SOURCE: Hume, R. D. “The Satiric Design of Lee's The Princess of Cleve.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 75, nos. 1-2 (1976): 117-38.

In the essay below, Hume argues that The Princess of Cleve was an angry satire written during a period when the playwright was undergoing profound changes in his own political opinions.

Scholars have generally found this play baffling, objectionable, or both. Lee started, of course, with Madame de La Fayette's La Princesse de Clèves, and he follows its action quite closely in his main plot. The Princess confesses her chaste love for Duke Nemours to her husband, who then nobly expires of love and jealousy. In the novel, Nemours is an attractive and honorable man, though not a wholly blameless one. Lee turns him into a brutal and cynical whoremonger, and onto Madame de La Fayette's delicate and aristocratic tale he grafts an apparently disjunct...