"Titles are jests": the challenge to generic dialectic in A King and No King.

Byrne, Peter

RECENT criticism of Fletcherian tragicomedy has focused on its political commentary. Such criticism is reasonable; tragicomedy appears particularly well-suited to courtly criticism, inasmuch as it can combine the lofty characters and high emotional and political stakes of tragedy, while avoiding that genre's necessarily cataclysmic conclusion, which might easily give offense to the courtiers observing their doppelgangers' demise. Instead, tragicomedy provides "a form which expresse[s] in theatrical fiction the belief that in spite of potentially dangerous circumstances harmony and order [will] prevail in the end," (1) and so enables an appropriate means for the artistic community to comment on the conduct of their social superiors. By incorporating instead comedy's resolution of harmony, the rhetoric of exhortation can replace that of condemnation. Such generic opportunity was unlikely to be neglected by the politically-minded Fletcher. Gordon McMullan has demonstrated thoroughly the political agenda of Fletcher's canon in The Politics of Unease in the Plays of John Fletcher, and the combination of such an author and such a genre yields the reasonably decisive conclusion that we are secure in reading his works for their political content.

But there is a problem with applying this rubric too broadly, particularly with regard to A King and No King, generally regarded as the most successful tragicomedy in the Fletcherian canon: political commentary, like all forms of rhetoric, requires a relatively stable genre to inform and sustain its argument. This need is particularly acute in those genres in which the commentary is implicit within the mimesis of art, and which therefore demands the interpretation of the audience in order to sway its opinion. Genre is a powerful device for easing this interpretation, as Alastair Fowler explains: "In literary communication, genres are functional: they actively form the experience of each work of literature." (2) For the playwright, the tropes of dramatic genre function as Aristotelian enthymeme--familiarities that prompt concession without requiring proof or digressive justifications: "The generic markers ... of a work have a strategic role in guiding the reader. They help to establish, as soon as possible, an appropriate mental 'set' that allows the work's generic codes to be read." (3) The wide assortment of generic hallmarks available to playwrights (character types, plot devices, commonplaces of imagery or action) serve to enable comprehension of the grounds upon which an argument is formed, and act as an illustration of that argument's movement from premise to telos. An audience familiar with watching a comedy or a tragedy is familiar with the meanings of the hallmarks of those genres, and by recognizing them, can more successfully be led to the playwright's desired concordance of opinion. Such rhetorical use of a genre's predictability can be problematic, however, in two ways. First, if the genre, like tragicomedy, is less rigorously defined and understood by author and audience, its ability to construct an argument based on accepted indices can be compromised. Second, overfamiliarity with any genre can lead to an ossification of the audience's judgment; elements that appear to be the hallmarks of a genre may be received contrary to the author's intent, and an audience preconditioned to see generic meaning can, with little or no prompting, see nothing else.

For the generically-minded playwright, there must be concern that the enabling of comprehension offered by genre can tip over into an occlusion of comprehension when familiarity of generic tropes replaces the ability to interpret objects that do not, in fact, embody those tropes. This problem is particularly acute for those working in tragicomedy, which must render its composers self-conscious about its generic elements. Tragicomedy, which assembles its arsenal of tropes from both comedy and tragedy, as well as many that are sui generis, must confront the rhetorically-minded author with the challenge of constructing an argument based on tropes that may lead an audience to anticipate (as the audience for The Faithful Shepherdess did) a play and an argument far from the author's intent. And there is an additional, related challenge for the tragicomic playwright: the loss of the emotional coherence provided by comedy and tragedy. Can the mixed mode achieve a momentum of pathos sufficient to carry an argument? John T. Shawcross obliquely diagnoses this concern in his definition of tragicomedy: "The conclusion is comedic, but there is no necessarily lasting spiritual rebirth or vision ... exhibited by the characters. The reversal is for the present only; there is more surface than depth, particularly in the moral dimension." (4) These are the concerns that dominate the argument of A King and No King, which addresses both the validity of a generically framed dramatic argument and the questionable emotional impact of a tragicomedy's denouement.

Both issues were clearly on Fletcher's mind well before the composition of A King and No King. In his address 'To The Reader' of The Faithful Shepherdess, Fletcher offers a famously acerbic account of the play's aforementioned failure: "It is a pastorall Tragie-comedie, which the people seeing when it was plaid, having ever had a singuler guift in defining, concluded to be a play of country hired Shepheards in gray cloakes, with curtaild dogs in strings, sometimes laughing together, and sometimes killing one another: And missing whitsun ales, creame, wassel, and morris-dances, began to be angry." (5) Though his conclusion may be compromised by his anger, Fletcher's disdain for his audience is significant in that he stresses the degree to which popular opinion (rather than classical precedent or artistic convention) had become a means of defining dramatic genres, a trend with potent implications for the popular artist whose income depended largely on satisfying that opinion.

For Fletcher, the poor reception of Shepherdess was not due to an audience unprepared to view a tragicomedy, but one that was too firmly prepared for its version of a pastoral to accept any elements extraneous to that anticipated theatrical experience. Such expectations invariably lead away from the notion of drama as a mode of philosophical or moral portrait, examination, and encouragement, and towards an "assembly line" approach in which the ingredients of the genre themselves become the genre itself.

Curiously, Fletcher seems to confirm this approach in his own definition of tragicomedy. While his dismissal of his audience's inadequacy would seem to be based on a dismissal of their means of evaluation, his description is not as distinct from theirs as it might be: "A tragie-comedie is not so called in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect it wants deaths, which is inough to make it no tragedie, yet brings some neere it, which is inough to make it no comedie: which must be a representation of familiar people, with such kinde of trouble as no life be questiond, so that a God is as lawfull in this as in a tragedie, and meane people as in a comedie." (6) Like his despised audience, Fletcher depicts tragicomedy as a genre defined by its hallmarks (or their absence) rather than for any coherent telos the genre sustains. (7)

Moreover, his description reinforces the easy notion of tragicomedy as a genre defined by other genres. Defined exclusively by the elements of tragedy and comedy, tragicomedy remains "neither fish nor fowl," and thus encourages the presumption that tragedy and comedy are instances of coherent genres, with elements appropriate to both. This definition has been the grounds for the critical dismissal of tragicomedy as an inherently inferior genre, since it cannot sustain a generic unity of tenor and vehicle. (8) Under this rubric, tragicomedy becomes simply an admixture of disparate elements, rather than an independent mode, capable of articulating a moral or emotional perspective that is something other than tragedy or comedy in a minor key. (9)

But as canonical critics of Fletcher like Eugene Waith and Philip Finkelpearl have demonstrated, the Fletcherian canon does achieve an artistic consistency that transcends the notion of tragicomedy as a generic gallimaufry. Fletcher's frustrated counterassertion to his audience's definitions appears to be the first step toward recognizing that the mode is more than the sum of its parts, and it is significant that the three works he produces in his collaboration with Beaumont immediately after Shepherdess are his most substantial contributions as a dramatist: Philaster, The Maid's Tragedy, and A King and No King. Recalling his recently expressed self-awareness of the problematic nature of generic tropes and their overfamiliarity, Fletcher moves towards an artistic assertion of the possibility of a dramatic mode that corrects the faults of generic overdependence.

Examined with this intent in mind, A King and No King offers a dramatic form in which the exceptional, rather than the categorical, is the constitutive. In this sense, it is a peculiar fulfillment of the modes of comedy and tragedy, which address the dramatic consequences of an exceptional perspective. But the play's portrait of exceptional perspective operates as a rejection of, rather than an altered version of these genres. The play argues that, abstracted from the specifics of plot and character, neither tragedy nor comedy can portray true exceptionality, since both genres operate according to a systematic concept of drama as dialectic, which excludes the exceptional in favor of the categorical. Each genre is a conflict of values, desires, and perspective, which in tragedy achieves the elimination of one side, and in comedy achieves a corrective detente. (10) But A King and No King strongly criticizes the exclusionary process of dialectic, suspending the conclusive nature of tragedy and comedy, and focusing instead on those theatrical elements of action and character that comedy and tragedy exclude, while acknowledging the pull towards commitment to one of the "pure" dramatic genres.

This rejection of a designated telos is reflected in tragicomedy's tendency to portray suspended action; within generic composition, action decisively commits the drama to one of the two generic outcomes. Waith has identified this structural suspension as a particular quality of Fletcher's tragicomic work: the use of narrative stasis as an occasion for rhetorical discovery and examination of a thematic topic. Of the characters of The Faithful Shepherdess, he writes: "In speeches as formal as the movements of the dancer they exhibit their diverse natures and establish the themes of the play.... The plot, like the story of a ballet, is less important than the component situations in which an idea, a relationship, or an emotion is given a brief, vivid actuality." (11) Like tragedy or comedy, tragicomedy is an exhibit of the agon between represented ideas, but unlike them, it is not predetermined in the conclusion of that agon.

On the contrary, its lack of narrative necessity enables its encounters to be profitably indecisive, achieving mutual agreement rather than the enforced capitulation of one perspective. It is the privileging of discourse in Fletcherian tragicomedy that has yielded much of traditional criticism's disdain for what seems like an indecisive mode. Waith answers this criticism (in the form of Eliot's famous dismissal of the collaborators' canon as "hollow" and "a clever appeal to emotions and associations which they have not grasped" (12)), by arguing that it is the very artifice of tragicomedy that enables a more substantial intellectual grappling with its subject: "The verse of Beaumont and Fletcher ... is exactly what it appears to be and exactly what the situations demand.... The poetry of every major scene is a brilliant solution to a rhetorical problem." (13) Waith regards this dramatic method as one primarily used to attempt emotional expression rather than more cerebral analysis, but he also notes that these emotional "high points" of tragicomedies like A King and No King are achieved by a "vitality ... given to them by declamatory rhetoric." (14)

It is the use of such rhetoric, used to examine as well as persuade, to identify and define as well as to move, that denotes Fletcherian tragicomedy. The authors assert their right to include gods as well as mean persons because such figures are capable of perspectives and speech that those occupying the middle grounds of humanity cannot articulate, and while tragedy or comedy would exclude one of these two extremities, tragicomedy enables a fuller view of its topic. Their tragicomedies enable a competitive but inclusive discourse between rival perspectives, and with this is in mind, we might regard A King and No King as, in part, a dramatized discourse between the perspectives and presumptions of each genre. This approach returns us to the notion of genre both as a rhetorical mode for making a particular argument about human character and experience, and as a means of popular and critical consumption. Both functions are foregrounded in A King and No King, which portrays a set of characters insistent on a generically coherent experience, reflecting both the audience demanding its usual generic tropes and the critic demanding a traditional generic telos.

Based on his earlier definition of a tragicomedy's licensed ingredients, Fletcher appears to favor the audience's demands. But A King and No King reveals a developed perspective that recognizes the need to examine both sets of expectations, and criticize the flaws in both. As such, A King and No King evokes generic conventions for evaluating character and action, in order to criticize the degree to which such conventions--and the convention of genre itself--are adequate to present and evaluation the heterogeneous nature of context and character.

Here my focus on the generic criticism in and of the play aligns with the political focus of other critics. For to be sure, Fletcher's plays are political in their aims. McMullan baldly states that "The Faithful Shepherdess is a political play," elaborating "the political effect of the transfer of power is ... highly charged, since figures representative of both spiritual and secular power in the play defer to a virgin for an appropriate solution to the country's ills, a thoroughly Jacobean literary strategy recalling the mythologized norms of the reign of Elizabeth." (15) The implication here is not simply that Fletcher's work is politically motivated, but that his use of familiar hallmarks of character and action show a lively sense of the power of such hallmarks to attain rhetorical ends. But the political goals of Fletcher's art are what must motivate him, as a conscientious artist, to render his plays capable of presenting and his audiences capable of receiving his intended argument. The failure of The Faithful Shepherdess, as well as his collaboration with Beaumont, appear to have given him pause in his political agenda, resulting in one work, at least, that questions the stability (and thus the efficacy) of generically-situated rhetoric. Unless an audience can read a play correctly, they cannot be expected to read the message conveyed within that play. The critical consensus on the political dimension of Fletcher's plays must make allowance for a self-awareness on Fletcher's part as a rhetorician. My reading of A King and No King as a play primarily concerned with the efficacy of genre as a means of interpretive engagement with both art and the world is therefore a supplement, rather than an alternative to, the political readings of his works.

The need for suppleness of interpretive approach in art and in life is of course a timely subject for Beaumont and Fletcher. Montaignean skepticism's intrusion into the theatrical realm creates a disruptive opportunity to question precedence as a means of evaluation, and Michael Neill has noted that the ethos of A King and No King derives substantially from such skepticism: "The protean qualities of this drama, the violent switches of attitude and behavior, are not simply resources of theatrical expediency: they reveal the dramatists' sense of a world knit up of contraries, inherently unstable and liable to sudden alteration and peripety." (16) Neill's reading correctly represents the experience of both the characters of the play and its audience, but as I will show, he overlooks a significant aspect of its plot which reveals that experience to be considerably less arbitrary, and which renders the experience of arbitrariness to be a misreading of the homogenous. Nevertheless, Montaigne's influence is unquestionable; the play's criticism of the insistence on conventional consistency resonates decisively with the Montaignean criticism of the same subject: "Given the natural inconstancy of our behavior and our opinions it has often occurred to me that even sound authors are wrong in stubbornly trying to weave us into one invariable and solid fabric." (17) While Montaigne may not have intended his words to be understood as references to dramatic poets, the sentiment is entirely applicable to their work, as Verna Foster has noted in identifying "one of the hallmarks of Fletcherian tragicomedy, the predictably unexpected quality of mundane human experience." (18)

The tragicomedy of A King and No King is framed within an unsustainable ethos that demands consistency, and rejects anything less as a sign of inadequacy. This is of course the problem of tragicomedy itself, which frustrates the expectations of critics who demand generic coherence. In their generically pliant mode, and its implied rejection of the authority of those critics (like Sidney) who demand rigidity, Beaumont and Fletcher appear to align themselves with the position of Puttenham, who prescribes a revised approach to composition and reception in terms that themselves owe much to Montaigne:

   But since the actions of man with their circumstances be infinite,
   and the world likewise replenished with many judgments, it may be a
   question who shall have the determination of such a controversy as
   may arise whether this or that action or speech be decent or
   indecent. And verily, it seems to go all by discretion, not
   perchance of everyone, but by a learned and experienced discretion.
   For otherwise seems the decorum to a weak and ignorant judgment
   than it doth to one of better knowledge and experience, who showeth
   that it resteth in the discerning part of the mind, so as he who
   can make the best and most differences of things by reasonable and
   witty distinction is to be the fittest judge or sentencer of
   decency. Such generally is the discreetest man, particularly in any
   art the most skillful and discreetest, and in all other things for
   the more part those that be of much observation and greatest
   experience. (19)

Puttenham later stresses that decency as is virtue is "to be observed in every man's action and behavior as well as in his speech and writing," (20) thus tying his analysis to the interpretation of performance as much as text, and giving a distinct air of the theatrical to the decorum he advocates. Of key importance in Puttenham's argument is the recognition that a flawed perspective on the part of the poetic critic or dramatic audience is as severe as a misguided author. In addressing the flaws of the critic and audience, however, Puttenham elides what Montaigne flatly states: that "learning" and "experience" often conflict, and that humanity has a tendency to rely too much on the former, and to forget that the latter is highly subjective. (21) Adopting the issue of genre precedent as an inadequate means of composing and receiving drama, Beaumont and Fletcher offer a deeper skepticism than Puttenham's, but do so in a fashion that attempts to unite his values of "learning" and "experience" by questioning the perspective that shapes both.

With Fletcher's description of his audience's inadequacies in mind, the crowd scene in II.ii of the play demonstrates his criticism of popular authority in generic evaluation. Beaumont had already mocked the sophomoric pretensions of the popular audience in The Knight of the Burning Pestle, and the scene in A King and No King strongly resembles that earlier work in its scathing portrait of the common spectator. Arbaces, King of Iberia, has ended his country's lengthy war with Armenia by besting its monarch, Tigranes, in single combat. With characteristic excess, he has announced to his court his plans to forgive all hostilities, forgo all ransom, and to unite the kingdoms with the marriage of his captive to Panthea, Arbaces's sister. (22) Arbaces has therefore assembled the populace not only to meet them in triumph, but to present to them a reconciled Tigranes. But here he meets with an unexpected response: a chorus of disapproval.

In what reads like an artist's retort against those who rejected his Shepherdess, Fletcher's prelude to Arbaces's entrance establishes the crowd as a surly, ignorant lot, as much concerned with the sale of conveniences and refreshments as they are by the appearance of their king after his long absence. A jostling fight breaks out and an adulterous assignation is contemplated; such is the moral and intellectual makeup of the crowd to whom Arbaces speaks. The king's agenda is not a complex one: to present Tigranes as the prospective husband of their princess, and the foundation of a lasting peace. Their reaction, however, does not follow his intentions; rejecting his bid to "sing songs of gladness and deliverance," the crowd quickly becomes a lynch mob: "Out upon him! How he looks! Hang him, hang him, hang him!" (23) His lieutenant Mardonius is appalled, Tigranes is humiliated, and Arbaces can only placate the crowd by giving them what they clearly want: a vision of Tigranes as a monstrously hubristic hero brought low. "The terror of his name has stretched itself / Wherever there is sun. And yet for you / I fought with him and won him too; /I made his valour stoop and brought that name, / Soared to so unbelieved a height, to fall beneath mine" (III.ii. 118-23). At this new representation of the war's conclusion as the consummation of a tragic career, the crowd subsides once again into happy celebration. It is the sacrificial catharsis of a tragic downfall that they have come to see, not the pleasantries of a comic reconciliation. Like the audience for Shepherdess, they have come with expectations, and nothing else offered them, no matter how pleasantly beneficial, will satisfy.

Tigranes blames Arbaces for this "speech in commendations of himself," calling him "vainglorious" (III.ii. 127-29)--a diagnosis shared by virtually all of the court--but it is worth remembering that such had not been Arbaces's intention: "It was far from me to mean it so" (III.ii. 112-13). Here the drama's depicted pull toward generic commitment is revealed. Swayed by the crowd and their expectations, Arbaces succumbs to their demands, and stumbles into a display of hubris that, even as it paints Tigranes as a tragic hero overthrown by nemesis, equally marks Arbaces himself as a tragic figure inviting his own peripeteia. Simply put, Arbaces wishes to offer his audience a comedy's ending, but his audience demands a tragedy's pride and fall, and gets it. For one who is marked as perversely self-determining throughout the play, Arbaces here displays the contrary fault in his unwillingness to remain firm in the face of a mob of ignoramuses; he would rather be popular with the people than maintain his own interpretive agenda. And lest we think that commoners are in the right, the authors are careful to mock them in departing, as the Citizens' Wives happily anticipate the "peas"--rather than "peace"--they believe Arbaces has brought home with him (III.ii. 155-63).

The scene argues that, within a theatrical perspective, action is interpreted by an often unsoundly biased perspective. This concern permeates the play, in which identity is too often determined by external denomination, and action judged accordingly. A King and No King opens with the comic exchange between Mardonius and Bessus, reviewing the latter's inadvertent success in the climactic battle of the war. Bessus, beaten by Mardonius as a coward during the battle, has allowed his fright to misdirect him, and engaged upon an unintentional surprise charge against the enemy, winning the Iberians their victory. But Mardonius will not allow any virtue in the action, arising as it did from cowardice and error. Bessus is pragmatic: "But came not I up when the day was gone and redeemed all?" Mardonius rebuts: "Thou knowst, and so do I, thou meanst to fly, and, thy fear making thee mistake, thou ranst upon the enemy" (I.i.67-71). Mardonius is correct, of course; the act was a mistake. But it was a mistake that led to triumph, which even Mardonius grudgingly concedes: "I think we owe thy fear for our victory" (I.i.72-73). But he will not allow that a man's action can be in contradiction to his character; Bessus is a coward, and thus his act is cowardly, and is judged accordingly.

A central problem of the play is established: the degree to which actions are deemed erroneous not by their consequences, but by the publically designated character of their performers. That Mardonius is right is this case does not mean that he will be right in every case, particularly with this interpretive approach. But the authors invite us to give Mardonius that credibility here; Bessus is such an identifiable type, the miles gloriosus, that we are encouraged not only to share Mardonius's certainty about him, but to approach subsequent characters with a similar means of typological evaluation, and a similar certainty as to their type. This invitation to confirmation bias is aided by the fact that Mardonius, in his moralizing chastisement, reveals himself to be a dramatic type as well: the raisonneur of comedy. If the first two characters we encounter appear to encourage generic typology, such typology is the suggested reading of subsequent introductions.

Upon this established point, Arbaces enters. And here the authors reveal that without such a sound understanding of character, readings that fall back on typology will attempt to make the exceptional and incongruous fit within the stereotypical. For just as Mardonius correctly reads Bessus as a generic type, so he reads Arbaces, but this time incorrectly. His chastisement of his king is the criticism of a perspective that demands consistency of character: "He is vainglorious and humble, and angry and patient, and merry and dull, and joyful and sorrowful, in extremities in an hour" (I.i.84-86). Here he resembles nothing so much as those figures mocked by Montaigne, who "select one universal character, then, following that model ... classify and interpret all the actions of a great man; if they cannot twist them the way they want they accuse the man of insincerity." (24) The notion that circumstances may, even within a short space of time, provoke Arbaces to entirely appropriate yet divergent responses, does not occur to him.

Mardonius's complaint regarding the brief space of time between these swings of mood and action pointedly resembles the demands of generically minded critics of tragicomedy. A play's brevity, for such readers, requires consistency of character in order to produce a harmonious whole in enacting the genre's emotional and moral telos. This critical perspective aligns Mardonius with Sidney, who demands just such consistency from his heroes: "If the poet do his part aright, he will show you in Tantalus, Atreus, and such like, nothing that is not to be shunned; in Cyrus, Aeneas, Ulysses each thing to be followed." (25) It does not strike Mardonius that, as a subject to a king, his reading of inconsistency might be the result of a flaw in a subject's perspective rather than a monarch's conduct. (In the absolutist terms of seventeenth-century kingship, derived from texts like Baslikon Down, such ought to be Mardonius's response.)

But Mardonius does not interpret Arbaces as he would a true king; he interprets him as he would a generic, and specifically, a tragic king. His advice to Arbaces addresses the king as an insufficiently committed dramatic type, not as an individual independent of generically conventional restrictions:

   Were you no king and free from these wild moods, should I choose a
   companion for wit and pleasure, it should be you; or for honesty to
   interchange my bosom with, it would be you; or wisdom to give me
   counsel, I would pick out you; or valour to defend my reputation to
   defend my reputation, still would I find you out; for you are fit
   to fight for all the world, if it should come in question

   (I.i.373-80).

Arbaces's status as 'a king' demands consistency before Mardonius can ascribe any virtue to him; without this consistency, he must be read as an inadequate figure. And it is equally telling that Mardonius portrays inconsistency not as a quality that divides Arbaces between a tragic identity and a comic one, but instead casts it as a disposition of character that leads to the tragic hero's role. "Truth will offend you" (I.i.276), he tells Arbaces, and a monarchical hero in opposition to a universal truth is the hallmark of tragedy's destructive arc.

This pattern of forcing Arbaces into a suitably generic role is perpetuated throughout the play. Following the debacle of the crowd scene, Arbaces is chastised for his capitulation to the mob by Tigranes and Mardonius. Tigranes is motivated by an understandable self-interest, but Mardonius's disapproval, motivated as he claims by his devotion to Arbaces and supported by his role as raisonneur, appears comparatively objective, and thus more a more significant contextual evaluation of his character. Maurice Hunt, for instance, deems Mardonius to be the "authoritative auditor" of Arbaces's self-expression, whose ridicule is supported by Beaumont and Fletcher: "By depicting temperamentally mixed Arbaces as two persons and then wishing the passionate fellow away, Mardonius predicts the possible reformation of his character." (26)

But I contend that this apparent support is an invitation by Beaumont and Fletcher to share the error, rather than confirm the opinion, of Mardonius. We cannot view his as the course of self-evaluation and conduct that Arbaces ought to follow, since Mardonius suffers from the same analytical distortion as Arbaces himself. Though he believes that he speaks from a perspective of critical objectivity, his perspective is fundamentally flawed in its premise. For, like everyone else at the Iberian court, and like the audience itself, he believes Arbaces to be what he is not: the rightful king and Panthea's brother.

The interpretive cipher to the action and argument of A King and No King, hidden until the final moments of the play, is the secret plot between Gobrius, Lord Protector of Iberia and Arbaces's true father, and the Iberian Queen Mother, Arane. Faced with the failure of her royal marriage to produce an heir, Arane enters into a conspiracy with Gobrius to feign her pregnancy, and to substitute Gobrius's newborn son as the designated heir to the throne. The plan succeeds, but to the chagrin of both, Arane subsequently conceives a true heir: her daughter, Panthea. Locked into the artifice of Arbaces's feigned parentage, the two continue the ruse as he assumes the throne. Arane repeatedly attempts to murder her supposed son in order to secure the throne for Panthea, only to be frustrated by failure and Arbaces's forgiveness.

But Gobrius has a more ornate scheme to resolve the crisis: he will encourage the supposed siblings to fall into an incestuous passion for one another, in order to facilitate their eventual marriage and the restoration of right and stability to the throne. All goes according to plan, but the suddenness of the plot's discovery and the instantaneously harmonious marriage of the dethroned Arbaces and the newly elevated Panthea has struck many readers as an unduly artificial conclusion to the drama. That Gobrius and Arane have been such minor figures in the drama, either off-stage or, in Gobrius's case, colorless, exacerbates this impression; they appear to have been included solely to provide the denouement of happy discovery.

By withholding the existence of the conspiracy throughout the play, the authors have done more than engage its characters in an artificial scenario; they have also forced the audience to rely upon its own generic preconceptions in reading the characters, and given their multiple cues to read Arbaces and Panthea as tragic figures, we will almost certainly do so. It is on this point that Neill's reading of the play as a portrait of "a heraclitan world" (27) appears misguided; while its characters and audience experience the apparent confusion of contradictory promptings and impulses, the play's many reversals are in fact the result of a carefully sustained composition by Gobrius, whose manipulations render what seems random to be in fact predestined. Far from the chaos of profitable uncertainty propounded by Montaigne, the world of the play is the result of a single absolute truth (Arbaces's true parentage) disguised by a single lie, easily revealed and, in being revealed, resolving all conflict between the perspectives of its characters. That the lie encourages a conventionally tragic consequence (Arbaces enters the final scene of the play intent on murder, rape, and suicide), while the truth provides a comic one is part of the play's generic criticism. Gobrius has constructed a plot of deceptive identity that results in comedic consummation, but his pawns are prompted by their conventional biases to read their situation as tragic, and nearly achieve the destructive end of that genre. Neither Gobrius's comic manipulations (which we must not forget are rooted in treasonous deception) nor the tragic predispositions of the other characters are offered as salutary perspectives.

Instead, the highly orchestrated scenario and the response of its players, first to the tragic deception, and then to the comic resolution, serve to remind us of the inadequacy of any response within such artifice. Thanks to the generic cues of Mardonius and others, and the revelation of Gobrius's elaborate scheme, we are perpetually reminded of the theatrical nature of our engagement with the text. Foster has noted this element in the play: "As spectators we share in the theatrical self-consciousness of Fletcher's plays. But where such self-conscious artistic design in Shakespearean tragicomedy evokes providential design, the more attenuated form of metatheater in Fletcher's tragicomedies points only to the author-ity of the dramatist himself." (28) But where Foster reads this authorial self-indication as a flaw of the play, I contend that this pointed reminder is an essential element of its argument. The orchestrated nature of the plot is confirmed by Arthur Mizener: "It is impossible not to admire the ingenuity of [the play's] construction; yet most readers will probably feel that it is more ingenious than satisfying." (29) But given the degree to which the play foregrounds the artifice of its generic circumstances, it may be wondered whether it can be aesthetically or emotionally satisfying, and whether this frustration is not, perhaps, the intended response of the play's critical portrait of a generic basis for drama.

Many readers will, I suspect, regard the emotional elements of the play as engaging, particularly the sufferings of Arbaces and Panthea. The plot's artifice does not negate the subjective experience of its characters, who do not regard their situation as artificial, and whose passions are real enough to them, and to us if we do not know the play's great secret. Yet given that secret--given the overarching artifice that casts the lovers and their supporters in such false senses of identity--can we regard their subjective reactions as objectively meaningful? Beaumont and Fletcher do not make this question easy to answer. William C. Woodson has noted that Gorbrius's scheme reduces Arbaces and Panthea as pawns in a situation of artificial plot "in which the young innocents are ... jeopardized by an alien and unwanted desire." (30) But we ought to apply that situation not merely to the hero and heroine, but to all the other characters of the play who are not directly involved in the conspiracy. The entire Iberian court and its foreign captives and visitors are under the same false impression, and their contributions to the unfolding of the play are no less maneuvered by an artificial reading of their situation.

While Woodson examines this false set of readings and responses in terms of contemporary morality, I would argue that an equally valid argument is being made in opposition to generic evaluation, inasmuch as the characters who articulate the judgments of this situation and those enmeshed in it are guided by principles that derive from the generic indices of character. Woodson is correct in that the characters are morally tested within what they believe to be a genuinely tragic dilemma. The authors have not simply presented a play in which comedy is disguised as tragedy, but one in which we are made to realize that if we accept generic dictates as absolute, we are led inevitably to insist upon those dictates, rather than seeking some other meaning in what we experience.

Under this generic belief, for instance, Mardonius reads Arbaces through the demands of appropriately kingly and brotherly behavior, and condemns him for the erratic conduct that contradicts such demands. Such condemnation is regularly expressed in a typology of character that resembles the distinction demanded by a binary view of genre: "Thy valour and thy passion severed would have made two excellent fellows in their kinds. I know not whether I should be sorry thou art so valiant or so passionate. Would one of 'em were away" (I.i. 171-76). Mardonius believes Arbaces has the makings of a fine typological specimen, either of boldness or of sentiment, but the king's insistence on enacting a mixed mode of conduct corrupts the virtues of both.

This condemnation of Arbaces's erratic behavior, by his onstage companions and by subsequent critics of the play, begins with a simple premise: an evaluation of character that privileges consistency as its means of preferment. Arbaces cannot reconcile his desires and impulses to his expected persona, but this inability appears, given the untenably artificial demands of that persona, to render him the kind of man idealized by Montaigne: "The most beautiful of souls are those universal ones which are open and ready for anything, untaught perhaps but not unteachable" (741). Unaware of his true nature, and limited by the absolute expectations of others, he nevertheless strives throughout to be genuine in his conduct, only to be represented as a monster of inconstancy. Such is how he and the play must appear to those whose doctrinal adherence cannot value the assertion of self in the face of circumstances, however artificial. Since Arbaces is magnificent and ludicrous, an evaluation that demands exclusivity must read one of these two qualities as false, artificial, or erroneous, whether that evaluation is Mardonius's or Thomas Rymer's: "And far from decorum is it, that we find the King drolling and quibling with Bessus and his Buffoons, and worse, that they should presume to break their jests upon him." (31) It is significant that Rymer's disdain for the character of Arbaces, the first major critical reaction after Dryden (who approved of the play), is based on a similar premise, echoing the criticism of Sidney--that Arbaces does not act as a king ought to: "Kings of Tragedy are all Kings by the Poets Election, and if such as these must be elected, certainly no Polish Diet would ever suffer Poet to have a voice in choosing a King for them" (42). Rymer's insistence on referring to the play as a tragedy largely explains his displeasure, and from that critical perspective, he is correct in his assessment of Arbaces, who refuses to display that consistently heightened state of conduct and expression that tragedy demands of its kingly heroes.

But we may reflect Rymer's criticism back onto the text to recognize that Mardonius's reading of Arbaces is itself tragic in nature. By demanding absolute consistency of conduct, Mardonius cannot help but read Arbaces's behavior as erratic, and to read such erraticism as a self-destructive flaw of character. Thus, Mardonius's expectations and assessment of Arbaces's character--that it should be a pure instance of his role as king--resembles a criticism of Fletcher's portrait of Arbaces, as Rymer's reaction confirms.

Arbaces's response to this judgment, seen within this genetically insistent context, suggests less erratic self-indulgence and more a sympathetic desire to assert his own identity independently of generic restrictions: "Will you confine my words? By heaven and earth, /I were much better be a king of beasts than such a people" (I.233-35). (32) There is an obvious political context to the speech; a king who is subject to the judgment of his inferiors is no true king, and among beasts, who lack context to render judgment, he can be more himself. (In his invocation of beasts, there is also a suggestion of Adamic identity, in which Arbaces, as the solely human arbiter of meaning, is one who bestows it, rather than receives it.) His perverse determination suggests a tragic hero's hubris, but also the instinct of a man who, as the plot reveals, is often instinctively in the right, only to be perpetually told that he is in the wrong.

And his present submission proves to be as much a failure as his earlier inconsistency; after this attempt at self-assertion, his response to Mardonius's complaint is total capitulation. Falling into a lower register, Arbaces submits himself to his subordinate's assessment: "Thou has spoken truth, and boldly, such a truth / As might offend another. I have been / Too passionate and idle; thou shalt see / A swift amendment" (I.i.385-88). But this capitulation, too, is further evidence of his erraticism; by refusing to maintain his right to be as prideful as he pleases, he veers from hubris to abjection. Within the confines of an order that demands consistency, Arbaces cannot succeed even by repentant reversal. Having been established as one who is an inappropriate mixture of qualities, he cannot be consistently himself without confirming this diagnosis; only a different frame of meaning can sustain his identity as something other than inadequate. Such is the equivalent predicament of tragicomedy under the generic rubric, its portrait of an inconsistently provocative cosmos rendering it faulty, no matter how substantial the contradictory provocations may be rendered.

Hunt correctly notes that "gradually the viewer realizes during the performance of act I that Arbaces contains within himself the fundamental conflict of the play." (33) I contend that this conflict is between the insistence on a categorically generic understanding of character, and an alternative insistence on a pliable freedom from generic categorization, in recognition of the multiplicity of experience. (34) Thus Arbaces's submission is carefully phrased to show that he is aware of its artifice. While he succumbs to the terms in which Mardonius would frame him, his conscientiousness cannot entirely erase his conviction that he is not the character he is forced to enact: "I want those parts / You praise me for" (I.i.388-89). Arbaces's sense of self is perversely resistant to the attempts of others to tell him what he is, and what he must be. Within a generic structure of identity, he knows himself not to be his own man, a conviction Fletcher quickly confirms by the crowd scene, in which the king is diverted from his course by a collection of his meanest subjects.

Arbaces identifies the flaw, both in Mardonius's criticism, and in generic criticism in general, when he asserts that "Where there is no difference in men's worths / Titles are jests" (I.i.332-33). The concept of "worth," like that of value, is based on the occupation of an identity. Unless rank is substantiated in character, titles and the expectations that attend them are an occasion for absurdity, and in Arbaces's case, both title and identity are distinctly unsound. But this point is ignored consistently throughout A King and No King, not simply by Mardonius, but by all those who reject Arbaces's conduct as heterogenous, and attempt to steer him squarely in a generically distinct type of character.

The subsequent colloquy between Arbaces and Panthea, isolated momentarily from all those who attempt to shape their identities, is the play's frankest confrontation with the failure of designation to account for character. The two characterize their dilemma as one that renders not their desire, but the designation of that desire, as erroneous:

   Arbaces: Is there no stop
      To our full happiness but these mere sounds,
      'Brother' and 'sister'?

   Panthea: There is nothing else,
      But these, alas, will separate us more
      Than twenty worlds betwixt us.

   Arbaces: I have lived
      To conquer men and now am overthrown
      Only by words, 'brother' and 'sister'. Where
      Have these words dwelling? I will find 'em out
      And utterly destroy them; but they are not to be grasped.
      Let 'em be anything but merely voice.

   Panthea: But 'tis not in the power of any force
      Or policy to conquer them

   (IV.iv. 112-28).

Intuitively, the two innocents are in the right, both in reading their situation and in their instinctive rejection of its artifice. Their colloquy here yields temporary but unsustainable refusal of their instinctive desires, but their capitulation to nebulous authority will drive Arbaces into tragic madness; when he next appears, it is with sword in hand, determined to assert his character in the face of a contrary designation--though even here, he continues to designate it and himself in tragic terms.

His embrace of his tragic identity is the fulfillment of the choice offered him by his two counselors in this matter: Mardonius and Bessus, who, one after another, offer a reading of the situation. Mardonius, predictably, designates the sexual desire as a tragic hamartia. Though he initially gives the nod to political subservience ("You must understand, nothing that you can utter can remove my love and service from my prince"), he immediately undercuts this statement by pressing his own, absolutist agenda: "But otherwise, I think I shall not love you more; for you are sinful, and if you do this crime, you ought to have no laws, for after this it will be great injustice in you to punish any offender for any crime ... I feel I have not patience to look on whilst you run these forbidden courses" (III.iii.96-103). This course lays the pathway to despair; Arbaces's instinctive reading of his relation to Panthea is too powerful (and too accurate) to subside, even in the face of this terrible condemnation. Although he is perpetually conceding Mardonius's tragic characterization of the act, Beaumont and Fletcher have him unable to resist his natural passion for Panthea.

But Fletcher is careful not to offer a comic reading of the situation as a preferable one, as the subsequent scene with Bessus reveals. Where Mardonius condemns the supposedly incestuous desire, Bessus indulges it, reminding us that if the predetermination of tragedy is bad, the predetermination of comedy is no better. The corrupt casuistry of Bessus is decidedly nauseating; told of Arbaces's desire, he readily encourages its fulfillment: "O, you would have a bout with her? I'll do it, I'll do't, i'faith," adding, "And when this is dispatch'd, if you have a mind to your mother, tell me, and you shall see I'll set it hard" (III.iii. 150-72). Small wonder that Arbaces recoils from this enablement: "Hast thou no greater sense of such a sin? / Thou art too wicked for my company, / Though I have hell within me, and mayst yet / Corrupt me further ... Thou hast eyes / Like flames of sulphur, which, methinks, do dart / Infection on me, and thou hast a mouth / Enough to take me in, where they do stand / Four rows of iron teeth" (III.iii. 156-64).

The hyperbole of this response is reflective of the degree to which Arbaces has already begun, under Mardonius's influence, to read his situation as irretrievably tragic, and his sense of Bessus as one who would "corrupt" and "infect" him is entirely reasonable under this assumption. But Bessus's advice, while monstrous, is not that of a villain, but of an individual who is fundamentally comic in his understanding of consequences. When Arbaces challenges him with "Dost make no more on't?", Bessus freely answers "More? No" (III.iii. 152-53). Bessus responds with a comic character's unwitting sense of action as essentially inconsequential. Taking a page from Restoration comedy rather than Greek tragedy, he regards sexual transgression, even in extremity, as a light matter, an attitude is keeping with his role as an undeniably comic character. In his world, vice is met with kicks and insults rather than death; his sense of consequence operates on the ameliorative scale of comic punishment, rather than tragic devastation. Yet Arbaces is undoubtedly right to be repulsed by Bessus; the suspension of generic identity within the play and his own growing sense of himself as a tragic figure would lead inexorably to his destruction, and a comic resolution here is portrayed as fundamentally insensitive to the severity of the action he contemplates.

The play thus rejects both tragic and comic characterizations of its reading as inadequate; the former is moral judgment on a false premise, the latter permissive regardless of circumstance. Neither will achieve an honest and salutary solution to the dilemma. The play thus argues, in the form of two generically minded and equally incompetent advisers, that the ability to inform authority of its duties cannot derive too much from, nor express itself in generic typology; again, we are reminded that Fletcher's larger goal is a drama and an audience healthy enough to offer and comprehend political commentary. And as bad as Bessus is, Mardonius, the 'virtuous' adviser, is worse, for it is his virtue that leads Arbaces astray. The more Mardonius reads Arbaces as tragic, and the more he expresses this opinion to Arbaces, the more he confines Arbaces's responses within a tragic framework of self-interpretation.

The result of this 'help' appears in Arbaces's final entrance, in which he declares his self-designation as finally, utterly tragic:

   It is resolved. I bore it whilst I could;
   I can no more. Hell, open all thy gates,
   And I will thorough them; if they be shut,
   I'll batter 'em but I will find the place
   Where the most damned have dwelling. Ere I end,
   Amongst them all they shall not have a sin
   But I may call it mine. I must begin
   With murder of my friend, and so go on
   To an incestuous ravishing, and end
   My life and sin with a forbidden blow
   Upon myself

   (V.iv.1-11)

This Senecan pronouncement, which by this point reads like a hysterical surrender to the tragic telos, has the hyperbole of satire, and its critical nature is confirmed as Mardonius enters with "What tragedy is near?" (V.iv.12), a line that reads as cruelly witty, given that this outcome is precisely the one he has striven so hard to achieve.

But Fletcher once again subverts the emotional momentum of the action, since this apocalyptic sentiment is immediately dispersed by Gobrius's lengthy confession, and is quickly followed by universal rejoicing, Arbaces finally answering the riddle of the play's title by declaring "Come every one / That takes delight in goodness; help me sing / Loud thanks for me, that I am proved no king" (V.iv.356-57). As noted by the play's critics, the cleverness of the conclusion does little to mask its artifice, and this problem is exacerbated by the unreflective nature of the characters' reaction to their new circumstances, and to the errors that all of them have been engaged in. Only Arbaces, significantly, admits his wrongdoing.

This conclusion infuriated Rymer because, according to the laws of ancient tragedy, Arbaces (and perhaps Panthea) ought to have died for entertaining the sin of incestuous desire. (35) But his reading insists that their sin, even if represented under false pretenses (they are, after all, not siblings) must follow the prescribed course of its presentation as 'true' incest. But the play rebuts this assertion; what seems like casuistry between the frustrated lovers in justifying their passion is the desired result of Gobrius's plot--they have, therefore, behaved correctly in achieving a harmonious conclusion. But Rymer's frustration is understandable, inasmuch as the degree to which the characters receive the news contains no resentment or criticism of Gobrius's manipulations. The Protector goes so far as to declare, in his confession, "Sir, I hate a lie / As I love God and honesty" (V.iv.100-101)--an absurd statement, given that the entirety of the action is based on his deception. Yet no one questions the moral or political correctness of his fraud. Instead, with universal rejoicing, all the characters embrace the artificial solution of comedy with an emotional readiness that understandably rings false. And such, I contend, is the point. Fleeing from a tragic denouement, they embrace a comic one, but the revolting premises of treason, violence, planned rape, and incest render this conclusion equally repulsive. A comic conclusion may be emotionally preferable--joy is invariably preferable to misery--but it is as artificial as the tragic conclusion, based on a lie, would have been.

In the hollow but vociferous rejoicing that results from the revelation of Arbaces's true parentage, the authors present their final argument against generic prescription. And this rejection of the generic telos suggests that, rather than a tragicomedy in the vein of Philaster, A King and No King may be something else: a play that rejects the significance of generic assignment. For if the play argues that genre inevitably leads to a popular and critical prejudice against what may or may not be done and said, and against characters who are anything more than the fulfillment of those prejudices of consistency, then to call the play even something as loosely categorical as a tragicomedy is to ignore its argument. Rather, the authors appear to offer a play without genre, a dramatic mode in which inconsistency is not evidence of a lack of disciplined perspective, but of the artistic assertion that such discipline invariably leads to an inorganic confirmation of prejudice. A King and No King argues that only through unrestricted self-knowledge can action that is truly representative of character be taken. But generic unity corrupts this process, as illustrated by Arbaces's victimized mischaracterization throughout the action.

The play reveals, then, the false necessity of generic absolutism, and its hero, simultaneously but not unnaturally ridiculous and terrifying, comic and heroic, is an embodiment of an attempt to achieve an exceptional path towards the virtue of self-consciousness. Arbaces fails, of course, as this reading has shown. He is subsumed into comedy by the conclusion, one which gratifyingly ignores his seemingly monstrous determination to defy moral order, and simply ushers him into a happy marriage and a more securely-worn crown. Genre is offered here as an influence that, once introduced, inescapably confines the understanding of character and action.

The implications of this argument for the political commentary within drama are profound. If an over-reliance on genre eliminates the personal from the categorical, then a generically-based political argument must ignore the human factor within political discourse. But if the specificity of circumstance may--and usually does--demand a recognition of the individual (whether that individual be author, audience, or event), then an over-reliance on the generic as a means of present or understanding the political is an unquestionably corrupting influence. I do not believe that Fletcher--a professional artist, after all--advocated the total rejection of precedent or intended the abolition of genre, though this play may stray towards the polemic in order to act as a corrective to a weighty opponent of tradition and familiarity. Rather, A King and No King serves, as all good drama should, as a medicinal reminder of the consequences of a limited perspective.

Notes

(1.) William Proctor Williams, "Not Hornpipes and Funerals: Fletcherian Tragicomedy" in Renaissance Tragicomedy: Explorations in Genre and Politics ed. Nancy Klein Maguire (New York: AMS Press, 1987), 146.

(2.) Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Cambridge; MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 38.

(3.) Fowler, Kinds of Literature, 88.

(4.) John T. Shawcross, "Tragicomedy as Genre, Past and Present" in Renaissance Tragicomedy, 24.

(5.) The Faithful Shepherdess in The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, ed. Fredson Bowers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), III, 497.

(6.) Ibid.

(7.) The concept of genre defined by popular expectation and reception is further confirmed by the commentary of clergyman Samuel Harsnett, identified and discussed by Herbert Barry. See Barry, "Italian Definitions of Tragedy and Comedy" SEL 14:2, 179-87.

(8.) Una Ellis-Fermor's condemnation of the collaborator's canon exemplifies the older tradition of criticism in this vein. See The Jacobean Drama: An Interpretation (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1947), 25-27. Subsequent criticism has, of course, led to a more appreciative approach the works Ellis-Fermor so derides, but the tradition has been slow to yield its interpretive grip. Even later critics like Danby, who attempt to mollify this disdain, acknowledge that they are swimming upstream against the deficiencies of the plays. See Poets on Fortune's Hill (Port Washington NY: Kennikat Press, 1966), 181-3.

(9.) His audience's approach appears more ecumenical; let the play be what it will in terms of argument or narrative architecture, they will be content so long as it contains those performative hallmarks they expect and enjoy.

(10.) We might characterize the difference of tragedy and comedy as a choice between Platonic or Ciceronian dialectic.

(11.) Eugene Waith, The Pattern of Tragicomedy in Beaumont and Fletcher (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1952), 5.

(12.) T. S. Eliot, Elizabethan Essays (London: Faber & Faber Ltd., 1934), 78.

(13.) Waith, Pattern of Tragicomedy, 40.

(14.) Waith, 41.

(15.) Gordon McMullan, The Politics of Unease in the Plays of John Fletcher (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 65-67.

(16.) Michael Neill, "The Defense of Contraries: Skeptical Paradox in A King and No King," SEL 21 (1981), 321.

(17.) Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays trans. M. A. Screech (London: Penguin Books, 1987), 373.

(18.) Verna Foster, "Ford's Experiments in Tragicomedy: Shakespearean and Fletcherian Dramaturgies" in Waith, Renaissance Tragicomedy, 100.

(19.) George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy ed. Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhom (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 348-89.

(20.) Ibid, 360.

(21.) Bacon follows this train of criticism in identifying his Idols of Tribe, Cave, Market-place and Theatre, noting that the precedent not simply of learning but of personal experience often leads the judgment astray from the true nature of die object of examination. See Novum Organum, trans. and ed. Peter Urbach and John Gibson (Chicago, II: Open Court, 1994), 60-67.

(22.) It should be added that Tigranes, previously sworn to his countrywoman, Spaconia, is far from pleased at being recast in the role of Panthea's intended. In enforcing the comic requirements of castigation, reconciliation, and marriage onto the uncomfortably individual Tigranes, Arbaces is already illustrating the inadequacy of a generic approach to the personal, reminiscent of the Duke's assignment of mercy and Mariana to the self-condemning Angelo in Measure for Measure.

(23.) A King and No King ed. Lee Bliss (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004) II.ii. 106-8. All references to the play will be to this edition, identified parenthetically by act, scene, and line number. I have elected to use this edition, rather than the Bowers, because it is the most recent critical edition and therefore reflects additional scholarship.

(24.) Montaigne, Complete Essays, 374.

(25.) Philip Sidney, A Defense of Poetry ed. J. A. Van Dorsten (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 36. Subsequent references will be to this edition, identified by page number.

(26.) Maurice Hunt, "Conquering Words in 'A King and No King'" South Central Review 7:4 (Winter 1990), 25.

(27.) Neill, "Defesus of Conltaries," 321.

(28.) Vema A. Foster, "Sex Averted or Converted: Sexuality and Tragicomic Genre in the Plays of Fletcher," SEL 32:2, 320-1.

(29.) Arthur Mizener, "The High Design of A King and No King," Modern Philology 38:2, 139.

(30.) William C. Woodson, "The Casuistry of Innocence in A King and No King," ELR 8 (1978), 314.

(31.) Thomas Rymer, "The Tragedies of the Last Age" in The Critical Works of Thomas Rymer ed. Curt A. Zimansky (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1956), 44. All references to Rymer will be to this edition. In fairness to Rymer, he urges that Arbaces ought have been given a duality of character: "Arbaces should have been consider'd in a double capacity; he should have been endu'd with all the greatness of mind, and generosity of a King, and also with the modesty of a Subject." (43-44) But even here Rymer is insisting on a decorum of character based on generic typology; he insists on calling the play a tragedy, and his scathing evaluation is guided largely by what he perceives as its many failures to sustain the typological demands of that genre.

(32.) The first Quarto's version of the line reads "While," rather than "Will," resulting in a statement rather than a sentence: "While you confine my words, by heaven and earth, / I were much better be a king of beasts / Than such a people." Quartos 2-8, however, amend the line as presented here, and I agree with this editorial correction. In either case, the sentiment of the line--Arbaces's resentment at limits to his self-expression placed on him by his inferiors--is unchanged.

(33.) Hunt, "Conquering Words," 25.

(34.) Again, Neill's identification of the play's Montaignean elements is validated.

(35.) Rymer, "Traegdis of the Lost Age," 48-50.