ABSTRACT

William Alabaster’s Roxana, performed at Cambridge in 1592 (first published in 1632), was a lurid revenge tale crammed with acts of violence and atrocity ranging from cannibalism to murder. Perhaps most shocking of all, the eponymous heroine, Roxana, is forced to kill her own children and is tortured to death on stage. The play was a rip-roaring success, its author described in The History of the Worthies of England by Thomas Fuller as

A most rare Poet as any our Age or Nation hath produced: witnesse his tragedy of Roxana admirably acted in that Colledge [Trinity], and so pathetically; that a Gentlewoman present thereat (Reader I had it from an Author whose credit it is sin with me to suspect), at the hearing of the last words thereof, sequar, sequar, so hideously pronounced, fell distracted and never after fully recovered her senses.