Getting Used, and Liking It: Erotic Instrumentality in Philaster

in Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher’s tragicomedy Philaster, Or Love Lies A-Bleeding (1609), the couple at the center of the romance plot cannot do it alone. The Princess Arethusa loves Philaster, the beautiful and beloved Prince of a neighboring kingdom. Philaster loves her as well, but her tyrannical father has usurped Philaster’s throne and promised Arethusa in marriage to a boorish foreign prince, forcing the lovers to conduct their secret love under the watchful eyes of the court. The two lovers need, commission, and use a third party to negotiate the social, affective, and erotic demands of their prohibited love match. The messenger who serves as a conduit for their love is an ambiguously gendered transvestite: the beautiful servant “boy” who is secretly a girl, Bellario (or, as he/she is ultimately renamed, “Euphrasia”). Early on in the play, Arethusa asks her exiled lover how they will communicate, how they can “devise / To hold intelligence” between them. Philaster suggests, as a solution, the use of his secret servant “boy” as a message-bearer: