of these words to counter the King’s assertion of political authority demonstrates that she possesses a performed sexual authority that is rooted in skill; to put it simply, Evadne knows she’s good in bed and that proficiency generates an authority that we will see is related to kink practice and the ritual space it generates. And it this ability to afflict his body with the absence of her performed sexual competence that is made all the more transparent in the lead-up to the King’s murder.

In the fifth act, The Maid’s Tragedy gives us a glimpse into the sexualized performance space of the King’s bedchamber and the kink logic that permeates that space. The unique rules that govern this part of the palace are first suggested by Evadne’s discussion with the Gentleman who appears to be guarding the King as he sleeps. As Evadne approaches, he recognizes her and happily allows her access to the King. Before she enters, they have the following exchange:

EVADNE.

Give me the key then, and let none be near;

’Tis the King’s pleasure.

GENTLEMAN.

I understand you, madam: would ’twere mine!

I must not wish good rest unto your ladyship.

(5.1.2–5)

The Gentleman’s wordplay, with its lewd interpretation of Evadne’s reference to “the King’s pleasure,” as well as the assumption that Evadne and the King’s activities will preclude sleeping, indicate just how much the social conventions in and around the King’s bedchamber have been [145] shaped by kink practice. Evadne’s past sexual encounters with the King have created alternative codes of behavior that give her degrees of access and license that allow her the opportunity to murder the King. The violence that Evadne perpetrates against the King is not itself kinky; instead past kink practice and the alternate power dynamics that come with it have created a space where Evadne’s cultural competence allows her to generate control and authority.

The unique authority that Evadne leverages in the bedchamber is highlighted by the King’s misinterpretation of her preparation for revenge as kink practice. Later in the act, after Evadne has entered the bedchamber and tied up the King, he wakes up and says,

What pretty new device is this, Evadne?
What, do you tie me to you? By my love,
This is a quaint one. Come, my dear, and kiss me.
I’ll be thy Mars; to bed, my Queen of Love,
Let us be caught together, that the gods may see
And envy our embraces.
(5.1.47–52)

The King’s initial response to being bound by Evadne is not one of suspicion; in fact, he immediately interprets it as a practice meant to increase sexual pleasure. It should be noted that his interpretation of being tied up as a “pretty new device” demonstrates that kink as a methodological lens is far from anachronistic. Here we see not only clear textual evidence of kink practice embedded in the dialogue but also an indication that this specific kink, sexual bondage, was recognizable to the play’s early modern audience without detailed explanation. While kink may be a modern term, Beaumont and Fletcher’s language demonstrates its practice was not just present in early modern England but was widespread enough for a play to reference sexual bondage offhandedly with the expectation that the audience was familiar with the concept. Additionally, as the dialogue [146] around “affliction” in act three, scene one, and directly leading up to this moment indicates, this performed kink practice in the period carried with it the potential for inverting traditional power dynamics by creating a space where the participants were “upon even terms no more” (5.1.37). In other words, kink practice then bears a more than passing resemblance to kink now.

The King not only misreads his bonds in this scene as a practice associated with kink but goes on to compare his bondage to the snaring of Mars and Venus in a net, a story mentioned in both Homer’s Odyssey and Ovid’s Ars Amatoria. Unlike the myth, in which the snaring of the two deities is the means by which their extramarital affair is made public, ridiculed, and eventually ended, the King sees his binding as “quaint” and, as editor T. W. Craik notes in his footnote, any discovery of their relationship would result in “envy” not derision.^[12] The King’s reading of the situation points to two important elements of his relationship with Evadne: that this type of kink was not alien to their existing relationship (his description of it as a “new device” implies the existence of at least one old device) and that similar practices must be common enough that being surprised with a new one produces excitement rather than anxiety. Both of these ideas indicate that this staged sexual practice shares important common ground with the ritualized consummation of marriage and the restaging of other cultural performances, like the masque that appears earlier in the play. This shared logic points to the play framing kinky sexual practice as its own type of performance that carries its own set of culturally encoded rules and expectations. The choice to place this type of ritual logic on stage effectively generates layers of dramatic representation, in much the same way as a metatheatrical inset, which allow for the performance of kink to generate the same type of screening effect that is prevalent in other revenge tragedies of the period. In other words, the performance of kink practice, much like a play-within-the-play, creates a representational distance, which helps to mitigate the taboo nature of Evadne’s act of regicide. The appearance of bondage, and by extension kink more generally, in the play acknowledges the potential power, particularly for women, embedded in sexual practice as something more than reproductive. It points to the skill of making sexual activity more pleasurable as a form of cultural competence that allows women a type of authority within the liminal, ritualized space of sex as a cultural performance that inverts traditional power dynamics. And it points to kink practice as a particularly potent means to access this potentially subversive type of control.

It should also be noted that the King’s comparison of Evadne to Venus and his use of the word “quaint,” with its pun on cunt, is part of a larger rhetorical strategy to mark Evadne as inherently feminine. While at first this language is part of the sexual banter in which he incorrectly thinks he is participating, later in the scene the choice to describe her as “sweet and gentle” (5.1.74), “not meant thus rugged” (5.1.84), and as “the soul of sweetness” (5.1.97) is functionally a form of self-defense. The King’s refusal to accept that Evadne plans to kill him is wrapped up in his view that a woman would be incapable of such an act. What the King does not realize is that from Evadne’s perspective her gender position has been wildly destabilized by her inability to progress from maid to wife by their extramarital sexual relationship. She points specifically in the scene to the fact that he has stolen her “fair name” (5.1.63) and a few lines later to the fact that she was once chaste until he poisoned her character (5.1.77–79). Evadne’s emphasis on the loss of her fairness and chastity demonstrates that she sees the King’s attempts to mark her as feminine as inaccurate. The King’s whoring of her has placed her outside of the standard models of gender against her will. She wants to return to the traditional feminine role she has lost, but the only method she can devise to do so requires her to embrace her suspended gender position and to [148] misappropriate kink by weaponizing it — a choice that not only misfires but that the play clearly sees as inherently unethical.

The suspension of Evadne’s gender position plays into one of the hallmarks of revenge tragedy: the disruption of social systems. As Katherine Graham astutely observes, the generic conventions of revenge tragedy often divorce the revenger from standard codified expectations of behavior, so it should come as no surprise that these plays also have the potential to complicate the protagonist’s gender expression.^[13] But while Evadne’s role as the primary revenger certainly works to destabilize her femininity, it is her connection to nontraditional sexual practice, specifically her extramarital relationship with the King, that causes her to transcend the gender binary. For Evadne, this suspension of her feminine gender position is rooted in her belief that her sexuality has made her monstrous, which though caused by her extramarital sex is intensified by her relationship with kink. In an attempt to repair her disrupted womanhood, she chooses to lean into her now-suspended gender position to rid herself of the King, whom she sees as the root cause of this disruption. Her success in accessing and murdering him is built on her competency with kink, which allows her to create a space with alternative codes of behavior that she is able to use to disrupt social and sexual hierarchies.

Nowhere in the play is Evadne’s nontraditional gender position and the manner in which it is complicated by kink practice more apparent than when she is confronted by Melantius. While he describes her with words like “whore” (4.1.51, 69, and 95), “sickness” (4.1.57), and “canker” (4.1.85), inviting the audience to see her actions as aberrant by nature of their connection to gendered sexual transaction or the taint of disease, Evadne initially rejects those models. Finally admitting her relationship with the King, she swears to avenge her honor, [149]

There is not in the compass of the light
A more unhappy creature; sure, I am monstrous,
For I have done those follies, those mad mischiefs,
Would dare a woman. O, my loaden soul,
Be not so cruel to me, choke not up
The way to my repentance.
(4.1.181–86)

Instead of describing her actions in feminine terms, she functionally rejects such a straightforward gender position. Not only does she admit to doing things that women would not do, she describes herself as “monstrous” — a word that carries very distinct sexual connotations in the period. As Graham points out in her own reading of the text,

While the play itself does not posit that Evadne is a sodomite or tribade, when Evadne uses, or is referred to by, the term ‘monster,’ the play brings into view the bodies of the sodomite and the tribade, bodies which are resonant through their links to excessive sexual desire, patriarchy (and their threat to it), beasts, and, most importantly, their monstrosity.^[14]

What Graham’s reading does not address is that only a few scenes after self-labeling herself as “monstrous,” Evadne will functionally identify with the exact type of monstrousness that Graham describes — the King’s sexual interpretation of being tied up by Evadne as one of her “tricks” indicates that their past sexual behavior could be seen as sodomy from a Renaissance perspective. As the Oxford English Dictionary reminds us, sodomy was regularly used in the period to describe “any form of sexual intercourse characterized as unnatural or immoral, or otherwise culturally [150] stigmatized.”^[15] In other words, Evadne collapses her extramarital sexuality with kink, both of which she understands as taboo and views them as the catalyst for her monstrosity and, as she will explain to the King, the reason she no longer meets her own idealized definition of femininity.

By the time Evadne enters into the bedchamber and begins to utilize the cultural performance of sexual practice to enact her vengeance, she has moved to a gender position that transcends a simple masculine and feminine binary. Instead, she has transitioned into a non-defined, neuter gender space with all the dehumanizing effects that that language communicates in English grammar. In response to Evadne drawing the knife she will soon use to murder him, the King asks her a question that prompts her to clarify how her gender position has shifted in the liminal space of the diverted erotic encounter,

KING.

How’s this Evadne?

EVADNE.

I am not she, nor bear I in this breast

So much cold spirit to be called a woman:

I am a tiger; I am any thing

That knows not pity.

(5.1.64–72)

Evadne views her role as revenger as inherently separate from any gendered identity she may have possessed earlier in the play. Instead, within the liminal ritual she has fully embraced the monstrous and become an unfeeling instrument of vengeance. She begins by denying that she is Evadne by rejecting the identifying pronoun “she” and stating she is not accurately described as a woman. But, it should be noted, that does not mean [151] that Evadne embraces the masculine. In its place she embraces the neuter position of “thing,” going so far as to describe herself as “a tiger” whose sole identifying characteristic in her description is its lack of “pity.” It is striking just how similar Evadne’s sentiment in these lines is to Lady Macbeth’s spell-like request,

unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty.
(1.5.39–41)^[16]

In many ways Evadne is embodying the genderless position that Lady Macbeth aspires to — an identity where femininity is erased without need for a masculine identity to replace it. That said, this role as genderless revenger is short-lived.

Just a few lines later, Evadne returns to the language of taint and corruption that Melantius used to describe her in act four. She tells the King,

I was once fair,
Once I was lovely, not a blowing rose
More chastely sweet, till thou, thou, thou foul canker,
(Stir not!) didst poison me.
(5.1.76–79)

It is in many ways her uncomplicated feminine gender position that Evadne has come to avenge as well as reclaim. The King is the “canker” that must be removed to enable her to uncomplicate her gender expression. This is the logic that underpins her assertion to Amintor a few scenes later that she has come to him transformed and without “her mischiefs” (5.3.111). She makes the case, unsuccessfully, that by embracing [152] her monstrous gender position she is able to enact a rite that has a social force on par with a coming-of-age ceremony or a marriage. This self-fashioned ritual has, in her eyes, allowed her to purge her feminine identity of the “canker” that poisons it.

Needless to say, Amintor rejects the efficacy of Evadne’s rite and in so doing the possibility of salvaging their marriage, which leads to her eventual suicide. Once she has died the play quickly shifts away from Evadne as Amintor’s attention is drawn to Aspatia, who still has not died despite having been stabbed over seventy lines earlier. Unlike Ophelia in Hamlet, Anne Frankford in A Woman Killed with Kindness, and a number of other female characters in the drama of the period, Evadne is not mourned by the male characters in the play once her sexuality is stabilized in death. Her position as an autonomous female revenger puts her beyond the pale of early modern dramatic logic. Beaumont and Fletcher’s tragedy pushes the logic of revenge tragedy in a different direction from their Jacobean peers — instead of reveling in the over-the-top violence that we associate with the genre at the time, The Maid’s Tragedy aestheticizes gender, sexual practice, and the taboo of kink itself.

Evadne’s repeated and misguided references in act five to the taint of her unchaste self being removed by her act of murder of the King further develop her understanding of the link between vengeance and cultural performance. Her statement that she “was not free till now” (5.3.121) is prefaced by the line she speaks to Amintor as she enters, which ends with

It is Evadne still that follows thee,
But not her mischiefs.
(5.3.110–11)

In her admission of guilt, Evadne frames the act of violence as inherently transformative. Unlike the majority of revengers from the period who die rather immediately after they have achieved their revenge, Evadne not only lives long enough to communicate the news to Amintor but [153] in this moment attempts to frame the act of killing as a new beginning. Revenge itself is only one motivator; the other, potentially more important reason is the personal metamorphosis she erroneously believes the act has catalyzed. She describes the murder as some sort of rite of absolution that divorces her from her past sexual transgressions and allows her to restart her marriage to Amintor — the King’s murder becomes, in her mind, like a second wedding, waiting, like the first, for the consummation of the wedding night. But this time, it is Amintor, not Evadne, who leaves the ritual incomplete and demonstrates the flawed nature of her logic. After telling Amintor of the King’s murder, Evadne bids him, “[T]ake me to thy bed; we may not part” (5.3.151). When he declines to take her to bed, tells her to leave, and eventually begins to leave himself, Amintor denies Evadne the ritual transformation that she incorrectly hopes to find in the aftermath of her sexualized act of regicide (5.3.152–66).

Amintor’s rejection of Evadne is all the more telling because his initial horror is also framed by the ritualized codes of sexual practice. His immediate response to the news of the King’s murder is to say,

Those have most power to hurt us that we love;
We lay our sleeping lives within their arms.
(5.3.127–28)

While these lines certainly echo his interactions with Aspatia and his own cuckolding, they also acknowledge the inherent social contract that exists between sexual partners. While this type of agreement is to some degree made explicit in the ritualized marriage relationship, it is worth noting that Amintor sees the force of that agreement as existing in all sexual relations and also, interestingly, as more relevant than a subject’s loyalty to their monarch. For Amintor, it is Evadne’s misuse of the authority granted to her by her ability to manipulate the ritualized codes of the sexual relationships, as well as the additional control granted by [154] kink practice and her own sexual competence, that makes her deeds so unforgivable.

Amintor’s unwillingness to forgive Evadne for her abuse of kink practice in many ways makes the play strangely prescient regarding contemporary mores around sexual culture and the importance of consent. This added layer twists many of the traditional moral standards embedded in the revenge tragedy, specifically that revengers generally need to die solely in order to stabilize the taboo nature of private vengeance. Evadne’s suicide adds a new facet to the standard expectations of the genre; her death serves as much to punish her abuse of the codes of sexual partnership as it does to stabilize her act of regicide. In addition, her sexual competence and her use of bondage and kink more generally are not in and of themselves marked as problematic; they only become so in a space where consent and care for a sexual partner are ignored. In other words, kink practice’s ability to generate the access that Evadne abuses to kill the King does not lead the play to demonize alternative sexual practices. Instead, the play places that blame on Evadne, not on the kink.

Evadne’s kinky sexual competence is all the more powerful because of its ability to invert both political and gender hierarchies in a period when those social structures were both extraordinarily potent. The manner in which The Maid’s Tragedy dramatizes that power through the elision of sexuality, violence, ritual, and performance indicates just how foundational these issues are to the play’s structure and offers us a glimpse into the sexual culture of the period that we rarely see in English Renaissance drama. Twenty-first-century cultures of kink are clearly aware of this same type of competence and the potential dangers that arise from its abuse, which is demonstrated by the ways that those communities emphasize the importance of consent both before and during play. Beaumont and Fletcher’s play makes the case that these insights may in some form date back to at least the early modern period.