"Fairyes or Divels": Why is Oberon in Lust's Dominion?

This essay reveals how early modern fairies served as a means for thinking about the instability of national identity. I examine an unresolved question surrounding the revenge tragedy Lust's Dominion: why, at the moment of greatest tension in the play, does a troupe of dancing fairies appear? This scene pivots from the trope of linking Moorish characters to devils, instead inviting the audience to interpret its Moorish antihero through the figure of the fairy. Through this comparison, the play responds to uncertainties surrounding the succession question at the end of the Elizabethan period by creatively reworking theatrical tropes used to represent national belonging. The play uses fairies' paradoxical domesticity and foreignness, their association with Tudor propaganda, and the stories of changelings and underground kingdoms associated with them to frame notions of stable lines of succession and the homogeneity of the state as fragile fictions.