Beaumont and Fletcher's Rhodes: early modern geopolitics and mythological topography in The Maid's Tragedy

Abstract

Discussions of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher's Maid's Tragedy have infrequently engaged with the matter of its setting. Nonetheless, as we are frequently reminded within the play, its tragic events are purportedly unfolding in a very specific locale: the island of Rhodes. This article seeks to shed new interpretative light on The Maid's Tragedy by offering a novel reading of the play s location that accounts for the semantic plurality of Rhodes in the early modern imagination. Focusing, by turns, on Rhodes meanings in the contemporary, geopolitical context of Ottoman conflicts in the early modern Mediterranean and on its regional connections with the well-trodden literary landscapes of classical tradition, this article ultimately highlights the polysemous quality of Beaumont and Fletcher's Rhodian setting.