The Heretical Foreign Woman, the ‘Raging Turk’, and Martial Figures in Fletcher’s <i>The Tamer Tamed</i> and <i>The Island Princess</i>

Abstract

John Fletcher’s The Tamer Tamed (1609-11), a farcical domestic comedy, and The Island Princess (1619-21), a romantic tragicomedy and travel drama, share several structural similarities despite their generic differences. In a domestic setting, the earlier play presents a reverse taming narrative while also giving voice to the rampant misogyny of the would-be wife-tamer and his allies. Set in the islands of Ternate and Tidore, The Island Princess stages Malukan resistance to European resource exploitation while also portraying the Portuguese colonizers’ vituperative contempt for the islanders and their religion. The similar attitudes of patriarchs and colonizers in these plays exemplify the interconnectedness, which scholars have long pointed out, of gender and colonial discourse. This discursive connection alone, however, does not account for specific plot similarities between the plays, nor do the source materials that the plays draw upon. These similarities include the lead female character’s attempt to convert a male love interest to her ‘faith’ and the male character’s disproportionate rage in response. In each play, the male character – Petruchio in The Tamer Tamed and Armusia in The Island Princess – receives advice from his allies to rape Maria and Quisara respectively. Each play ends with the male character’s mock martyrdom and the ambiguous restoration of gender and colonial hierarchy. I argue that theatregrams are behind these structural parallels, namely, the tropes of the heretical foreign woman and of the “raging Turk.” Apart from Quisara in The Island Princess, Fletcher’s use of characters not overtly identified as a heretic or “Turk” as iterations of these well-worn tropes in effect destabilizes the tropes themselves. This destabilization, however, fails to undo the associated constructions of race as they apply to women. In each play, moreover, a civilian character appropriating a military identity embodies one of these two tropes, which contributes to the increasingly complex and varied representations of martial identity in the period.