What ties these falls together, beyond their inevitability and remorseless dramatic succession (exacerbated by the play's severe truncation of historical events), is the word “divorce,” which appears, like an uncanny specter, linking the tragical plot of “falls of greatness” to the romantic plot of masque, courtship, marriage, and birth. Thus Buckingham, foreseeing his own beheading (“[e]ven as the axe falls”), calls it a “long divorce of steel” (2.1.62, 77).
