Half-Persuaded Converts and Partial Turns in Fletcher's The Island Princess

Abstract:In the final act of John Fletcher's The Island Princess (c. 1619–21), the heroine Quisara takes on a familiar role: the non-Christian, foreign woman converted by her love of a Christian man. Critics, including Ania Loomba, Dennis Austin Britton, and Lieke Stelling, describe Quisara's turn as part of early modern theater's pattern of presenting desirable, successful converts to Christianity as fair-skinned, virtuous women, more integrable because of these supposedly Christian qualities and because their identities can be subsumed by their Christian husbands. However, although The Island Princess draws on many of the conversion paradigms of medieval and early modern romance and drama, which offer paths for converts to become confirmed members of their new religious communities, it ultimately fulfills none of them, letting Quisara linger mid-conversion. Diverging from recent scholarship that has emphasized ways that early modern drama invests in ideologies of religious stability or ironizes conversion as false or doubtful, this essay argues that in the context of emerging Western European colonial evangelism, protracted reformations, and doctrinal debates within Protestantism, The Island Princess invites audiences to imagine religious identity as something that might be compromised and evolving, yet still apparently genuine.