ABSTRACT
Two Jacobean plays by John Fletcher, The Maid’s Tragedy (1610), a collaboration of Beaumont and Fletcher, and Valentinian (1614), include among their principal characters a lustful tyrant who is killed by a subject he has injured. Both plays equate sexual license with the arbitrary power of a vicious tyrant, raising questions about the morality of regicide and whether subjects owe allegiance to a bad king. These two plays were adapted during the Restoration period in ways which brought out their ethical and political implications – The Maid’s Tragedy by Edmund Waller and Valentinian by the Earl of Rochester. Where Waller sought to tone down the play’s potentially dangerous implications, Rochester intensified them, emphasizing parallels between the tyrant and voluptuary Valentinian, surrounded by corrupt courtiers, and Charles II, and building up the roles of the innocent Lucina, raped by Valentinian, and her husband Maximus, who avenges the rape.
