ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how Middleton uses his representation of the Tyrant’s obsessive behavior to contrast his kingship with that of the overthrown ruler, Govianus, and the virtues of his prospective bride, the Lady. The Lady’s Tragedy depicts a close association between expectations of kingship and the usurper’s rapid descent into madness. The chapter begins by considering how the play’s treatment of the Tyrant’s love for the Lady would have been interpreted by early modern audiences, specifically in terms of contemporary ideas surrounding male madness and softened masculinity. In The Lady’s Tragedy, then, Middleton may well have been consciously “revising scenes in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale,” as Carol Thomas Neely has suggested. Indeed, the similarities between the statue of Hermione coming to life before Leontes’s very eyes and the Tyrant’s rapport with the Lady’s cadaver have been commented upon before, most recently in the work of Bailey Sincox.
