ABSTRACT
Little sustained attention has been paid to William Heminge’s grisly rape-revenge tragedy The Fatal Contract, a play that features one of the more singular characters in early modern drama: the villainous African Eunuch, Castrato, who turns out to be a white woman, Chrotilda, who has disguised herself in order to avenge her own rape. Most scholars have either ignored this play or dismissed it as derivative; Donald McGinn, for example, calls it “the most obvious and detailed example of plagiarism of Hamlet in the seventeenth century” (quoted in Morley 22). There is no question that the play is full of passages and motifs from dozens of early modern plays, especially but not exclusively those of Shakespeare. To view it through the anachronistic lens of plagiarism, however, is to misunderstand the play’s rich metatheatricality and to ignore its innovative, if also disturbing, take on the convention of racial masquerade on early English stages.
