Hengist, King of Kent, or the Mayor of Queensborough

by Thomas Middleton, Grace Ioppolo (Editor)

Hengist, King of Kent (also known as The Mayor of Quinborough ) was one of the most popular plays of the 1630s and 1640s. Written by Thomas Middleton by 1619, its main tragic plot concerns the invasion of the Saxons, led by Hengist, into Britain and the division of the kingdom into heptarchies,
one of which, Kent, Hengist comes to rule. The play exists in two manuscript texts (both from the 1640s) and an early printed quarto (1661); this is one of the rare plays of the period that exists in early manuscript copy.

Genres: Drama, Renaissance

112 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1620

About the author

Thomas Middleton (1580 – 1627) was an English Jacobean playwright and poet. Middleton stands with John Fletcher and Ben Jonson as among the most successful and prolific of playwrights who wrote their best plays during the Jacobean period. He was one of the few Renaissance dramatists to achieve equal success in comedy and tragedy. Also a prolific writer of masques and pageants, he remains one of the most noteworthy and distinctive of Jacobean dramatists.

Reviews

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading this play next to Macbeth is fascinating: written about the same time as Middleton was rewriting Macbeth, it has a number of the same themes, with Roxena a bargain basement Lady M including seeing a ghost of the child she has murdered), and Aurelius a slight afterthought-Malcolm.

But a number of the themes that we think of as Shakespearean/Macbethian seem to be cropping up here: an obsession with Time, with the bodily humours and notions of sickness, with betrayal (sexual, political) etc. It is not clear if he rewrote Macbeth much more fully than we commonly think, inserting all these themes and linguistic tropes in there, or if writing this was the response to rewriting that.

There is a disturbing scene of marital rape in this play, which feels a bit like a rushed Titus moment, and has no parallels in the historical sources, and a number of ridiculous (and very funny) scenes with the Mayor of Queenborough himself, Simon the tanner, which distract from the tragedy around it.

This edition suggests Middleton rewrote the play at least once, and the play was rewritten by writers from the King's Men (possibly a couple of times) between its original production and its publication forty years later: certainly there are manuscript versions with a different ending (and more songs!), so one wonders if this was always a problem play: too good to let go, but never quite workable as a performance piece.

I would love to see it done live, but I suspect I may be in a minority.

[Gill · Rating 3 out of 5]

Seriously odd. Middleton knew a lot of Shakespeare plays and adapted several for revivals, and this 'feels' like he was trying to do that same sort of thing Will achieved in Henry IV, Part 1, a combination of actual history and low-life comedy which reflects back on it. But Middleton's didn't work. The Mayor subplot has quite a strong feel of Dekker's Shoemakers' Holiday, with a lot of boisterous yokels, while the Hengist story includes a bizarre 'rape' which by modern standards is creepy as well as being actual rape. The story can be traced back to Geoffrey of Monmouth and much earlier, but the version used has a lot of accretions which just make things complicated, and not in a gripping way.

Read as part of the REP King's Men repertoire online reading group in the bleak December of that very bleak year 2020.