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A King and No King
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This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface.
We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
224 pages, Hardcover
First published May 1, 1619
About the author
Francis Beaumont
814 books22 followersborn 1584
English poet Francis Beaumont wrote his major works, plays, including The Maid's Tragedy and The Coxcomb , with John Fletcher in the 1610s.
Francis Beaumont, a dramatist in the Renaissance theater, most famously collaborated.
A justice of the common pleas of Grace Dieu near Thringstone in Leicestershire fathered Beaumont, the son, born born at the family seat. Broadgates hall (now Pembroke College, Oxford) educated him at 13 years of age in 1597. Following the death of his father in 1598, he left university without a degree and entered the Inner Temple in London in 1600 to follow in his footsteps.
Beaumont worked not long as a lawyer, accounts suggest. He studied Ben Jonson; Michael Drayton and other dramatists also acquainted him, who decided on this passion. He apparently first composed Salmacis and Hermaphroditus in 1602. The edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica describes as "not on the whole discreditable to a lad of eighteen, fresh from the popular love-poems of Marlowe and Shakespeare, which it naturally exceeds in long-winded and fantastic diffusion of episodes and conceits."
In 1605, Beaumont commendatory verses to Volpone of Jonson. Collaboration of Beaumont perhaps began early as 1605.
They hit an obstacle early in their dramatic careers with notable failures; The children of the Blackfriars in 1607 first performed The Knight of the Burning Pestle of Beaumont; an audience rejected it, and the epistle of the publisher to the quarto of 1613 claims, failed to note "the privie mark of irony about it;" they took satire of Beaumont as old-fashioned drama. It received a lukewarm reception. In the following year of 1608, Faithful Shepherdess failed on the same stage.
In 1609, however, the two collaborated on Philaster , which the men of the king performed at the globe theater and at Blackfriars. The popular success launched two careers and sparked a new taste for comedy. John Aubrey related a mid-century anecdote; , they lived in the same house on the Bankside in Southwark, "sharing everything in the closest intimacy."
About 1613, Beaumont married Ursula Isley, daughter and co-heiress of Henry Isley of Sundridge in Kent; she bore two daughters, one posthumous. After a stroke between February and October 1613, he ably composed no more than an elegy for Lady Penelope Clifton, who died 26 October 1613.
People buried his body in Westminster abbey. People celebrated Beaumont during his lifetime and remember him today as a dramatist.
English poet Francis Beaumont wrote his major works, plays, including The Maid's Tragedy and The Coxcomb , with John Fletcher in the 1610s.
Francis Beaumont, a dramatist in the Renaissance theater, most famously collaborated.
A justice of the common pleas of Grace Dieu near Thringstone in Leicestershire fathered Beaumont, the son, born born at the family seat. Broadgates hall (now Pembroke College, Oxford) educated him at 13 years of age in 1597. Following the death of his father in 1598, he left university without a degree and entered the Inner Temple in London in 1600 to follow in his footsteps.
Beaumont worked not long as a lawyer, accounts suggest. He studied Ben Jonson; Michael Drayton and other dramatists also acquainted him, who decided on this passion. He apparently first composed Salmacis and Hermaphroditus in 1602. The edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica describes as "not on the whole discreditable to a lad of eighteen, fresh from the popular love-poems of Marlowe and Shakespeare, which it naturally exceeds in long-winded and fantastic diffusion of episodes and conceits."
In 1605, Beaumont commendatory verses to Volpone of Jonson. Collaboration of Beaumont perhaps began early as 1605.
They hit an obstacle early in their dramatic careers with notable failures; The children of the Blackfriars in 1607 first performed The Knight of the Burning Pestle of Beaumont; an audience rejected it, and the epistle of the publisher to the quarto of 1613 claims, failed to note "the privie mark of irony about it;" they took satire of Beaumont as old-fashioned drama. It received a lukewarm reception. In the following year of 1608, Faithful Shepherdess failed on the same stage.
In 1609, however, the two collaborated on Philaster , which the men of the king performed at the globe theater and at Blackfriars. The popular success launched two careers and sparked a new taste for comedy. John Aubrey related a mid-century anecdote; , they lived in the same house on the Bankside in Southwark, "sharing everything in the closest intimacy."
About 1613, Beaumont married Ursula Isley, daughter and co-heiress of Henry Isley of Sundridge in Kent; she bore two daughters, one posthumous. After a stroke between February and October 1613, he ably composed no more than an elegy for Lady Penelope Clifton, who died 26 October 1613.
People buried his body in Westminster abbey. People celebrated Beaumont during his lifetime and remember him today as a dramatist.
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
August 27, 2025
Once upon a time, in the kingdom of Iberia (no relation to the famous peninsula, but in Georgia, somewhere south of Macon, perhaps), there lived a princess so beautiful that all who so much as looked upon her were driven mad with desire. (“What are you worried about—your boyfriend’s not gonna fall for me, he loves you!” says the princess to her friend. “Girl, look in the mirror,” she answers.) Commoners, at least, were not defenseless. Having no reasonable hope of wedding such a princess, they could admire her in the relative safety of hopelessness. But a king? A king was truly helpless in the face of what I can only assume was one bangin’ bod. And so what if she was his sister!?
“Is there no stop
To our full happiness but these mere sounds,
Brother and sister? … I have lived
To conquer men, and now am overthrown
Only by words...”
Everyone reads 'Tis Pity She's a Whore for the title, but as 17th century incest plays go, I liked this far more—even if Beaumont and Fletcher don’t quite have John Ford’s courage, telegraphing pretty clearly from the start that, somehow or other, the king would turn out to be, well, no king—and his sister, therefore, no sister. But the journey to get there is wildly satisfying.
Also, the play is sort of weirdly feminist—always a refreshing surprise in early modern literature. It’s full of men complaining that perfectly reasonable and chaste women are nothing but inconstant whores (“Why didst not make me acquainted / When thou wert first resolved to be a whore?” shouts one absolutely unhinged father at his kind and intelligent daughter, “I would have seen thy hot lust satisfied / More privately; I would have kept a dancer, / And a whole consort of musicians / In my own house, only to fiddle thee.” She answers, with admirable calm: “Sir, I was never whore.”) Meanwhile, all the men in the play are literally insane and just barely hanging on to the last shreds of their self control. The irony is delicious and clearly intentional.
“Is there no stop
To our full happiness but these mere sounds,
Brother and sister? … I have lived
To conquer men, and now am overthrown
Only by words...”
Everyone reads 'Tis Pity She's a Whore for the title, but as 17th century incest plays go, I liked this far more—even if Beaumont and Fletcher don’t quite have John Ford’s courage, telegraphing pretty clearly from the start that, somehow or other, the king would turn out to be, well, no king—and his sister, therefore, no sister. But the journey to get there is wildly satisfying.
Also, the play is sort of weirdly feminist—always a refreshing surprise in early modern literature. It’s full of men complaining that perfectly reasonable and chaste women are nothing but inconstant whores (“Why didst not make me acquainted / When thou wert first resolved to be a whore?” shouts one absolutely unhinged father at his kind and intelligent daughter, “I would have seen thy hot lust satisfied / More privately; I would have kept a dancer, / And a whole consort of musicians / In my own house, only to fiddle thee.” She answers, with admirable calm: “Sir, I was never whore.”) Meanwhile, all the men in the play are literally insane and just barely hanging on to the last shreds of their self control. The irony is delicious and clearly intentional.
March 7, 2025
Why did I kind of love this?? Every single man in this play is absolutely bonkers except Mardonius, who reacts to everything with the same degree of revolted bewilderment as I did reading it. Even the women aren't that sensible.
Interesting commentary on kingship and primogeniture, lots about flattery. Cassio's 'Reputation, reputation, reputation!' would fit right in here, except Cassio is from a just marginally better play. I bet this is an absolute riot to see onstage.
Interesting commentary on kingship and primogeniture, lots about flattery. Cassio's 'Reputation, reputation, reputation!' would fit right in here, except Cassio is from a just marginally better play. I bet this is an absolute riot to see onstage.
October 2, 2016
Beaumont and Fletcher are the Gilbert and Sullivan of the Jacobean theatre, ; their names seem inseparable and I do not know if it is possible or even useful to distinguish between the contributions of the one or the other. A King and No King is probably their best known work. It is published in the Regents Renaissance Drama Series, which is a kind of hallmark of recognition. Despite their great popularity at the time of their writing, they seem to have suffered a rapid decline in popularity in succeeding years and many students of literature who might be able to say something spontaneously about Ben Jonson, Jon Ford or Thomas Middleton, would probably be hard put to say anything about any of the many plays which were published under the name of Beaumont and Fletcher.(53 plays according to the second folio!). My assessment is borne out by the fact that there has not been a single review or even rating here in Goodreads of this play. It deserves much better.
A King and No King escapes from the certitudes of Jacobean and Elizabethan drama, if escape is the right word, to present moral dilemmas with an almost dismissive « objectivity ».
The scene of A King and No King is exotic enough. Not Italy, as was customary but in Iberia and Armenia. The sources of the play are a miscellany if not mishmash of legends and stories from far and wide. The setting of the play is Armenia and Iberia. Pursuing legend and history in the creation of this tale would be a study in itself. Suffice to say, that two main themes are taken up which were a dominating concern in much of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama : the abuse of power, virtue, guilt and incest. The central protagonist of the drama is king Arbaces, a character of surprising psychological complexity, surprising because for all their differences, the writers of the time are hardly marked be their presentation of psychological complexity. We the superb magisterial exception of Hamlet, what dramatic character of the stage of the time can honestly be described as complex ? Othello ? Iago ? Sejanus ? King Lear ? Macbeth ? Falstaff ? But Arbaces is genuinely complex, or at least contradictory. In this sense if no other, the faithful Mardonius says truly of his royal master that 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) Whereas characters in earlier drama were driven by their humours and once we understood their humours or their ignorance, we knew at once what « made them tick », the characters of this play are driven by forces within them which can best be summarised, as by Robert Turner in an insightful introduction to the play, as a conflict between will and reason.
The will is presented as the force of nature. The unspoken shadow of Thomas Hobbes ? Man's life in nature is nasty, brutish and short. So it will be if man is not governed by reason. Is the rule of the king a rule of reason ? Not if the ruler is himself subject to his will, his appetite (there seems to be no distinction in the dramatists' eyes between will and appetite) and the question unspoken but present in this play as in John Ford's Perkin Warbeck, is is royalty only a title, where is God in the choice of king ? The implication of Calvin's theology is clearly that a King may rule who is ungodly and therefore it would be right to remove such a king. In A King and No King, the lightness and dangers of absolute monarchy are clearly presented. The capriciousness of human nature, the tendency of the will to overrule reason and destroy it, makes it dangerous to invest full powers in the hands of one man. This is exactly the issue which came to boiling point in England not many years after the publication of A King and No King culminating in Cromwell's fateful words in 1649 : If he is guilty, sign !
Not only kingship is presented in a doubtful light. So is the notion of sin. Sin and kingship are both conventions accepted in this play. Er conventions did I hear myself say ? Well, so it comes perilously close to so seeming in the play. The dominating sin in this tale of king and no king, incest and no incest, is Arbaces's tormented lust for his own sister, a torment resolved by a deus ex machina resolution which recalls Orsino's dilemma in Twelfth Night, namely his affection for Caesario to whom he is « much affected ». It all comes right in the end, but almost by slight of hand, a new fact, shown and proved, changes everything and changes sin into a happy socially approved event.
What is new in this intriguing play is the marked undercurrent of certainty of the permanence of what counts a sin and what counts as divine providence. The trappings of traditional morality plays are there : King Arbaces is like Faust with a good angel (Mardonius) and a bad angel ( Bessus) on either side of him. But we have moved psychologically a long way from Marlowe's Faustus : these good and bad angels are not only believable human beings, the bad angel is also equipped with some uncomfortably persuasive characteristics : humour and self-interest. Bessus is a comic, but his morality is brutish, that is to say, he is the animal of the Hobbseian pre-social world. In short he has no higher reason or sense of morality whatsoever. The play may make us uncomfortable if we see something of ourselves in Bessus who is a sort of Iago and Falstaff and Fool in one. Shakespeare would never, I think have wished to have merged those three characters of his theatre into one. This would have implied a moral turpitude which would have repelled him. Such moral turpitude rolls over the plot of this play like threatening storm clouds over a meadow. I think this is what critics mean when they refer to the « decadence » of Beaumont and Fletcher's drama, because in terms of dramatic plot, psychological credibility, the drama as a vehicle for ideas and dilemmas, A King and No King can hardly be described as decadent, it is on the contrary in such respects very disciplined and sure of itself. It is rather in its uncertainty or unwilling to be certain, its casual approach to questions which others had resolved with passionate conviction,. That many might be inclined to call this play decadent. This drama provides stimulus and interest to issues which are germane to politics and morality, a play which seems at first glance to be merely following a tradition and be at at the end of a tradition ( and that too may earn it the epithet of decadent) but which in fact presents old tales and old certainties in a new perhaps unsettling way.
A King and No King escapes from the certitudes of Jacobean and Elizabethan drama, if escape is the right word, to present moral dilemmas with an almost dismissive « objectivity ».
The scene of A King and No King is exotic enough. Not Italy, as was customary but in Iberia and Armenia. The sources of the play are a miscellany if not mishmash of legends and stories from far and wide. The setting of the play is Armenia and Iberia. Pursuing legend and history in the creation of this tale would be a study in itself. Suffice to say, that two main themes are taken up which were a dominating concern in much of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama : the abuse of power, virtue, guilt and incest. The central protagonist of the drama is king Arbaces, a character of surprising psychological complexity, surprising because for all their differences, the writers of the time are hardly marked be their presentation of psychological complexity. We the superb magisterial exception of Hamlet, what dramatic character of the stage of the time can honestly be described as complex ? Othello ? Iago ? Sejanus ? King Lear ? Macbeth ? Falstaff ? But Arbaces is genuinely complex, or at least contradictory. In this sense if no other, the faithful Mardonius says truly of his royal master that 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) Whereas characters in earlier drama were driven by their humours and once we understood their humours or their ignorance, we knew at once what « made them tick », the characters of this play are driven by forces within them which can best be summarised, as by Robert Turner in an insightful introduction to the play, as a conflict between will and reason.
The will is presented as the force of nature. The unspoken shadow of Thomas Hobbes ? Man's life in nature is nasty, brutish and short. So it will be if man is not governed by reason. Is the rule of the king a rule of reason ? Not if the ruler is himself subject to his will, his appetite (there seems to be no distinction in the dramatists' eyes between will and appetite) and the question unspoken but present in this play as in John Ford's Perkin Warbeck, is is royalty only a title, where is God in the choice of king ? The implication of Calvin's theology is clearly that a King may rule who is ungodly and therefore it would be right to remove such a king. In A King and No King, the lightness and dangers of absolute monarchy are clearly presented. The capriciousness of human nature, the tendency of the will to overrule reason and destroy it, makes it dangerous to invest full powers in the hands of one man. This is exactly the issue which came to boiling point in England not many years after the publication of A King and No King culminating in Cromwell's fateful words in 1649 : If he is guilty, sign !
Not only kingship is presented in a doubtful light. So is the notion of sin. Sin and kingship are both conventions accepted in this play. Er conventions did I hear myself say ? Well, so it comes perilously close to so seeming in the play. The dominating sin in this tale of king and no king, incest and no incest, is Arbaces's tormented lust for his own sister, a torment resolved by a deus ex machina resolution which recalls Orsino's dilemma in Twelfth Night, namely his affection for Caesario to whom he is « much affected ». It all comes right in the end, but almost by slight of hand, a new fact, shown and proved, changes everything and changes sin into a happy socially approved event.
What is new in this intriguing play is the marked undercurrent of certainty of the permanence of what counts a sin and what counts as divine providence. The trappings of traditional morality plays are there : King Arbaces is like Faust with a good angel (Mardonius) and a bad angel ( Bessus) on either side of him. But we have moved psychologically a long way from Marlowe's Faustus : these good and bad angels are not only believable human beings, the bad angel is also equipped with some uncomfortably persuasive characteristics : humour and self-interest. Bessus is a comic, but his morality is brutish, that is to say, he is the animal of the Hobbseian pre-social world. In short he has no higher reason or sense of morality whatsoever. The play may make us uncomfortable if we see something of ourselves in Bessus who is a sort of Iago and Falstaff and Fool in one. Shakespeare would never, I think have wished to have merged those three characters of his theatre into one. This would have implied a moral turpitude which would have repelled him. Such moral turpitude rolls over the plot of this play like threatening storm clouds over a meadow. I think this is what critics mean when they refer to the « decadence » of Beaumont and Fletcher's drama, because in terms of dramatic plot, psychological credibility, the drama as a vehicle for ideas and dilemmas, A King and No King can hardly be described as decadent, it is on the contrary in such respects very disciplined and sure of itself. It is rather in its uncertainty or unwilling to be certain, its casual approach to questions which others had resolved with passionate conviction,. That many might be inclined to call this play decadent. This drama provides stimulus and interest to issues which are germane to politics and morality, a play which seems at first glance to be merely following a tradition and be at at the end of a tradition ( and that too may earn it the epithet of decadent) but which in fact presents old tales and old certainties in a new perhaps unsettling way.
March 9, 2024
I prefer reading plays that don’t involve incest, so this one wasn’t for me. Even though the incest turned out to not actually be incest, it still felt very incest-y.
Sorry Fletcher, but I’m not a fan.
Sorry Fletcher, but I’m not a fan.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 1, 2024
This play had me on the edge of my seat. I saw the incest plotline coming from a mile away, but that wasn't a bad thing; if anything, it made the gradual progression into desperation all the more painful to witness. I appreciated how many themes this invoked, especially the tension that language can cause (check out my review of Derrida's Acts of Literature, specifically his essay "Before the Law," which this felt similar to). Though the incest taboo can't be entirely simplified down to words, I think this is still a beautiful passage: "I have lived / To conquer men and now am overthrown / only by words, 'brother' and 'sister'." In essence, Beaumont and Fletcher dare to ask how much of our lived torment is due to language, categories, and social pressures, and how much pain might be prevented if we attend closely to language. I can see how this play typified the tragicomic genre, since its flip from the nearly tragic to the surprisingly comic was expertly done.
April 6, 2020
This is one weird-ass play, which is another way of saying that it is a sicko Jacobean play that seems headed for a sicko tragic ending until something unsicko happens in the last scene. I find it unsatisfying because the solution almost comes out of nowhere. Everything changes at the end, yet much remains unresolved, such as who will now rule the kingdom? I understand that the American Shakespeare Center's current production (as I write this) is played as a comedy. While there are comic scenes, this is difficult to imagine for most of the scenes. The show is available over the internet for a couple of weeks, so I shall see if they can make this unlikely text work.
July 9, 2014
Simply excellent. Well-crafted story with a wickedly biting humor. This one's a must-read.
April 14, 2025
The dark romance girlies would LOVE this, credence fans eat your hearts out
April 11, 2020
This is better than the quarto edition only to the extent that it has an informative introduction that will help you understand this very strange play. It is also a nicely edited text, but I prefer texts to be unedited.
April 21, 2010
I found this play very interesting as one of Shakespeare's contemporaries. The plot left me confused as to what was going to happen at times. I definitely had some "huh?" moments while reading. It was a fast read and enjoyable.
November 26, 2012
Tragicomedy - written in a tragic mode with the exception of certain comic characters until the plot is resolved in a mistaken parentage plot. Jacobean Incest!
September 13, 2025
This is one of those stunningly SEXY renaissance plays that you hear so much about: two people who want to bone china like there's no tomorrow, but are absolutely unable to do anything about it, are left alone onstage together, both almost unable to walk from all the vibes and the blood in their genitals. Fletcher is a genius at these sort of scenes.
Oh, and the reason they can't is that they are brother and sister. Hmmm.
Rest of the play is merely a meet-cute for this scene, but by God is the DNA flying in this scene.
Oh, and the reason they can't is that they are brother and sister. Hmmm.
Rest of the play is merely a meet-cute for this scene, but by God is the DNA flying in this scene.
April 1, 2025
Weird ass play that I read for class. Don’t read it, wouldn’t rec. 2 stars bc the writing itself wasn’t bad. But if you do ever read it, I feel like the moral level of incest contained is just as wrong as in Umbrella Academy, which I personally believe is still weird and icky. I wanna know your opinions. It’s supposed to be funny but like. The ending is relieving in a oh-my-god-I-guess-it-coulda-been-way-worse kinda way, yet it’s still not good. Didn’t rly enjoy this one
March 22, 2020
Plays like this really show the general goodness of various plays from Shakespeare's contemporaries. A King and No King is a bit difficult of a play to understand at times, especially because the comic subplot is so physical, but overall a very enjoyable play. It deals with vexed philosophical and moral conundrums without ever seeming outright boring - and remains a compelling read throughout.
February 5, 2020
This play fucking sucks.
March 15, 2023
If I have to read one more Jacobean play about incest 😭
March 9, 2024
i guess there's some interesting commentary on the nature of power going on here but holy shit i hate the plot of this play so much.
November 22, 2025
I guess I’m glad they aren’t actually siblings?
May 30, 2015
“A King and No King” by Beaumont and Fletcher, the Gilbert and Sulivans of Jacobean drama, is said to have been extremely popular at the time it was produced and for many years after that. I do not understand why this should be so, for the psychology of “A King and No King” is implausible, the plot incredible and the entertainment value low. The title of the play refers directly to a development of the plot but also presumably, to the capriciousness of fate and character, which is very much a feature of the play. Now you see me, now you don't, now I think so now I don't, now he is now he isn't, a coward and no coward, a king and no king, a mother and no mother, a devil and no devil, a comedy and no comedy, a tragedy and no tragedy. Still, after the glorious plays of the Jacobean baroque, this reads in some respects like a poor and feeble forgery of the real McCoy. Perhaps there are dramatic skills which only become apparent when a production is made. There are explicit references to subjects which must have been of widespread concern and possibly this accounts for the popularity.
The two principle themes of this so-called tragic-comedy are incest and absolutism, fought out in the character of Arbaces, King of Iberia. Arbaces is a highly capricious individual. As King he swings from high to low (today he would probably be diagnosed as a manic depressive) and contradicts himself repeatedly demanding first one thing and then the other, condemning his hapless subjects for trying to follow his switching moods, like trying to remain seated on a banana boat, where falling off is not without peril. He has not seen his sister for years (he has been away for years in wars against Armenia, whose king, Tigranes, he has rather surprisingly, given Arbaces' fickle nature and irresoluteness, overthrown in single combat) so long in fact that his sister has blossomed into a lovely lady for whom he is consumed with guilty and incestuous desire. He swerves wildly between scheming and fantasising about the object of his incestuous lust and averting from his guilty desire with horror.
An underlying strength of this play despite its almost grotesque implausibility of plot development (the plot reads like that of a grand opera libretto-come to think of it, Handel or Verdi would have been happy to have used this play for a new opera), is that somewhere buried under the rodomontade, theatrical buffoonery and absurdities of plot, is serious subject matter: to what extent should any single person be allowed absolute authority, as indeed demanded at the time the play was written by the new king of the united Scottish-English crown, James Ist?) where does obedience end and service to higher values begin; finally, and we are offered no intellectual issue here, we are offered the psychological portrait of an individual torn between sexual desire and a guilty conscience, which, again at a deep level, is paradoxically quite realistic and wholly contemporary and probably always contemporary because I is difficult to imagine that any human society will ever entirely resolve the conflict of sexual desire and sexual guilt. .
The play is worth reading, with some poetic moments inspired by Shakespeare and perhaps Webster and Jonson, and I would be intrigued if it were produced and would want to see it but I am still puzzled to learn that it was once very popular and so I still ask myself whether there is an important aspect of this play which has escaped me.
The two principle themes of this so-called tragic-comedy are incest and absolutism, fought out in the character of Arbaces, King of Iberia. Arbaces is a highly capricious individual. As King he swings from high to low (today he would probably be diagnosed as a manic depressive) and contradicts himself repeatedly demanding first one thing and then the other, condemning his hapless subjects for trying to follow his switching moods, like trying to remain seated on a banana boat, where falling off is not without peril. He has not seen his sister for years (he has been away for years in wars against Armenia, whose king, Tigranes, he has rather surprisingly, given Arbaces' fickle nature and irresoluteness, overthrown in single combat) so long in fact that his sister has blossomed into a lovely lady for whom he is consumed with guilty and incestuous desire. He swerves wildly between scheming and fantasising about the object of his incestuous lust and averting from his guilty desire with horror.
An underlying strength of this play despite its almost grotesque implausibility of plot development (the plot reads like that of a grand opera libretto-come to think of it, Handel or Verdi would have been happy to have used this play for a new opera), is that somewhere buried under the rodomontade, theatrical buffoonery and absurdities of plot, is serious subject matter: to what extent should any single person be allowed absolute authority, as indeed demanded at the time the play was written by the new king of the united Scottish-English crown, James Ist?) where does obedience end and service to higher values begin; finally, and we are offered no intellectual issue here, we are offered the psychological portrait of an individual torn between sexual desire and a guilty conscience, which, again at a deep level, is paradoxically quite realistic and wholly contemporary and probably always contemporary because I is difficult to imagine that any human society will ever entirely resolve the conflict of sexual desire and sexual guilt. .
The play is worth reading, with some poetic moments inspired by Shakespeare and perhaps Webster and Jonson, and I would be intrigued if it were produced and would want to see it but I am still puzzled to learn that it was once very popular and so I still ask myself whether there is an important aspect of this play which has escaped me.
October 9, 2025
Read as part of the Shakespeare Institute's "Extra Mile" online readathon in the lockdown summer of 2020.
Wow, what a play. Incest is at the heart of the main plot, which makes it very Jacobean, though the couple involved have never met as adults and turn out
The quality of the writing here is superb, especially Beaumont's parts, though Fletcher is also very skilled. Real psychological depth as the central character fights his unwanted feelings. The sub-plot is a bit silly, but works well enough with a boastful, cowardly soldier reminiscent of Falstaff.
It would be wonderful to see this on stage, when theatres are properly open again.
And again in 2025 as part of the process of cutting the play for a reading on Zoom. Arbaces is an intriguing character. Echoes of a certain orange politician.
Wow, what a play. Incest is at the heart of the main plot, which makes it very Jacobean, though the couple involved have never met as adults and turn out
The quality of the writing here is superb, especially Beaumont's parts, though Fletcher is also very skilled. Real psychological depth as the central character fights his unwanted feelings. The sub-plot is a bit silly, but works well enough with a boastful, cowardly soldier reminiscent of Falstaff.
It would be wonderful to see this on stage, when theatres are properly open again.
And again in 2025 as part of the process of cutting the play for a reading on Zoom. Arbaces is an intriguing character. Echoes of a certain orange politician.
July 15, 2012
This is a captivating play with beautiful language. Each character, even the smallest ones, have depth, and the emotional journeys the characters undergo is moving and feels real. The struggle between the morally correct and sinfully pleasurable is invigorating rather than by the numbers, primarily due to the different ways the two kings approach this tug of war. It's a very unheard of work, but it matches Shakespeare's wit, dimensionality, and dramatic intensity.
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