“Restless and still Unsatisfied We Roam”: Politics and Gender in Eliza Haywood’s
The Fair Captive
By
Rachel Gould
Thesis
Submitted to the Faculty of the
Graduate School of Vanderbilt University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
in
English
December, 2015
Nashville, Tennessee
Approved:
Bridget Orr, Ph.D. Mark Wollaeger, Ph.D.
On February 21, 1749, an anonymous letter titled “A Criticism on Mahomet and
Irene. In a Letter to The Author” appeared in the General Advertiser and critically mocked
the subplot in Samuel Johnson’s recent production of Irene: A Tragedy:
The first Thing I have to enquire into, is your Scene; which, I think you have
plac’d in the Garden of the Seraglio: Nay, in the most private and sequester’d
Walks of it; which the Sultan, being deep in Love and fond of Melancholly,
had chosen for his own Retirement. This, I think is the Place where your two
Grecian Heroes, in Turkish Habits, open the Play; which, I doubt not, amaz’d
every Body, to think how they got there: For the Seraglio being a Place so
guarded by Slaves, and kept sacred to the Sultan’s Pleasures, how should it be
possible two strange Turks (suppose they were really so) durst appear,
dress’d in all the Magnificence of the eastern State, in the most retir’d Walks
of the Palace Garden, and never be enquir’d after? (6-7)
As Johnson’s anonymous critic notes, the Ottoman seraglio had long been privy only to the eyes of the sultan, a space of rumored sensuality that epitomized Ottoman despotism. For a
European man to gain entrance was absurdly unthinkable, and yet Johnson’s drama features two such interlopers whose presence leads to chaos and ultimately death.1
Despite Johnson’s seeming departure from the the traditional British view of the
Ottoman seraglio, his breach of this sacrosanct space had been anticipated a few decades
earlier by Eliza Haywood, whose tragedy, The Fair Captive, similarly introduces a disguised
European male character into the sultan’s harem. Staging the long-held fear of British
1 For further information regarding the critical response to Johnon’s Irene, see James Boulton’s Samuel Johnson: The Critical Heritage (2002) and Wendy Belcher’s Abyssinia's Samuel Johnson: Ethiopian Thought in the Making of an English Author (2012).
2 enslavement in an Islamic state, The Fair Captive presents the dramatic scene of a Christian
woman held prisoner within the Ottoman court and the ensuing efforts to protect her from
rape.2 Haywood’s play diverges from the customary encounter between the virtuous and
the aggressor, though, when she also introduces an Ottoman bashaw name Haly, who offers
the play’s Christian hero passage into the seraglio:
At Dead of Night repair to the Seraglio,
Where in Disguise a Slave of mine shall wait,
And safely lead the lovely Captive to thee;
Then thro a private Garden strait conduct you
To the Sea-side unseen, and unsuspected. (I.I.11) 3
Haly’s offer is astonishing, for not only does he suggest that the Christian, Alphonso, can
gain entrance into this most intimate and heavily guarded area, indicating a weakness on
the part of the sultan, but the Ottoman character also offers assistance into this space,
hinting that he will betray either his country or Alphonso.
Haly’s offer would have been unimaginable prior to the defeat of the Ottomans in
Vienna in 1683. Long a powerful and aggressive neighbor of mainland Europe, the Ottoman
empire stood as the epitome of military might and imperial splendor, and yet by 1699, the
Treaty of Karlowitz had significantly diminished the Ottoman threat so that a more
complex view born of travel narratives, rumors, and Oriental tales began to flourish in the
English imagination. These fantasies centered on the seraglio, and as Ruth Yeazell argues,
2 See Linda Colley’s Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600-1850 (2007) for a discussion of English citizens who found themselves captured while trading with the Barbary states and the English perceptions of such captivity. 3 All quotations come from The Fair Captive printed by T. Jauncy and H. Cole, 1721. All citations will be marked by act, scene, and page number.
3 “As imaginative projections, such harems tell us more about the Europeans who created
them than they do about the domestic reality of the East” (8). Indeed, given that many
Islamicate plays frequently used this space to demonstrate the absolutism of the Ottoman
empire or to represent a conflict between a virtuous woman and a despotic ruler, these
projections provided constructs through which authors could comment on the events at
home so that political, ideological, and theological structures within England became
knowable through Ottoman scenes. 4
Haywood’s tragedy premeired at Lincoln’s Inn Fields on March 4, 1721, during the aftermath of the South Sea crisis, and it echoes the uncertainty of that moment, drawing on
Islamicate tropes to represent concerns about politics, gender, and commerce. My reading of the The Fair Captive argues that Haywood wrote it as a political allegory, one that employs the sensual sphere of the harem to criticize the chaos of a globalized financial system as well as the injustices of a patriarchal system that deprived women of public credibility. Connecting public concerns surrounding the absences of George I and the power of his ministry to her own experiences as a female author, Haywood confronts a social order built on systemic speculation that would exchange kings for politicians, money for stocks, and women for power, and she offers feminine constancy as a form of resistance against such substitution, gesturing towards an alternative ideology of internal integrity.
The Fair Captive stages the story of a virtuous Christian woman, Isabella, imprisoned within a sultan’s seraglio. In the absence of the sultan, who has journeyed to
4 I am borrowing the term “Islamicate” from Marshall Hodgson. In The Venture of Islam (1975), he argues that this word should be used instead of Islamic when referring not to Islam the religion but to the socially and historically complex culture “distinctive to Islamdom and practiced by both Muslims and non-Muslims” (58). Bernadette Andrea also uses this term to describe the plays of Delarivier Manley and Mary Pix in English Women Staging Islam, 1696-1707 (2012).
4 Constantinople, the power-hungry vizier, Mustafa manages the empire, aided by his ally,
Haly, and opposed by two bashaws, Achmet and Ozmin. Although Isabella’s love, Alphonso, seeks to ransom her, Mustafa refuses the payment, intent on seducing Isabella as he has the two Muslim women featured in the play: Daraxa, his former mistress, and Irene, the sultan’s daughter and Mustafa’s wife. Daraxa hides her shame by disguising herself as a eunuch in the seraglio, and she pretends to assist Achmet and Ozmin as they support
Alphonso in a rash plot to steal Isabella from the seraglio, a plan that results in Alphonson’s capture. Aware of her husband’s lust for the Christian woman, Irene seeks to outwit
Mustafa by removing Isabella from his grasp, but Isabella hazards her virtue to appear before Mustafa in his chambers where she pleads for Alphono’s life and to offer hers in his stead. She is protected from rape by Irene, who had disguised herself as a eunuch and hidden within the chamber. Daraxa, still faithful to Mustafa, reveals the plot to him and commits suicide, and Mustafa murders Irene, unaware of her true identity until after his fatal stab. The play ends with Achmet and Ozmin leading the janissaries in a successful revolt against Mustafa, which frees the two Christians. Doubtful of Isabella’s continued virtue, Alphonso reunites with her after the deposed Mustafa confirms that Isabella does indeed remain virtuous.
Haywood’s depiction of an absent sultan and the resulting political instability departs suggestively from the Islamicate plays of Restoration drama. A tradition inaugurated by William Davenant’s The Siege of Rhodes (1656), Islamicate heroic plays represented the concerns of the English state – succession, imperial ambition, and national identity – through scenes of sensual absolutism ruled over by a despotic sultan. London theater companies staged forty such plays from 1660-1714, and many of these were set
5 against an Ottoman backdrop that united the imperial threat that the Ottoman empire
posed to Europe with the opportunities that England’s commercial interests in the region
provided.5 With England isolated not only geographically but more importantly
theologically from mainland Europe after the English Reformation, Elizabeth 1 negotiated a
formal trade concession with the Ottoman sultanate in 1580, which led to the formation of
the Levant Company. By 1638, the Levant merchants, known as pashas, had established it
as England’s leading trade company, and both their imported merchandise and their tales
from the caravan trails fed England’s fledgling curiousity in the Ottoman empire.6 One of
these pashas, Paul Rycaut, drew from his personal experiences to write The Present State of
the Ottoman Empire and General Historie of the Turks, which he published in 1687. This
work along with Richard Knolle’s General History of the Turks (1603) and Aaron Hill’s Full
and Just Account of the Present State of the Ottoman Empire (1709) presented detailed
reports on the region, and Bridget Orr emphasizes that these reports were perceived as
authoritative and accurate accounts of Ottoman life (26). By the early eighteenth century,
these travel narratives had been joined by the Grub Street translation of Antoine Galland’s
Les Mille et une Nuit (1704-1717), and these texts spurred contradictory representations of
the Ottoman empire as a hotbed of despotism, eroticism, cruelty, and opulence but also as a
site of potential upward mobility and political influence unavailable to most in British
society. Both the Grub Street hack and the professional writers adopted these tropes,
5 Bridget Orr argues in Empire on the Stage 1660-1714 that Restoration heroic drama features a concern over the nature of empire, and the Islamicate plays acted as a “contemporary mirror, not simply a historical imaginary, in which local political problems, whether those of succession or the relation between the crown and private citizens, could be re-imagined, explored, and resolved” (61). 6 For further information regarding the Levant Company and pashas, see James Mather, Pashas: Traders and Travellers in the Islamic World (2011).
6 crafting pseudo-oriental tales and translating other French adaptions of Arabic originals so
that interest in the Ottoman empire surged.
Oriental fictions, particularly the Islamicate plays, served as a powerful mode of
political discourse. Ros Ballaster asserts that the Oriental narrative is inherently “fabular”
in form, both concealing and revealing information as it attempts to “move” its audience to
a place of new knowledge and reformed morals.7 As the supposed antithesis of Britain, the
Ottoman empire provided an imaginative space available to writers of any political
inclination so that a despotic ruler intent on rape could serve as a metaphor for British
colonial pursuits or as a critique of patriarchy. Dramatists wove these tropes together in a
multilocal and transcultural spectacle to promote an alternative ideology in a method as
critical as it was entertaining.
Drawing on the rich critical possibilities provided by this Islamicate corpus,
Haywood adapted this tradition and revised familiar tropes to speak to the current political
situation and cultural concerns in Britain. Through many scholars have searched
Haywood’s private life for signs of her political allegiance, no consensus on her position has
been reached. Toni Bowers argues that Haywood was a passionate Tory, while Ballaster,
who originally argued against political readings of Haywood’s works, similarly asserts that
some of Haywood’s novels carry Opposition undertones. While Haywood’s work does
reflect Tory concerns, I agree with Kathryn King’s recent assessment that Haywood’s
7 See Ballaster’s Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England 1662-1785 for her discussion of Oriental fables.
7 political leanings were complex and focused on those oppressed and excluded from power,
a concern clearly expressed in The Fair Captive.8
As with many political allegories, Haywood’s characters refuse easy interpretation
while simultaneously referencing current political events. Her audience, alert to the
potential readings of the relationships between characters, power structures, and
nationalities, would have been prepared for the political satire to come and likely would
have identified the key characters in the play with the major political actors in the
government and in court. The immediate and most easily assumed connection rises from
the alignment between the missing Ottoman sultan and the frequent absences of George I.
Members of the Ottoman court, Achmet and Ozmin, alert the audience to the sultan’s
absence and to the subsequent grab for power by Mustafa during the first act of The Fair
Captive, yet they offer no explanation as to why he left or where he is. Irene also alludes to
the missing leader when, as she attempts to remove Isabella from the court, she reveals
that the sultan has departed the capital stating, “I’ve one Request to make,/ That thou, with
me wilt leave Constantinople,/And bear me Company to meet the Sultan” (IV.II.48). Like
Ozmin and Achmet, she never explains the cause of the sultan’s departure, but she too
recognizes the cover it has provided for Mustafa’s schemes. While in many Islamicate
captivity narratives, the sultan features as a prominent character who may be converted by
the virtuous Christian woman or who may succeed in robbing the captive of her virtue, the
scarcity of this character in Haywood’s play marks a divergence from the expected
narrative, and his character, or lack thereof, finds a neat parallel in George I’s relationship
8 See Bower’s “Collusive Resistance: Sexual Agency and Partisian Politics in Love in Excess” in The Passionate Fictions of Eliza Haywood (2000), Ballaster’s “A Gender of Opposition: Eliza Haywood’s Scandal Fiction” in The Passionate Fictions of Eliza Haywood (2000), and King’s Political Biography of Eliza Haywood (2012).
8 with the British monarchy. George I inherited the monarchy following the death of Anne in
1714, and this responsibility drew him away from his beloved Hanover to Britain. As a
result, he made frequent trips back whenever opportunity permitted.
George I’s ministry was plagued with crises. Although Whigs were prominent in his ministry, the party was divided in a fashion reminiscent of the discord that Haywood depicts in her Ottoman court. With the sultan missing from the play, a substitute ruler fills his place: the vizier, Mustafa.9 Achmet observes that Mustafa’s powers are growing
unchecked even when the sultan is present:
Yes, ‘tis this this Visier governs all: The Sultan,
Grown old in Power, now nodes upon the Throne,
And holds, with such a slack and weaken’d Hand,
The Reins of Empire, that I am amaz’d
They drop not from him quite. One bears the Name,
But t’other has the Power. (I.I.4)
Opposed to Mustafa’s authority, Achmet’s sly observation signals that the sultan, even when present, has lost interest in governing the empire, a task that the despotic Mustafa is only too happy to complete in his stead. Haywood’s audience likely would have associated
Mustafa with Charles Spencer, Earl of Sunderland, an ambitious and politically shrewd man who had successfully elevated his power under George I to become a close advisor to the
9 Adam Beach notes in “Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Slavery in the Ottoman (and the British) Empire” (2006) that the Ottoman vizier was structurally an elite slave, and as such, lacked the power that British representations often associated with the position (295).
9 king.10 Like the sultan in the play, George I removed himself from British politics not only
through his trips to Hanover, but, as he was fluent in French instead of English, he also
frequently excused himself from cabinet meetings, allowing his chief ministers, including
Sunderland, who was also fluent in French, to consult him privately afterwards (Plumb 59).
The Epilogue to The Fair Captive, which was written by Aaron Hill, appears to mock these
infrequent appearances of the king:
To Matrimonial Contract, meekly just,
All Women, there, obey – because they must.
Silent, they sit, in passive Rows, all Day;
And musing, cros-legg’d, stich strange Thoughts away…
Slow must five hundred Womens Virtue fall,
Like the warm Sun, he daily does appear;
But his grand Round is made, scarce once a Year! (Epilogue. xv)
Hill’s lines are frequently seen as a jest about the forced chastity of the seraglio mistresses,
yet this quip also serves to emphasize further the absence of the monarch from Parliament,
depriving it of his kingly presence.
Where Mustafa relied on Haly, Sunderland worked closely with James Stanhope, a
man of similar tastes to Sunderland who, for a time, sympathized with Sunderland as well
as with the Opposition (Plumb 50). Achmet and Ozmin likewise find allegorical
counterparts in the figures of Robert Walpole and Charles Townsend, who, although Whigs,
10 The vizier’s name, Mustafa, alludes back to Orrery’s Mustapha while also resonating with current political events. John Plumb notes in The First Four Georges (1956) that George I owned two Muslim slaves whom he had captured during battle, one of whom was named Mustafa (43).
10 worked closely with the Tories against the Whig leadership from 1717-1721, charging the
Hanoverian leadership with corruption and working to sabotage its agenda.
The Fair Captive debuted six months after the price of the South Sea Company stock
fell from a market high of £1100 per share in August of 1720, to £190 per share by the end
of September, creating social unrest and a political crisis.11 Unsurprisingly, when Anthony
Boheme took to the stage to deliver the The Fair Captive’s Prologue, the lines immediately
addressed the turbulent scene:
Long has it been the Clamour of the Age,
That Party-Feuds have rent both State and Stage;
But, (thank the Foresight of our South-Sea Masters!)
Faction is quite o’erwhelm’d by worse Disasters:
Nor This, nor That, can we a Grievance call,
For One great Discontent has swallowed all. (Prologue, xiii)
Haywood’s blunt opening lines indicts those in leadership as guilty of the political chaos
that erupted from the crash of the South Sea Company, a theme that she continues to
develop throughout the play. Achmet tells Ozmin that the janissaries feel quite betrayed by
Mustafa’s failure to pay them, and Haly too references the sufferings of the janissaries,
claiming that the government wishes it could have prevented such hardship:
------For the Janizaries,
Oft have I heard him grieve their hard Enduring,
11 For further discussion of the South Sea Bubble crisis, see John Caswell, The South Sea Bubble (1960); P. G. M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit (1967), and Julian Hoppit, “The Myth of the South Sea Bubble” in Transaction of the Royal Historical Society (2002). For additional information about the overlap between the crisis and the contemporary print market, see Catherine Ingrassia, Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England: A Culture of Paper Credit (1998).
11 And wished he cou’d, from his own private Purse,
Relieve their Sufferings, till the Publick Stock,
Which lately has been drain’d, cou’d do ‘em justice. (II.II.24)
Despite these claims, as one of the perpetrators of Mustafa’s slow seizure of power, Haly’s comments appear ironic, for he fails to acknowledge the reason why the stock has been drained and appears to ignore the regime’s role, a criticism echoed by those financially injured in the South Sea crisis.
Lured into the South Sea Company’s scheme by rising share prices, investors saw their financial assets dissipate rapidly, and they directed their ensuing anger at the government’s failure to oversee this speculative venture. Already an unpopular figure,
George 1 was not even in the country at the moment of the crash, having returned to his home in Hanover in early July of 1720, and his closest advisors, Stanhope and Sunderland, were viewed as guilty agents who had perpetuated the deception surrounding the scheme.
John Carswell notes that Sunderland had negotiated a “profit” on company stock so that he was allowed £500 for every point that the stock rose, a benefit that Hill slyly references in his epilogue to The Fair Captive when he mocks the government “wives” stating, “Learn’d in their Lord’s vast Worth, they get by heart,/ How rich each is, in her five hundredth Part!”
(Epilogue. xv.)12 Though these same political leaders suffered from the crash, such insider trading of assets infuriated the public and caused many across the nation to question the
handling of the national debt and the state’s economic resources. Petitions to the House of
12 See John Caswell’s The South Sea Bubble (1960) for further information regarding the ministry’s connections to the South Sea Company (114).
12 Commons linked the crisis to a political failure to prevent the instability and deceit
surrounding the speculation.13
The Ottoman empire provided an ideal setting onto which Haywood could project the political uncertainty derived from the crash and through which she could interrogate the speculative nature of this financial scheme. These anxieties, Catherine Ingrassia argues, emerged in references to the “feminized” men and the “empowered” women who were caught up by the financial opportunity (“Pleasure” 192). Haywood personifies these anxieties in the figure of Mustafa, who, driven by an all-consuming lust, seeks woman after woman, never satisfied and always risking his political gains on another affair. Calling on
“all the Statesman’s Subtilty to assist me,” Mustafa manipulates his surroundings for his pleasurable profit, trading one woman for the next when a more desirable conquest who promises even more power appears (III.I.29).
The women whom Mustafa has seduced and abandoned know his scheme. Daraxa, his former mistresses, openly regrets the investment of her heart as she declares:
I shou’d not have believ’d the Visier base,
Had not his Wrongs to me unseal’d my Eyes,
And taught me, he that so foully cou’d betray
A Maid who lov’d him, might betray the World. (I.I.9)
Daraxa candidly connects Mustafa’s licentiousness to political crimes born of a self- interested motivation.14 The love Mustafa professed to Daraxa has proven to be false, as he
13 Julian Hoppit notes in “The Myths of the South Sea Bubble” (2002) that 87 petitions were submitted within nine months of the South Sea crisis, and he argues that most of these petitions were reactions to the political ramifications of the crash rather than the economic aftermath (154- 55).
13 abandoned her to marry the sultan’s daughter, Irene, and he is now poised to repeat this
pattern with Isabella. In an effort to prevent this betrayal, Irene forced Mustafa to swear
loyalty to her through marriage, but Ozmin warns her that Mustafa will likely renege on his
word when he declares, “Our law allows Plurality of Wives,/ And he, perhaps, believes you
may forget/ The Vow he made to marry none but you” (II.I.18). Mustafa has bedded the
women that enable him to gain political power, and the Christian captive, typically reserved
only for the sultan’s lust, would serve as one more step in his usurpation of the sultan’s
authority.
Predictable in his indfidelity, Mustafa’s schemes produce a political instability that
invites further corruption and deceit as the bashaws around him jostle for power. Although
audiences may have initially been inclined to favor Achmet and Ozmin for their support of
Alphonso’s mission to rescue Isabella, the play suggests their motivations for opposing
Mustafa are born not of a stronger moral than Mustafa possesses but from a similar drive
for power.
For the audience watching, this political jostling would have held unsettling
parallels to the British government. The succession of George I in 1714, the failed Jacobite
rebellion of 1715, and the tension between George I and his son resulted in a period of
unease and competition between the Whigs and Tories that was punctuated by the crash of
the South Sea Bubble. Walpole and Townsend found themselves out of political favor in
1717, which prompted them to align themselves with the Tories in opposition to Whigs,
like Sunderland and Stanhope, who held office. Much like Achmet and Ozmin, Walpole and
14 For further discussion of the connection between sexual and political crimes in Haywood’s work, see Paula Backscheider’s Selected Fiction and Drama of Eliza Haywood (199) and Marta Kvande’s “The Outside Narrator in Eliza Haywood’s Political Novels” (2003).
14 Townsend’s movements against the ministry were grounded not in principle but in a push for political power that Plumb refers to as a “battle of the ‘ins’ and the ‘outs’” (55). Yet the
British viewed such competition for political status as a symptom of an unsound Ottoman government far different from the steadiness of their own parliamentary body. In his maxims of the Ottoman empire, Rycaut observes that “Men are raised at once by adulation, change and the sole favour of the Prince, without any Title of noble Blood…and yet how
short their continuance is in them, how with one frown of their Prince they are cut off” (3).
Rycaut, in an argument later supported by Hill, asserts that Ottoman political success links
not to nobility but to industry, a system he faults as being instable and built on the quick
substitution of one politician for another. Though the British credited their government
with greater stability than that of the Ottoman empire, the previous few years had
demonstrated that their ministry officials gained or lost power in a fashion reminiscent of
Ottoman politics. The same substitution grounding the credit of the South Sea Company
appeared to be influencing British politics. Speculative fever had infected every part of
society so that politicians could be exchanged as rapidly as stock prices.
With the fickleness of Achmet and Ozmin thus exposed and the deceit and crimes of
Mustafa denounced, Alphonso appears to present a potential alternative to speculative
Muslim greed and desire. While the vizier dissembles his true motives and intents,
Alphonso declares himself to be truthful and sincere. Betrayed by the duplicitous Haly
during the attempt to rescue Isabella, Alphonso finds himself on trial before Mustafa and a
council of bashaws where he differentiates himself from the Ottomans when he declares, “I
scorn to be unjust, mean, or dishonest,/ To gain your Favor, or to avoid your Tortures”
(III.I.34). This honesty, a stylized indicator of his religion and citizenship, marks Alphonso
15 as a figure of alterity within the Ottoman court, a difference that Achmet emphasizes when
he describes Alphonso as “a Stranger to our Laws and Customs” who is “only led by love”
(III.I.32). Unlike Mustafa, Alphonso yearns after only one woman, Isabella, and that desire
leads him to forfeit his liberty in pursuit of her freedom.
Alphonso’s status as a political outsider may have led Haywood’s audience to
connect him allegorically to the Prince of Wales. Animosity between George I and his son
resulted in the prince’s expulsion from court in 1717, so that the prince and his wife,
Caroline of Ansbach, relocated to Leicester House, which soon became the center of the
Opposition. While George I maintained a small circle of primarily Hanoverian advisors and a few British ministry officials, the prince and his wife worked to woo the British people, welcoming a lively gathering of a younger politicians to Leicester House. Among those who made their way to the prince’s court were Walpole and Townsend. Much like the alliance between Alphonso, Achmet, and Ozmin, Plumb records that these men, particularly
Walpole, quickly formed a close relationship with the prince and princess, and they spent a significant amount of time discussing the flaws and potential embarrassments of the king’s government (57). George I’s appetite for women was well known, and although he did not
possess a harem in the Ottoman sense, he did maintain several mistresses. Prince George,
by contrast, remained faithful to his wife throughout his entire life, and he sought to
distance himself from his father’s lifestyle. While the king retreated frequently back to his
first love, his home in Hanover, the prince and princess adapted British customs and strove
to model an exemplary private life, one that would suggest an integrity which George I
appeared to lack and which would indicate the nature of the relationship that the prince
might one day have with the nation once he became king.
16 Unsurprisingly then, Alphonso claims integrity as a central component of masculinity when he tells Ozmin, “I dare to do anything that’s honest and becomes/ The
Character of Man, as Man should be” (IV.I.45). Yet even as Alphonso embodies a specifically
British masculinity that contrasted with the feminized treachery typically associated with
Ottoman behavior, his conduct suggests an unsettling inconstancy. Although he is aware of the multiple male gazes directed at Isabella, Alphonso believes her to be honorable and faithful to his will, leading him to declare himself, “Blest in my Love, secure of Isabella”
(III.I.36). Alphonso, nevertheless, engages in a contest of authority over Isabella against
Mustafa, charging her to be wary of Mustafa’s advances. At the first test of her fidelity,
Alphonso rejects Isabella’s claims of continued virtue, refusing even to allow her to speak when she attempts to defend her actions. Unable to abort Alphonso’s rage against her,
Isabella must rely on a male defense of her virtue, which Mustafa provides:
------Maid,
More than these wounds: Had I possess’d that
I had ransack all the Joys that Life could give,
And would have smiled at Death. O Isabella
Pity me, and from that rigid virtue which thou bear’st
Recede a little. (V.II.74)
Only the male voice, even one that issues from the mouth of the deceptive enemy, carries the currency and authority to reverse Alphonso’s perception of Isabella’s character and to restore her virtue. Such behavior marks Alphonso’s character, rather than Isabella’s, as suspect. Despite his repeated assertions that Isabella would be faithful, Alphonso’s skepticism and his refusal to hear Isabella’s defense reveals that his belief in her virtue
17 stems not from her proven constancy but from his ability to control her. Alphonso’s
immediate suspicions of Isabella thus renders his own claim to honesty uncertain as he
unveils a latent despotic tendency.
Alphonso’s nascent despotism underscores a lingering Orientalist fear of the
phenomenon referred to as “turning Turk.”15 Gerald MacLean observes that the early moderns worried that those who were held captive or lived in close proximity to the
Ottoman empire might absorb some of its traits and, in turn, abandon their faith and their
European heritage for Islam’s perceived sensuality and absolutism. This image, argues
MacLean, presented the Ottomans as “managing to represent for European men everything that they imagined themselves not to be” of which the fundamental unifying feature was “a principle of inner-contradiction, of inconstancy” (7). Alphonso, dismissive of the devotion of his beloved to him, thus displays a disposition prone to an even greater threat: an ideological betrayal of himself and his country. Despite the appearance of difference that
Alphonso offered, Haywood’s European hero proves no more or less honorable than his
Ottoman counterparts, rebuking the notion that either side can be valorized. As she links together the political and the economic systems into one, Haywood thus exposes the substitutive and speculative nature of British patriarchy as no more constant or certain than that of the Ottoman empire.
Even as Haywood implicates British masculinity as guilty of perfidy and absolutism, she pushes back against this system of substitution clearly susceptible to collapse through
15 Gerald MacLean explores the image of the “Turk” in Looking East: English Writing and the Ottoman Empire Before 1800 (2007), and he argues that the concept functioned beyond just a reference to nationality but operated as a reference to a person’s very character: a person could choose to become a “Turk” unlike being born a citizen of a particular nation state (57).
18 the figure of the woman. As a captivity narrative, The Fair Captive features a structure that
invited women to image a female agency that could circumvent the traditional boundaries
stipulated by patriarchy, and this attempt to grant women an authority and a personhood
still largely denied them locates Haywood’s play within a teleology of feminocentric
Islamicate dramas.16 While Islam and the Ottoman empire had long served as metaphors
through which dramatists could criticize opposing ideologies, female dramatists amended
these tropes and merged theology, ideology, sexuality, and politics into a new
feminocentric Orientalism.17 Playwrights such as Mary Pix and Delarivier Manley entered
into political debates by way of the seraglio, a space traditionally associated with male
fantasy and constraint that they repurposed as a metaphorical vehicle through which to
challenge patriarchal limits. Each dramatist instilled her own political views into her
portrayal of the seraglio, resulting in a metaphor that refused to conform to a standard
reading but rather provided a lens through which to view cultural criticism. Pix, who
tended to display Whig sympathies, used the seraglio in Ibrahim, the Thirteenth Emperor of
the Turks (1695-96) to display the vulnerability of women and to critique the decadence of absolutist rule, whereas Manley, who frequently targeted Whigs in her oeuvre, used the seraglio in The Royal Mischief (1696) to challenge the narrative of British female liberty by presenting Persian women as possessing freedoms that were frequently denied British
16 For further information about the potential for social mobility that British women associated with the harem, please see Khalid Bekkaoui, “White Women and Moorish Fancy in Eighteenth- Century Literature” published in The Arabian Nights in Historical Context: Between East and West (2008). 17 Joyce Zonana first describes feminist orientalism in “The Sultan and the Slave: Feminist Orientalism and the Structure of Jane Eyre,” Signs: The Journal of Women in Culture and Society (1993), where she describes it as the displacement of “the sources of patriarchal oppression onto an ‘Oriental,’ ‘Mahometan’ society, enabling British reader to contemplate local problems without questioning their own self-definition as Westerners and Christians” (593).
19 women.18 These female wits and others, including Aphra Behn and Catharine Trotter,
created a niche within dramaturgy that exploited political satire as an instrument through
which to challenge and transcend female social boundaries.
This feminocentric Orientalism likely would have appealed to Haywood, an interest
shared and encouraged by her mentor, Aaron Hill. Recent scholarship by Christine Gerrard,
Kathryn King, and Earla Wilputte has explored the literary network that Haywood
cultivated, ranging from William Chetwood, who published her first novel, to John Rich, the
manager of Lincoln’s Inn Fields.19 But it was her relationship with Hill that proved
particularly formative, as he welcomed her into the coterie of young writers that he
gathered around him. Haywood, plausibly a member of the circle from 1719-1724, joined
with Hill, Richard Savage, Martha Fowke and others regularly to exchange manuscripts and
poems. Unique among other coteries, the Hillarians, as they were called, included women
and sought to create meaningful, professional relationships between writers of both sexes.
An admirer of female authors, Hill was an ardent supporter of Haywood’s early work,
greatly influencing her writing style and her early content, and he likely pointed her to
Delarivier Manley, whose writing he had publicly praised in his Plain Dealer.
Haywood’s Islamicate drama must have been an attractive text to Hill, for it brought
together his abiding interests in the Ottoman empire and in the theater. Hill had gained his
18 Other Islamicate plays by female playwrights include Catharine Trotter’s Agnes de Castro (1696), Pix’s The Conquest of Spain (1705), and Manley’s Almyna; or the Arabian Vow (1706). 19 Christine Gerrard’s Aaron Hill: The Muses Projector, 1685-1750 (2003) provides a biography for Aaron Hill, a champion of female writers, and details the close relationship between Hill and Haywood during her early years as a professional writer. Kathryn King’s A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood (2012) provides updated information regarding Haywood’s personal life and argues that Haywood’s novels should be read as political commentaries. Earla Wilputte’s Passion and Languag in Eighteenth Century Literature: The Aesthetic Sublime in the Work of Eliza Haywood, Aaron Hill, and Martha Fowke (2014) argues that Haywood’s writing uses the sublime, a discourse she learned from Hill, as a language to through which to express passion and her inner life.
20 own authorial status following the publication of his Full and Just Account, which detailed
his travels throughout Constantinople, Greece, Egypt, Jordan, and other eastern states. His
personal observations of the restrictions surrounding the seraglio combined with his
obsession over the costumes and the stage designs of theatrical productions would have
made him an invaluable reference for Haywood as she wrote the particulars of the drama’s
plot.20 Hill even contributed the epilogue to The Fair Captive, which gave Haywood’s play
an Oriental authority it would have otherwise lacked.
Haywood’s connection to Hill as well as her work as an actress at Lincoln’s Inn
Fields likely created the opportunity for Haywood to write The Fair Captive. Fresh off the
success of her first novel, Love in Excess (1719-1720), Haywood was approached by John
Rich, who asked her to revise a play titled, The Fair Captive, which he had purchased from
Captain Robert Hurst but had later determined to be unfit for the stage.21 In the
advertisement attached to the printed version of the play, Haywood describes her writing
process and indicates that she found the original very flawed, so although she does fault
some of The Fair Captive’s poor reception on a shared authorship, she readily
acknowledges that she wrote almost an entirely new play:
On reading, I found I had much more to do than I expected; every
Character I was oblig’d to find employment for, introduced one entirely
new, without which it had been impossible to have guess’d at the Design
of the Play; and in fine, change the Diction wholly, that, excepting in the
Parts of Alphonso and Isabella, there remains not twenty Lines of the
20 Hill would later translate and revise Voltaire’s Zaire, producing his own Islamicate play, Zara, in 1733. 21 Hurst eventually wrote one other play, The Roman Maid (1725), which Rich would produce at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, a tragedy depicting a Christian maid in a pagan empire.
21 Original. (Advertisement. xii)
Though current scholarship at times excludes this drama from Haywood’s oeuvre as not original work, she clearly saw the drama as a reflection of her efforts as an author, and it includes many of the characteristics that would become hallmarks of her work: power, gender, erotic desire, and agency.
Thus joining the intertextual dialogue begun by Pix, Manley, and Trotter at the end of the seventeenth century, Haywood deploys an introductory gesture common among female playwrights: an appeal to the women in the audience to defend her work. After her announcement in the first few lines about the political stakes of her production, Haywood closes her Prologue with her request:
Not but her Sex to Favour pleads some Right,
A Female Pencil draws the Lines to-night.
Ladies, ‘tis your Concern to interpose,
Who hurt a Woman, are your Sex’s Foes;
And, Sirs, consider ‘tis a Lover’s Cause,
Sure, a Fair Captive some Compassion draws:
Think Her the Muse, and learn to pity then
A Woman’s Sufferings, from a Woman’s Pen. (Prologue. xiv)
Since, as Jacqueline Pearson observes, “Writing women were clearly guilty of something,”
Haywood is quick to acknowlege her sex and it’s perceived affect on her writing, calling on the female viewers to unite in support of her through their shared understanding of female restrictions (9). Though Haywood addresses the men in the audience as well, her request to them is for pity rather than admiration, a calculated move of performed humility designed
22 to deflect male criticism. As the opening for an Islamicate play, Haywood’s plea resonates
not only with other female playwrights but also with the female voice of Oriental fictions.
Such fictions, Ballaster reminds us, are directed not at the women they may claim as their
audience but at the powerful male listening in.22 The allegorical lesson intended by
Scheherazade or, in this case by Haywood, cannot be simply directed at its intended
audience forthright but must first be mediated by another woman, a woman who can
“interpose” on behalf of a woman’s suffering.
Each of The Fair Captive’s three women understand well the sufferings and
limitations of their female position since they all, having at one point been the focus of
Mustafa’s sexual advances, understand the danger that his actions hold for their perceived
value within the market of men. Although the harem traditionally held a titillating scene,
Haywood diminishes the eroticism by highlighting the emotional costs of Mustafa’s
licentiousness.
As the scorned lover from his past, Daraxa expresses her loss with poignant grief,
claiming that it is her own heart that is the “Betrayer of my Honour” for loving such a man
(III.II.38). Though Mustafa deserted Daraxa for the chance to marry Irene, hers is the
reputation that will be damaged should his actions become public knowledge, and she
expresses acute awareness of her position as a soiled woman, lamenting the “never-ending
Shame” that must now accompany her wherever her story is known (I.I.8).23 Despite
22 Ballaster illustrates her argument in Fabulous Orients by examining the relationship between Scheherazade, Dinarazade, and Schahriar. She argues, “To be reminded of Dinarazade’s position is to be reminded that the route taken by narrative meaning(s) is neither simple nor direct, no single flight path from the mouth of the speaker to the ear of the listener” (3). 23 Juliette Merritt argues that Haywood’s abandoned women use their emotions in order to create a female subject in the discourse. See Beyond the Spectacle: Eliza Haywood’s Female Spectators (2004).
23 Mustafa’s actions, Daraxa still loves him, and she chooses to hide her loss of public virtue by
disguising herself as a eunuch in the sultan’s harem.
Irene has likewise been abandoned, though Mustafa has yet to complete the cycle by
subduing his intended conquest. Unlike Daraxa, Irene agreed to wed Mustafa and now finds
herself trapped in a union with a man who will only disgrace her. In a statement that
echoes Daraxa’s lament, Irene ironically comments to Ozmin, “She who proclaims her
Wrongs, proclaims her Shame;/ And tho the Husband sins, the Wife is scorne’d” (II.I.19). In
an effort to prevent this scorn, Irene wields the best weapon available to her, her own wits,
in order to outsmart Mustafa’s plan as she declares, “With how much Ease an injur’d
Woman can/ Unravel all the Schemes of faithless Man” (IV.II.52). Although Haywood’s
audience might have viewed Irene as powerful due to her position as the sultan’s daughter,
she too lacks control over the value that will be assigned to her due to Mustafa’s planned
adultery, and thus she must rely on her own abilities to protect her name.24
Though both Daraxa and Isabella express their shame, neither character melts in the
agony expected of an irrational female nor does either woman display a need for male
guidance in her moment of grief. Perfectly controlled, their responses indicate a knowledge
of their position within a system of sexual circulation, and this knowledge provides them
with a limited but notable agency. In a discussion of consciousness within Haywood’s
novels, Jonathan Kramnick argues that Haywood’s heroine will demonstrate volition
“precisely when she sees herself from the perspective of someone else who consider her to
be an object” (467). Both Irene and Daraxa demonstrate this volition, for even as Mustafa’s
24 Bernadette Andrea notes in Women and Islam in Early Modern English Literature (2008) that although British literary representation frequently rendered the sultan’s daughter as powerful, Ottoman accounts refute such accounts (112).
24 infidelity threatens to damage both women, it also becomes an opening for their agency.
Mustafa uses Daraxa and Irene as political gambits in his pursuit of power, but they
understand their respective roles in his history, and, therefore, can know themselves to be
worth more than the value that he or other masculine outsiders might assign to them.
Aware of her part in Mustafa’s past, Daraxa uses this knowledge to prevent her
predicament from becoming known and to enable her continued closeness to Mustafa,
while Irene, cognizant of her place in Mustafa’s present, turns this knowledge against
Mustafa, protecting both Isabella and herself from disgrace. No longer the focus of a lustful
man driven from one woman to the next, Daraxa and Irene demonstrate a measured grief
that enables her to take what she knows of her situation to make deliberate choices
concerning her future.
Haywood frequently writes characters that are slight variations of each other, and
The Fair Captive displays different temporal versions of Mustafa’s mistresses: Daraxa as
Mustafa’s past, Irene as his present, and Isabella as his desired future. While Daraxa and
Irene understand and exploit the knowledge of their place in Mustafa’s life, Isabella does
not yet see herself as a commodity to be traded in the market of men. A beautiful and
virtuous character, Isabella remains confined in the sultan’s harem after Mustafa refuses
the ransom that Alphonso offers to redeem her from captivity.25 Yet the prison that holds
Isabella captive is not the merely the walls of the seraglio but also the competing demands
placed on her by Alphonso and Mustafa. Following Alphonso’s failed attempt to rescue
Isabella, the two prisoners undertake a clandestine meeting where he warns Isabella of the
25 Haywood’s depiction of a refused ransom was entirely probable. Linda Colley argues that during the seventeenth century, English citizens who found themselves captured while trading in the Barbary states were sometimes denied ransom due to their perceived value. See Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600-1850 (2007).
25 Mustafa’s intentions for her after she claims that the vizier is helping her to secure
Alphonso’s release. Alphonso states:
He is a cunning Monster, Isabella!
At thy Request? I charge thee have a Care,
He may, perhaps, ensave thy thoughtless Vertue,
Say, has he never offer’d thee his Love? (IV.I. 43)
While Isabella interprets Mustafa’s actions as honest, Alphoso recognizes the scheme that is brewing. Although he claims to know Isabella’s faithfulness to him, he expresses the fear he holds of Mustafa’s power over her when he says, “Full well I know nought, can corrupt thy Love,/ Not that of Angels burns more bright and pure,/ But yet I fear – ” (IV.I. 44). Alert to Isabella’s innocent ignorance and to his own inability to control what happens to her,
Alphonso experiences his first doubt in her faithfulness, conceived ironically from Isabella’s honest disclosure about her previous interaction with Mustafa.
With new mistrust creeping into his mind, Alphonso commands Isabella to be wary of the vizier and to guard herself against his advances. Alphonso’s suspicions of Mustafa are warranted, for even as Alphonso seeks to retain his authority over Isabella, Mustafa also attemps to bend Isabella to his will, sending Haly to warn Isabella that unless she come before the vizier in his chambers to beg for life, Alphonso will die. Left with an impossible choice, Isabella cries out in despair:
O Torture! O Confusion to my soul!
Must then Alphonso Die, and I neglect
All means, all Opportunities to save him?
Or to preserve him, must I hazard Vertue?
26 Hazard! What Hazard? The Visier has been still
Most good, most gracious to my Supplications,
But ne’er attempted to seduce my Honor –
Away then with Delays – I fly to seek him.
– Yet stay – where art thou going Isabella?
Into the very Chamber of the Man,
Thy only Friend commands thee to avoid. (V.II.55)
To obey Alphonso’s command means his certain death, yet to yield to Mustafa’s call means
the loss of favor of the man she loves and perhaps even her virtue. Isabella thus finds
herself trapped between two aspiring masters. To obey either means rejecting the other
and opening herself up to harm.
It is this moment that Haywood seeks to direct her male audience members to when
she pleads for compassion on a woman’s suffering during the prologue to the play.
Isabella’s grief comes not from her imprisonment in the harem but from the double bind of
competing masculine demands, and this captivity is one that Haywood argues her female
audience members know well. Haywood herself was caught between similar demands, for
although much of her personal history remains unclear, by 1717, she was living in London
as a single woman with little means to support herself, so Haywood became first an actress
and eventually a professional author.26 Despite the popularity of her novels, her career
26 Born Eliza Fowler, Haywood had changed her name by 1715, though when she married and to whom is yet unknown. In a letter to a prospective patron, Haywood hints that she was later abandoned by her husband stating “an unfortunate marriage has reduced me to the melancholly necessity of depending on my Pen for the support of myself and two Children,” while in another letter, she suggests she was widowed, writing “tho the Inclincations I even had for writing be now converted into a Necessity, by the Sudden Deaths of both a Father, and a Husband” (Firmager181- 182). King suggests in her Political Biography of Eliza Haywood (2012) that Haywood’s status as a
27 always struggled against poverty, which she noted in a letter to a potential patron stating,
“Precarious as the condition of a person in whose only dependence is on the pen, to the
name of Author wee are indebted for the priviledge of imploring the protection of the great
and good” (Firmager 182). The cost of supporting herself was steep in more ways than just
fiscally, for Haywood became the target of male scorn, particularly from other male
authors, which tarnished her reputation.27 The fair captive referenced in the play’s prologue thus resonates not only with Isabella but also with Haywood, linking the character to the author in a quite personal way that intensifies the stakes of Isabella’s predicament. Haywood seeks not only agency for Isabella but for all women similarly trapped in a world not of their making.
As Isabella debates the two demands pushing in on her, she struggles in an emotional register and questions her own wants, revealing that she has not internalized male authority. She is consequently able to choose her path not out of fear of either man but based on her own desire, and she chooses to go to Mustafa and offer her life as a payment for the life debt that Alphonso owes due to his crime of entering the seraglio. The very act of entering the vizier’s chambers casts her virtue into dubious light, but Isabella recognizes that her fidelity to Alphonso exists separately from the perceived virtue ascribed to her by the male gaze; for her to desert Alphonso would not only be a betrayal of the man she loves but also of her own integrity.
widow can be confirmed due to a 1750 deposition that identifies her as “Elizabeth Haywood of Durham Yard in the Strand Widow.” 27 Haywood was famously derided by Alexander Pope in his Dunciad and by her former colleague, Richard Savage. For further discussion of these attacks and their impacts on Haywood’s career, see George Whicher, The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood (1915), Paula Backscheider, “The Shadow of an Author: Eliza Haywood” (1998); Christine Blouch, “Eliza Haywood and the Romance of Obscurity” (1991); Kathryn King, “Eliza Haywood, Savage Love, and Biographical Uncertainty” (2007).
28 Isabella thus exercises an agency born from constancy. This constancy serves as a form of resistance against the powers pushing against her, for while she is unable to halt these pressure or to enact her own power to overwhelm them, she operates within the space where these forces collide, turning the demands placed on her to meet her terms.
Where Alphonso expects obedience, Isabella instead demonstrates a loyalty to him that cannot be commanded even as it disobeys. Where Mustafa expects submission, Isabella surprises with an offer of her very life, a gesture of complete surrender that would still protect her virtue. Unwilling to crumple under fear of the louder demand, Isabella chooses her path based on an internal integrity and thus interrupts her circulation between the male figures by claiming ownership over her actions.
All three women behave in a manner that is defensive rather than displaying the aggression driving their male counterparts, so Daraxa and Irene can be seen displaying this constancy in their situations as well. Both women disguise themselves as eunuchs, Daraxa in order to remain close to Mustafa and Irene to keep a watchful eye over Mustafa’s actions.
These breeches roles demonstrate female constancy because as Pearson argues, these women “change their shapes but not their minds” (103). Consequently, although Mustafa deserted Daraxa, leaving her open to ridicule and scorn, she remains steadfast in her love for him throughout the play, choosing to reveal the plots of Achmet and Ozmin to Mustafa when she believes his life to be in jeopardy rather than to enact revenge. Irene, likewise is trapped between the shame of an adulterous husband and the masculine mandate of feminine fidelity. Refusing to be another victim of the vizier’s schemes, Irene does not reveal Mustafa’s promiscuity but rather seeks to limit it in the same way that she has been
29 limited. The agency exercised by each of these three women centers on an internal integrity
to self that serves as a nexus self-sacrifice and self-assertion.
Feminine constancy thus becomes the alternative to the instability of a substitutive masculine greed and provides a freedom otherwise unavailable. As the man most consumed by his own instability, Mustafa recognizes that even as he attempts to assert his dominance over Isabella, he is as much a prisoner to his lust as she:
Does fickle Fancy lead our vain Desires?
Restless and still unsatisfied we roam,
For perfect Happiness was never found:
One Wish obtain’d, another still succeeds,
And Hopes and Fears, in an alternate Round,
Weary out Life, and mock our best Resolves…
In vain o’er Slaves we boast an envy’d Sway,
While we ourselves are our own Passions Prey;
We’re less unconquer’d, and more lost than they. (III.II.39)
Even as Mustafa repeats the same scene of desire over and over to no end, the women he pursues respond in their own unique ways, each demonstrating a constancy of mind that allows her to move within the boundaries specified by patriarchy in order to resist masculine consumption.
Mustafa’s acknowledgement of his own enslavement haunts the rest of the play, for although the janissaries successfully revolt and Isabella maintains her virtue, the systemic problems plaguing them are not settled. Mustafa has been overthrown and captured, but the sultan is still absent, so power has exchanged hands to Achmet and Ozmin. Alphonso
30 and Isabella are both free from prison and together again, but as noted earlier, this reunion
occurs only due to Mustafa, and Isabella finds herself silenced during the final moments of
the play. No clear hero remains, and so the play gestures towards and even attempts to
think through a resistance that ultimately fails to mature into a full revolution of the
system.
Perhaps because of this emphasis on female suffering in the face of British
masculinity and because of the unresolved political crisis, The Fair Captive failed to capture
the imagination of the attending audience, and the play was poorly received. The London
Stage, 1660-1800 records that the drama ran three nights with an additional fourth to serve
as an author’s benefit, indicating that while Haywood was able to profit from the
production, it was not popular and, therefore, was never revived. Her long-time associate,
William Chetwood, claimed that The Fair Captive, along with most of her later plays, simply
appeared on the stage at ill-opportune moments, when he notes, “Her Dramatic Works
have all died in their first visiting the World, being exhibited in a very sickly Season for
Poetry” (57). Although Chetwood meant his comments in reference to the literary moment
during which the plays were presented, his observation may have some validity in it
considering the political climate when The Fair Captive appeared at Licoln’s Inn Fields. The
tumultuous months following the South Sea crisis had left people seeking reform and
political accountability, and they would have expected to find a political dialogue on the
stage that offered opinions on the current situation. Unlike many of the earlier Restoration
Islamicate dramas, however, Haywood does not try to resolve the conflict in her drama or offer a clear solution to the problem at hand. Rather, in a striking repetition of the world beyond the stage, her characters, much like the political actors in Parliament, find
31 themselves trapped within a social chaos not of their making, leaving them to navigate a world over which they have little control and few ideas as to how to change. Consequently,
Haywood’s move towards a new form of agency is never fully realized, so the final act of the play lacks ideological harmony. Even though Haywood’s play fails to offer an alternative to the speculative and substitutive system driving British society, her characters do resist this system so that even in the disharmony at the end, a push towards a better way still exists, for in the words of Mustafa as he considers the fate of his prisoner, “There is a wide essential Difference/ Betwixt the slighting Death, and bravely dying;/ One is Fool- hardiness, the other Courage” (III.II.35-36).
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35