Lust's Dominion

Lust's Dominion, or The Lascivious Queen is an English Renaissance stage play, a tragedy written perhaps around 1600 and first published in 1657, probably written by Thomas Dekker in collaboration with others.

The play has been categorized as a revenge tragedy, comparable to Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and Hamlet, and to tragedies by Thomas Middleton (The Revenger's Tragedy), John Webster (The White Devil, The Duchess of Malfi) and Cyril Tourneur (The Atheist's Tragedy).

The first edition attributed the authorship of the play to Christopher Marlowe, though this attribution has been recognized as spurious by critics and scholars for nearly two centuries. (The play borrows from a pamphlet, published in 1599, about the death of King Philip II of Spain in 1598. Marlowe died in 1593.)

The 1657 duodecimo edition was published by Francis Kirkman, to be sold by the bookseller Robert Pollard. Of the four surviving copies of the 1657 edition, three attribute the play to Marlowe on their title pages—but one does not. This fourth copy also includes three dedicatory poems prefacing the play.

Many critics who have studied the play judge the internal evidence to be suggestive of the style of Thomas Dekker. John Payne Collier was the first to identify Lust's Dominion with the play The Spanish Moor's Tragedy, a play that has not survived under its original name. Collier's argument has been accepted by a number of subsequent commentators. Philip Henslowe's Diary records a down-payment of £3 to Dekker, John Day, and William Haughton in February 1600 for The Spanish Moor's Tragedy; the Diary, however, does not show that that play was ever finished, and its identification with Lust's Dominion remains uncertain. Individual scholars have also discussed the hypothesis that Henry Chettle may have had a hand in the play, and a few have allowed a possibility that Marlowe may have had some connection with the text in an earlier form.John Marston has also been linked to the play as a potential part-author.

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