Nathaniel Lee's
Restoration-era tragedy The Rival Queens
tells the story of the death of Alexander the Great through the lens of the
women in his life.
Wait...
Alexander the Great... and women? Well, yes. Many of the stories about Alexander
that circulated in early modern Europe linked him to various women he was
alleged to have loved.
For instance, in
Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus the
Emperor asks to see the paramour of Alexander. This paramour is presumably
Thais, a courtesan who allegedly convinced the conqueror to burn the famed
palace of Persepolis.
While Thais is
name-checked in The Rival Queens, the
play focuses instead on Roxana, his first wife, and Statira, a Persian princess
he married as part of a plan to unify Greek and Persian civilizations. When
the play opens, Statira is distraught because Alexander had promised her he
would never bed Roxana again, but he seems to have broken that promise. Statira's
opening lines show her in a conventional state of grief:
Give me a knife, a draught of poison,
flames!
Swell, heart, break, break, thou stubborn
thing!
Now, by the sacred fire, I'll not be
held!
Why do ye wish me life, yet stifle me
For want of air? pray give me leave to
walk.
When Alexander
hears how upset Statira is, he blames his hook-up with Roxana on beer goggles,
claiming she seduced him while he was drunk. He professes his undying love for
Statira and asks her mother and sister to help him win her back again. If he
cannot, he vows to renounce his empire and live out the remainder of his life
in the countryside, forsaking worldly glory.
The third act
introduces Statira's rival queen, Roxana. She is determined to not have to
share Alexander, and proclaims:
Roxana and Statira, they are names
That must forever jar; eternal discord,
Fury, revenge, disdain, and indignation
Tear my swoll'n breast, make way for fire
and tempest.
Well, that's
just fine with Alexander, who doesn't want anything to do with Roxana anymore,
anyway. Celebrating his reconciliation with Statira, he invites his faithful
soldiers to a feast. It is at that feast that a group of conspirators plans to
poison Alexander, and they attempt to gain the aid of Roxana. Instead of
helping them slay her lover, she resolves to murder her rival.
That murder
occurs in the play's climactic fifth act. The two rival queens meet, and Roxana
kills Statira while Alexander himself is also dying of poison. And what of
Hephestion, the notorious male lover of Alexander? Well, he appears in the
play, but as a suitor for the hand of Statira's sister. Lee also banishes
Hephestion from the fifth act of the play, having his death merely reported.
The emphasis on
the female characters might be linked to the fact that they were played by...
well... women. The play's epilogue threatens to return boy actors to the stage
in women's roles if the audience does not leave the professional female
actresses alone. Lee wrote The Rival
Queens sometime around 1676 or 1677, so women on the professional English
stage were still a relatively new phenomenon. Perhaps, then, it should be
unsurprising that a Restoration-era tragedy about Alexander focused on his
relationships with women.
