'[N]or bear I in this breast / So much cold spirit to be called a woman': The Queerness of Female Revenge in The Maid's Tragedy

Abstract:In Beaumont and Fletcher's The Maid's Tragedy, we find Evadne, a female revenger who violently acts, avenging herself and the men around her. This article argues that the representational strategies of the play trouble our understanding of Evadne's gender, showing it as constructed via a nexus of sometimes contradictory fixations, fixations which are articulated through a rhetoric of bodies. Throughout this consideration, I connect this nexus with Evadne's proximity to, and enacting of, revenge.