'The Maid's Tragedy' Summary

The Maid's Tragedy is a play by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher. It was first published in 1619.

The play has provoked divided responses from critics.

Critics have varied widely, even wildly, in their responses to the play. Many have recognised the play's power, but have complained about the play's extremity and artificiality. (People who dislike aspects of Beaumont and Fletcher's work will find those dislikes amply represented, even crystallised, in this play.) John Glassner once wrote that to display "the insipidity of the plot, its execrable motivation or the want of it, and the tastelessness of many of the lines one would have to reprint the play."

Andrew Gurr, one of the play's modern editors, notes that the play "has that anomaly amongst Elizabethan tragedies, an original plot." Other critics have noted that the play introduces romance into the standard revenge tragedy, and that the play, even in its artificiality, has relevance to the disputes about authority that characterised relations between kings and Parliament in the decades leading up to the English Civil War.[4] Due to its setting on the island of Rhodes, the play has also been read in light of sixteenth-century Ottoman military expansion in the Mediterranean.