The Politics of Suicide in John Fletcher's Tragedie of Bonduca

This essay shows that in John Fletcher's The Tragedie of Bonduca Jacobean debates about absolutism and law are mediated through the play's representation of suicide. In England, willful, criminal suicide violated the monarch's right to control his or her subjects' bodies, and the responsibility of judging suspicious deaths in order to determine such criminality fell to members of local communities serving on juries. Thus England's common law invited one to be cognizant of and participate in a system where judging one's peers wrested some evaluative authority from the monarch. The honorable, military suicide of a charismatic woman in Fletcher's play resists easy categorization and encourages the audience to enact processes of judgment similar to those found in an English jury trial. By provoking the audience to evaluate and classify Bonduca's suicide, the play directs the audience to resist the kind of legal absolutism James I desired. Bonduca becomes a symbol of English identity as both a virtuous predecessor of Elizabeth and as a figure who recalls, for the Jacobean audience, a time when the monarchy did not so greatly threaten subjects' legal agency.