Chapter 2 East versus West: Seraglio Queens, Politics, and Sexuality in Thomas Heywood's Fair Maid of the West, Parts I and II

Claire Jowitt

This chapter focuses on the ways Roxolana, first bondswoman and later the wife of Sultan Suleiman I, is imaginatively recreated in the figure of Queen Tota, wife to Mullisheg, King of Fez, in Thomas Heywood's Fair Maid of the West, or A Girl worth Gold, Part II.

There are marked contrasts between the representation of Bess between Parts I and II of Thomas Heywood's Fair Maid of the West, or A Girl worth Gold. The difference (indeed transformation) between her in two parts is a useful barometer of the modifications to ideological formulations of queenship.^[216] This chapter explores the reasons behind, and implications of, these changes, particularly in terms of the ways anxieties about female rule are displaced in both plays onto despotic “Ottoman” characters, Mullisheg, the King of Fez in Part I, and in Part II, this unease is also focused on his tyrannous and lascivious wife, Tota.

In the following pages, then, I argue that Heywood’s geographic drama, The Fair Maid of the West, offers different political opinions about the dangers of female rule in Part I and Part II, both of which are connected to depictions of race, specifically Mullisheg in Part I, and Mullisheg and Tota in Part II. The composition of Part I of The Fair Maid of the West most likely occurred in the last years of Elizabeth’s reign, probably between 1596 and 1603, with the second part being written by 1630.^[218] The temporal gap in the composition of the two parts is significant, since changes in the representation of Bess reveal the ways that powers of queens were, after the death of Elizabeth I, revised, remodeled, and reduced. In the first part of the drama, Heywood’s character Bess—short, of course, for Elizabeth—is on one level an allegory of Elizabeth I.^[219] Jean Howard has argued that Bess “owes much to representations of Elizabeth I,” given that the problems Bess experiences— she is both desired by and threatening to the male characters in Heywood’s text—are precisely identical to the oscillating and anxious representations of Elizabeth produced in the last decades of her reign. In the second part of The Fair Maid of the West, Bess’s character is considerably different from her earlier incarnation, though still possessing some resonance with Elizabeth. Heywood’s revised treatment reveals the historically contingent nature of perceptions about appropriate female “queenly” behavior.

Race, Gender and Sexuality in The Fair Maid of the West Part I

The Fair Maid of the West Part I follows the adventures of the upwardly mobile virtuous tavern maid Bess Bridges. At the beginning of the play, we see Bess besieged by male customers and suitors in the tavern, “The Castle” in Plymouth, where she works. The play is set on the eve of the Islands’ Voyage of the English fleet to the Azores under Essex, and the town “swells with gallants” (Part I, 1.1.11). A fight occurs between rivals for Bess’s attentions in which her favorite, Spencer, kills a man, Carrol, who has been harassing her. The lovers become engaged, and Spencer departs on Essex’s mission whilst entrusting Bess with his possessions, including his picture and a tavern, “The Windmill” at Foy. News then arrives that Spencer has been killed at Fayal—though the audience knows he has actually survived. Spencer’s compatriot Goodlack returns in order to test Bess’s constancy to his friend, and inform her that she inherits Spencer’s fortune. Believing Spencer to be dead, Bess determines to rescue his body from the Spanish and fits out a ship for the purpose.

That Bess Bridges, the tavern maid turned avenging national heroine, is supposed to refer to Queen Elizabeth on some levels is explicitly indicated by the text. Part I, Act IV, scene iv describes the defeat of Spanish naval forces by Bess and her men. At Bess’s mercy and about to be put into their “long boat” to row ashore, the Spanish commander and his fellows are commanded by Bess to “pray for English Bess” (Part I, 4.4.120). The Spaniard replies, “I know not whom you mean, but be’t your queen, / Famous Elizabeth, I shall report / She and her subjects both are merciful” (Part I, 4.4.121-3). The Spanish captain’s misunderstanding over the identity of “English Bess,” then, is not unreasonable, as Bess appears in disguise in men’s clothes at this point. However, there is little doubt that Bess alludes to herself since, in an earlier encounter with some captured Spanish, she commanded them, on their release, to “Pray for Bess Bridges, and speak well ’o’th’ English” (Part I, 4.4.59). Bess Bridges, as she aggressively but mercifully scuppers the Spanish fleet, acts in a manner reminiscent of accounts of Elizabeth’s Tilbury performance on the eve of the arrival of the Spanish Armada in 1588. She is an extension of the militaristic Queen involved in a just war against a threatening and treacherous enemy.^[221]

The parallels between Bess and the Queen continue to be explicitly drawn until the end of Part I. The Chorus between Act IV and Act V informs the audience of Bess’s continued naval success: “Much prize they have ta’en.

There’s virtue in that name.

The virgin queen, so famous through the world,

The mighty empress of the maiden isle,

Whose predecessors have o’errun great France, Whose powerful hand doth still support the Dutch And keeps the potent King of Spain in awe, is not she titled so? (Part I, 5.1.88-93)

However, despite these celebratory, jingoistic representations, Bess is also simultaneously a figure that exposes contemporary anxieties about masculine potency. In The Fair Maid of the West Part I, Bess is considerably more able than most of the male characters that surround her. Even Spencer—who impetuously kills Carroll, is wounded in Essex’s service, and is then held captive—appears helpless for most of the drama, compared to the resourceful Bess. Since Bess’s abilities are better than those of the men in the play, she is able to manipulate them, making them appear stupid or weak or both as a result. In The Fair Maid of the West, Bess demonstrates far more prowess in the diverse roles of swordsman, politician, privateer, and diplomat than do any of the men in the play. Whilst at sea, in Act IV, for example, Bess is considerably more accomplished at swashbuckling than either Spencer or Goodlack. Spencer has been humiliatingly incarcerated in a Spanish vessel. Goodlack, despite being in charge of “the manage of the fight” (Part I, 4.4.86) against the Spanish and trying to stow Bess away from the danger (“Fair Bess, keep you your cabin”; Part I, 4.4.90), is so seriously injured in the fray that he can “no longer man the deck,” leaving Bess to lead the assault (“Advance your targets, And now cry all, ‘Board, board! Amain for England!’”; Part I, 4.4.104-5).

These fears are most graphically played out in Act V of Part I of The Fair Maid of the West, when Mullisheg’s eroticized court (Part I, 4.3.27-34) functions as a mirror of Bess’s alarming sexuality since, as Jean Howard argues, “the Moorish King [... ] actually displays the rapacious sexual appetites so feared in Bess.”^[223] For instance, in response to Bess’s white beauty (she abandons her cross-dressing to appear in female clothes again), the sexually predatory King becomes effeminized himself. In effect he functions as a mirror, or displaced version, of the gender and sexual anxieties previously solely focused on Bess. He is unable to turn down any of her demands (“We can deny thee nothing, beauteous maid”; Part I, 5.2.78), since he is so enthralled by her sexually explicit, wanton, behavior: “’Tis no immodest thing / You ask, nor shame for Bess to kiss a King” (Part I, 5.1.65-6). Furthermore, anxieties about the consequences of Bess’s sexuality on the men around her also surface in Spencer’s threatened and Clem’s apparent actual castration (Part I, 5.2.86-100, 126-31), which is to be inflicted as a sign of Mullisheg’s favor (Spencer “shall have grace and honor [... ] He shall be our chief Eunuch”; Part I, 5.2.91-3), and in the way that the Englishmen are scattered and peripheral to the action between Mullisheg and Bess. In fact it is Bess, rather than any of the men, who intervenes to save Spencer’s testicles from Mullisheg’s “cutting honor” (Part I, 5.2.131). Her intervention only succeeds because she distracts the King with flirtatious promises, offering “what I have” to him and requesting that the King “Leave naught that’s mine unrifled,” if only he will “spare me him [Spencer]” (Part I, 5.2.96-7). In other words Bess’s aid, which saves Spencer’s manhood, simultaneously threatens to unman him. Both her wanton flirtation with the King and Clem’s apparent castration indicate that her sexuality is not merely provocative but is also capable of undermining male sexual performance. The threat to the Englishmen’s masculinity is, on one level, averted at the end of the play as the men take charge in the last few lines. Spencer, Goodlack, and Roughman finally manage to regroup and successfully persuade Mullisheg to embrace “an heroic spirit” (Part I, 5.2.118), and release them unharmed with Bess. Once the Englishmen take charge, Bess and Mullisheg’s influence immediately wanes. However, the aggressive sexuality of both the Moorish King and the “maid of England” who appears “like a queen” (Part I, 5.2.7) widely threaten the integrity of English masculinity until the very last lines of the play.

This text, then, in its representation of queen-like Bess’s sexuality, reveals the problems and limits of Elizabeth’s rule. In the character of Mullisheg we have articulated fears about the aggressive, castrating potential of queenship as it is capable of rendering Englishmen literally impotent. The threat is finally overcome with only one casualty, the low-class character of Clem, and Mullisheg and Bess appear tamed. However, this conclusion does not fully disperse the risk that both these monarchical, but “female” characters present to the integrity of English manhood.

Furthermore, the description of the King of Fez from the Barbary Coast in North Africa as threatening to unman Englishmen, though later he appears effeminized, can be seen to possess another layer of political and diplomatic meaning regarding English interactions with the Muslim world. The figure of Mullisheg of Fez is, as Nabil Matar suggests, resonant of that of Mulay al-Mansur, also known as Ahmad I al-Mansur, King of Morocco, who in the 1590s entered into a diplomatic alliance against Spain and trade treaty with Elizabeth I.^[224] The negotiation of this relationship was a delicate, protracted, and tricky business— which provoked considerable anxieties amongst English commentators concerning the wisdom and implications of establishing a close relationship with a culturally and technologically sophisticated non-Christian nation—and the conclusion to Heywood’s play can be seen “to celebrate the success of his monarch in dealing with Mulay al-Mansur.”^[225] The character of Mullisheg thus serves simultaneously to represent twin threats; the anxiety concerning the potential of the Muslim world to “unman” Europe through subordination, and the consequences of female power upon male prowess and potency.

Lascivious Queens: Tota, Roxolana, Bess, and Henrietta-Maria

For the rest of this chapter, I focus on the sequel to The Fair Maid of the West, written long after the death of Elizabeth, in order to examine the ways in which the text’s representations of Fez and its rulers reveal how discourses of queenship were modified in the period between the first and second part. Part II of The Fair Maid of the West picks up the story at exactly the point where Part I ended. It is Spencer and Bess’s wedding day. However, instead of being supportive of the English couple, Mullisheg now appears so jealous that he determines to deprive Spencer of the first night with his wife and enjoy her himself. Mullisheg’s wife, Queen Tota, furious at her husband’s neglect, becomes infatuated with Spencer and also hatches an adulterous plan. They enlist Bess’s followers in their schemes as, through a mixture of bribery and threat, the Queen forces Roughman and the King coerces Goodlack to arrange sexual access to their respective objects of desire. Though initially appearing to be unable to think of a way out of their difficulties, Roughman and Goodlack confer about the situation in which the English find themselves. After informing Spencer and Bess of the Moors’ duplicity, the English plan a bed-trick to fool the King and Queen into sleeping together whilst thinking that they are in fact with Bess and Spencer. Whilst the King and Queen are enjoying their night of passion, Roughman, Goodlack, and Bess escape to their ship, but Spencer is less fortunate. He is defeated in combat by one of the King’s men, Joffer, and only manages to rejoin Bess—who will think him dead unless he meets her onboard the ship by a certain time—by promising to return to Mullisheg’s court. For the first time in The Fair Maid of the West Bess does not appear to advantage since, not understanding the honorable nature of Spencer’s promise to Joffer, she violently chastises her husband. When Spencer returns to Mullisheg’s palace, the King finally understands the integrity of English behavior and relents; harmony is finally restored when Bess too returns and is reconciled with her husband. At the end of Act III the English depart from Fez but are beset by disaster once more since they are attacked by pirates, shipwrecked, and dispersed so that husband and wife are separated again, and after a series of misunderstandings and adventures in Italian city states, they are finally reunited. The most important misunderstanding occurs over whether Spencer has feelings for Bess because, having promised to woo Bess for the Duke of Florence, he is forced to publicly deny his feelings for Bess with the result that she becomes incensed at such treatment. She appears tyrannous, accusing Spencer of stealing, and exacting a promise herself from the Duke to do with the thief as she pleases, she threatens to have him killed. Tragedy is averted only when Bess thinks better of her vengeful actions, and all the misunderstandings between the couple are finally explained. The Duke and Spencer are reconciled, and the last action of the play is to bring in the noble Moor Joffer (who has meanwhile been captured by the Italians) allowing the men to admit him into their chivalric group.

There is a considerable difference in the overall tone as well as in the treatment and actions of Bess between the two parts of The Fair Maid of the West. As Kathleen McLuskie observes, the focus of Part II is on “women and their chastity” and “sexual exchange,” and, as she also notes, “Bess has lost her active role, and is the subject of others’ passions.”^[226] But the shift is more significant. In Part I Bess was a “girl worth gold” because she possessed many virtues, including honor, bravery, skilful management and diplomacy as well as chastity. By contrast, in Part II Bess has lost all these qualities except chastity. These changes are revealed by her consistent helplessness through Part II as the male characters make decisions for her and rescue her from difficult situations. As Charles Crupi has suggested, Bess is reduced to a “damsel in distress,” passively awaiting rescue in Part II.^[227] But there is another more dangerous aspect to her character in Part II: she also appears, at times, to be a lascivious and bloodthirsty despot, threatening revenge if things fail to go her way.

In Part II, Bess reveals herself to be utterly unable to appreciate male codes and standards of honor. After fleeing Mullisheg’s court, Spencer is only able to join her on The Negro because he has promised to return to Joffer in Fez once Bess is assured that he has not been killed in his escape attempt. When Spencer informs her that he intends to return and give himself up because of this commitment, Bess is at first incredulous: “Prize you my love no better than to rate it / Beneath the friendship of a barbarous Moor? / Can you, to save him, leave me to my death? / Is this the just reward of all my travels?” (Part II, 3.2.127-30). Spencer attempts to explain that he cannot break his word to the Moor since such behavior would be tantamount to allowing the Moors to appear to be superior to Christians: “I prize my honor and a Christian’s faith / Above what earth can yield” (Part II, 3.2.131­2). He states that he would rather “die a hundred thousand deaths” than allow Islam to appear nobler than Christianity (Part II, 3.2.135-6). Such honorable, if partisan, reasoning does not convince Bess, as her next speech, which dwells on her personal satisfaction rather than national or religious pride, reveals: “Was ever maid thus cross’d, that have of / Been brought to see my bless and never taste it? / To meet my Spencer living after death, / To join with him in marriage, not enjoy him?” (Part II, 3.2.137-40). Indeed, when he refuses to take her with him, Bess sulkily abandons him:

Then, false man, know

That thou hast taught me harshness. I without thee

Came to Mamorah, and to my country back

I will return without thee. I am here

In mine own vessel, mine own train about me.

And since thou wilt forsake me to embrace

The queen of Moors, though coining strange excuse,

E’en at thy pleasure be it; my way’s into

My country. Farewell, I’ll not shed one tear more. (Part II, 3.2.149-57)

Bess and Spencer’s respective understandings of the necessity of his return to Mullisheg’s court are presented as utterly at odds in this scene. For Spencer, failure to return would be a violation of his own sense of identity, which is based on the innate superiority of Christian, English, chivalric, and male honor. Bess has no such code of honor here and, indeed, fails to understand Spencer’s reasons, even after they have been explained, preferring to see his return as inspired by adulterous desires for Tota, Fez’s Queen (“thou wilt forsake me to embrace / The queen of Moors”; Part II, 3.2.154-5). For Bess the honorable intentions Spencer outlines appear too ludicrous (“strange excuse”) to be believed. Furthermore, her desire to behave as the independent woman (“I am here in mine own vessel, mine own train about me”; Part II, 3.2.152-3), that was so impressive in Part I, is here inspired by the less admirable emotion of jealousy of Tota. But the context in which she now articulates this desire for independence—based on irrational jealousy and a failure to understand male honor—makes clear that her pretensions are not to be applauded.

Though this misunderstanding between Spencer and Bess over conceptions of honor is overcome as Bess too returns to Mullisheg’s court, the problems are not fully resolved, and they resurface towards the end of the play. When Spencer denies his feelings for her because of his prior promise to the Duke of Florence, Bess again sees this as evidence of sexual betrayal and desires revenge. She sees Spencer’s denial of her as evidence of his inconstancy (“Hath some new love possess’d him and excluded / Me from his bosom?”; Part II, 5.2.75-6) and determines to make him pay for his neglect:

But I’ll be so reveng’d

As never woman was. I’ll be a precedent

To all wives hereafter how to pay home

Their proud, neglectful husbands.’Tis in my way;

I’ve power and I’ll do it. (Part II, 5.2.78-82)

Spencer’s group comment on the change in her demeanor: “This cannot be Bess but some fury hath stol’n her shape” (Part II, 5.4.47); and “This cannot be Bess Bridges, but some Medusa / Chang’d into her lively portraiture” (Part II, 5.4.87­8). Bess’s resemblance to a tyrannical queen is explicitly drawn in the text by Clem, who satirically comments on courtiers’ fears concerning the waywardness of royal favor: “Now if she should challenge me with the purse she gave me / and hang me up for my labour, I should curse the time that ever I was a courtier” (Part II, 5.4.97-9).^[228] We have here, then, a mirror for princes(ses), as it is apparent that queenly interference in male domains is not to be encouraged. As the Hampton Court Prologue makes clear, Henrietta-Maria shall “be sovereign[s] ever” due to her “beauty” rather than the characteristics of “majesty” and skills of “best govern[ment]” possessed by her royal husband (Prologue, 5-12). Consequently, Bess’s gender-specific failures of chivalric behavior can be seen as templates for Henrietta-Maria designed to school her into playing a consort role rather than actively interfering in matters of state. As Kevin Sharpe has argued, after the difficult early years of the marriage, Charles and his wife were settling into a companionate and loving relationship by 1630, but earlier problems had been caused by the Queen’s Catholicism, her jealousy over the influence of Buckingham, the war with France, and the Queen’s “headstrong” temperament.^[229]

In Part II of The Fair Maid of the West the text attempts to rebut and neutralize queenly conduct. The play opened with Queen Tota’s despotic and lascivious behavior as she tried to force Clem and Roughman to enact her adulterous schemes. At this point Tota’s actions appear to closely resemble contemporary Western depictions of, as Galina Yermolenko puts it, “one of the most legendary women of early modern history,” Hurrem Sultan, known to Europeans as “Roxelana” or “Roxolana,” first favorite concubine of Sultan Suleyman I, the Magnificent (1520-1566), and later his wife.^[230] This woman fundamentally changed the ways, as Lesley Peirce observes, “reproductive politics” were conducted in the Ottoman court, since Suleyman, unlike other sultans, did not take a succession of concubines once his relationship with Roxolana was established, and, unlike previous mothers of the heir to the throne, she did not accompany her son to his princely posts.^[231] The successive Venetian and other European ambassadors to the court repeatedly reported the strength of Hurrem’s power over Suleyman, from the birth of her first child in 1521 until her death in 1558, and the ways in which she was able to manipulate him. Indeed, according to Luigi Bassano, such was Roxolana’s sway over Suleyman that “his subjects say she has bewitched him; therefore they call her Ziadi, which means witch,” and 20 years later Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq noted that she was “commonly reputed to retain [Suleyman’s] affections by love­charms and magic arts.”^[232] Such accounts of Roxolana’s power clearly influenced Richard Knolles’s 1603 version of the Queen of the East. Roxolana, ambitious and ruthless concerning her own and her children’s positions within the Ottoman dynasty, and jealous of her husband’s eldest son, Mustapha, the offspring of another bond-slave, determines to secure her place and thus the succession of her children in the Ottoman dynasty:

To fairest lookes trust not too farre, not yet to beauty brave:

For hatefull thoughts so finely maskt, their deadly poisons have.

Loves charmed cups the subtile dame doth to her husband fill:

And causeth him with cruell hand, his childrens blood to spill.^[233]

Furthermore, according to the version of George Sandys’s A Relation of a Journey begunne, Anno Dom. 1610, published by Samuel Purchas in 1625 in Purchas his pilgrims, the story of “the wickedly witty Roxolana” was used as a warning in the Ottoman court of 1610 to Ahmed I concerning the consequences of corrupt queenly behavior.^[234] Her manipulation of the Sultan’s erotic appetite through refusal “to consent unto his pleasure,” once she was made a free woman rather than a bond­slave, which forces him to marry her and leads to the “succeeding Tragedies,” is here used as a warning concerning the present Ottoman domestic situation, since the current sultan “hath also married his Concubine.”^[235] It seems that Roxolana has become a recognized symbol of female ambition and unruliness, and in Sandys’s account there are concerns about whether Roxolana’s behavior establishes a model for other women to follow. Certainly English and continental dramas—such as Gabriel Bounin’s La Soltane (1560), an anonymous Latin play Solymannidae (1581), and Fulke Greville’s The Tragedy of Mustapha (1606)—used the story of Roxolana, or Rosa/Rossa, as she was also known, in order to explore the interaction between domestic and political themes, through their depiction of the connections between Senecan passion and statecraft.^[236]

Jealousy, concern to shore up their own positions, and the exploitation of their sexuality motivates Roxolana in Knolles’s, Purchas’s, and other dramatists’ accounts, and it can also be seen in Heywood’s character of Tota in Fair Maid of the West. The opening of Part II finds Tota scheming to regain Mullisheg’s erotic favor, considering “a thousand projects in my brain until finally one misshap’d embryon grow[s] to form” providing a plan with which she is satisfied: “I am ambitious but to think upon’t, / And if it prove as I have fashion’d it, / I shall be trophied ever” (Part II, 1.1.15-23). At this point in the play, however, it seems that Queen Tota, the Queen of the East, was intended as a foil for the virtuous and honorable Bess of Part I, representing all that was antithetical to “the Fair Maid of the West.”

As the play progresses, this apparent distance between Queen Tota and Bess is not maintained. During the course of the action Bess starts to behave in similar ways to Tota since, as we have seen, in times of crisis Bess also places her personal satisfaction above the honorable claims of nationality or religion. Indeed Bess’s vengeful speeches in the later stages of the play are remarkably similar to Tota’s ruminations at the beginning of Part II when she meditates on how to be revenged for her husband’s neglect of her in favor of Bess:

It must not, may not, shall not be endur’d.

Left we for this our country? To be made

A mere neglected lady here in Fez,

A slave to others, but a scorn to all?

Can womanish ambition, heat of blood,

Or height of birth brook this and not revenge? (Part II, 1.1.1-6)

In fact, the comic interchange involving Clem and Tota later in this scene concerning the similarities and differences between the women of England and Fez establishes that resemblances between Bess and Tota are to be expected. When Tota asks Clem about the differences between “ladies and choice gentlewomen” of the two nations, he replies:

CLEM. You shall meet some of them sometimes as fresh as flowers in May and as fair as my mistress, and within an hour the same gentlewoman as black as yourself or any of your Morians.

TOTA. Can they change faces so? Not possible.

Show me some reason for’t.

CLEM. When they put on their masks.

TOTA. Masks? What are they?

CLEM. Please you to put off yours and I’ll tell you.

TOTA. We wear none but that which nature hath bestowed on us

and our births give us freely.

CLEM. And our ladies wear none but what the shops yield and they buy for their money. (Part II, 1.1.77-89)

This exchange sets up the idea that female “Morian” behavior, already glimpsed in Tota’s stratagems, is like a black “mask” transferable to women “fair as my mistress.” Tota’s dark identity, both literal and metaphorical, may be assumed by Bess, Clem seems to imply, at any point. In other words, Tota’s behavior—indebted to the story of Roxolana—might transmit to the similarly upwardly mobile and ambitious Bess. The ways that gender and “race” are here being represented as performative must, of course, have been emphasized by the role of Tota being performed by a boy actor in blackface.

There is another layer of resemblances at work. Not only does the character of Tota appear indebted to contemporary perceptions of the “wicked woman” Roxolana,^[237] but also Tota’s unhappiness with her royal marriage for which she left her own country can be seen to chime with the situation of Queen Henrietta-Maria, wife to Charles I. Both royal brides have been married for dynastic considerations and have left their home country to take up consort positions in the kingdom of their husband. Just as Tota is jealous of Bess, so too was Henrietta-Maria of the influence Buckingham exerted over her husband. The contrast between the letter the King wrote to Buckingham, when separated from him in July 1627 (“No man ever longed so much for anything as I do to hear some good news of you”), and the “dry, ceremonious” letter he received from his wife in February 1628, which he “answered accordingly,” clearly reveals the different tenor of the relationships.^[238] Indeed, if the logic of Clem and Tota’s conversation about the potential transference of “black” identity onto “fair” characters is pursued and Tota is viewed as simultaneously resembling both Roxolana and Henrietta-Maria, then it is possible that the play is invoking the dangerous possibility that Roxolana’s style of behavior might be passed on to the English Queen.

Though Tota and Mullisheg are reconciled in Act III, scene iii, when Mullisheg now “quench’d” of all lust reverts to the correct order of things, as he “esteem[s] thee [Bess] next our queen [Tota] in grace,” and Bess appears to embrace once more the role of dutiful wife at the end of the play, the challenge to English patriarchal control these characters represent remains. In the course of Part II, like Tota and Roxolana, Bess has repeatedly behaved in despotic and tyrannical ways—as she appeared as a kind of avenging “fury” or “Medusa” to the male characters. The end of the play—where the men align themselves together as honorable and elite, and reject Bess—is consequently crucial for reading this play’s attitude to queenship. When Joffer appears, having also been coincidentally captured by the Italians, Spencer immediately abandons Bess to go to him: “Bashaw Joffer?—Leave my embraces, Bess,/ For I of force am cast into his arms,— / My noble friend!” (Part II, 5.4.155-7). Ferrara, Spencer, and Joffer recognize in each other virtuous, masculine honor of a kind that marginalizes Bess and her threatening erotic power. Ferrara’s concluding speech—though it celebrates Bess as “the mirror of your sex and nation, Fair English Elizabeth”—ends with Bess rendered as a possession since she is now “a chaste wife” (Part II, 5.4.190-200). Bess has effectively been silenced through language that objectifies and neutralizes the threat of her sexual power over the men by constructing her in terms of her “chaste” relationship with Spencer. In these last speeches the focus of interest, then, is firmly on an elite based on male codes of chivalric honor, since Spencer prefers to embrace Joffer rather than Bess.^[239]

Part II of The Fair Maid of the West is considerably more limited in its conceptions of the parameters of queenship than Part I. In the earlier drama, written under Elizabeth, Bess’s military and financial competence was celebrated, even though it is clear that, at times, her success undermined the masculinity of her followers. In Part II, by contrast, influenced by her contact with the ambitious and despotic Tota, Bess is represented as potentially fickle, tyrannical, and misguided in contrast to the male characters, whose code of honor she is unable to understand. In this depiction, we can trace contemporary fears concerning the influence Roxolana’s story and behavior might have on English women. Her ruthless ambition and her ability to rewrite the rules of the Ottoman court represent a negative exemplar of what English patriarchy must not allow in the conduct of a queen.

Furthermore, because Roxolana’s unchecked influence leads to a succession crisis in the Ottoman world, it becomes clear through the course of Part II that Bess must be domesticated. The play shows the way she learns to be guided by her husband. When her last lines imperfectly correspond to patriarchal conceptions of appropriate female behavior—as she imagines herself still in the active, dominant role—Spencer punishes her through aligning himself principally with the other male characters on stage. Bess’s judgment in Part II is consistently undermined by the text: she is shown to need schooling and guidance by the male characters. Independent action on the part of females is, it is clear, not to be tolerated because, as Tota and Bess both reveal, it is invariably motivated by personal ambition and potentially disastrous. What Part II reveals, then, is a patriarchal fantasy concerning the reduction of female power because national and religious values are successfully promulgated solely by men. Thus the Moor Joffer is converted to Christianity, because he is so impressed by Spencer and the Duke of Ferrara, and loads the English down with gold because he recognizes the value of the Englishmen’s chivalric honor. Bess, though gratulated as a motivating factor for this gift, has, in fact, had little to do with it because she has, noticeably, not been able to embrace these male standards of chivalric honor. Part II of Heywood’s text, then, seeks to moderate and manage female ambition; Roxolana’s brand of queenship and patterns of behavior are shown by Tota to be dangerous and despotic, and when they emerge in Bess, are corrected and suppressed.