ABSTRACT
This chapter examines surrogate sexual partner is a dark-skinned female servant. With primary reference to John Fletchers The Knight of Malta, overlooked connection in the period between the bed-trick motif and the myth of Ixion. While there were many variations on the hoax, it focuses on one particular instance of the bed-trick that involves a noblewomans attempting to protect her chastity from male lust by putting a black servant in her bed as her replacement. The discovery of a black woman in the bed-trick, however, produces a far more ambivalent reaction. All's Well That Ends Well, John Wain argues that love feeds on recognition and knowledge of the loved person; lust, by contrast, is blind; its patterns are laid down in advance and it feeds on whatever approximates to those patterns. Though aware of the presence of Kate prior to Thomass own discovery of her, the audience is also implicated in forgetting the black maids real identity.
