Peter F. Mullany

SOURCE: An Introduction to Jacobean Drama Studies: Religion and the Artifice of Jacobean and Caroline Drama, edited by Dr. James Hogg, Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, Universität Salzburg, 1977, pp. 1-28.

[In the following essay, Mullany discusses what he perceives as the increasing artificiality, sensationalism, and dissociation from reality that characterized drama of the Jacobean period.]

Religion is a perennial concern of literature and appears in a variety of uses. Not infrequently we find it used for sentimental effects in the saccharine entertainments produced for television and movies. In the popular media religion provides on many occasions a counter eliciting automatic responses in much the same fashion as such standard topics as family, patriotism, political institutions, and crime. Money in the novels of Sinclair Lewis, for example, immediately suggests the evil of capitalistic oppression of society's underdogs. Each age has its particular emotional counters which produce stock responses because of an audience's shared attitudes toward a specific subject. During the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, such themes as those of revenge, Divine Right of Kings, and the confrontation of Christian and pagan beliefs afforded dramatists subjects which appealed to ethical and religious beliefs of vital concern to the actual lives of Englishmen. Shakespeare's history plays in the 1590's appealed not only to an awakened jingoism, but to a vigorous interest in the historical conflicts rooted in the dispute concerning Divine Right of Kings. Indeed the sacred aura surrounding majesty has an important bearing upon Elizabeth's rule and that of her successor, James I. Revenge tragedy in like manner remained a viable dramatic form from Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy (1587-1589) down to James Shirley's The Cardinal (1641) because it presented a dramatic subject both theatrically exciting and of import to life. Later in this chapter I will discuss revenge and Divine Right at greater lengths, but here I would like to suggest that the significance of both subjects for audiences of Jacobean and Caroline plays stems from the explicit and implicit religious attitudes called into play by their dramatic use.

This study seeks to indicate that religion comes increasingly to be used during the Jacobean and Caroline periods as a dramatic counter eliciting emotional responses and providing threatrical excitement in a manner analogous to Beaumont and Fletcher's tragicomedies. The plays chosen illustrate the use of religious materials as an important element in the creation of an escapist drama which deliberately turns away from the arena of human experience. It is this conscious withdrawal from a dramatic concern with reality into a purely artificial and sensationalist world that produces the artistic decadence of the drama prior to the closing of the theaters in 1642. Beaumont and Fletcher's tragicomedies provide the major impetus to the growing artificiality of the drama, and in large part their dramatic practice lays the foundation for the ensuing retreat into a romantic world wherein theatrical values supplant artistic seriousness. However, prior to a fuller discussion of Beaumont and Fletcher's dramaturgy, I feel it necessary to anticipate their work by showing the major dramatic forces operative in the early years of the seventeenth century. Through an awareness of Jonson's satiric techniques and of the growing romanticism and sentimentality in the plays of Dekker, Heywood, and in some plays of Marston, we come to recognize more fully the special type fashioned by Beaumont and Fletcher and its relationship in many ways to the specious products of our popular media.

… I intend to trace the shift in tone from Elizabethan to Jacobean drama and to indicate the major dramatic influences that lead to the romantic emphasis evident in the tragicomedies of Beaumont and Fletcher and in Shakespeare's last plays. Renaissance critical bias against romantic materials was satisfied by Jonson's satiric comedies which in their avowed moral seriousness come to grips with issues of real concern to men. Jonson's innovations in form and technique, however, did not deter the romantic impulse, for, as we shall see, dramatists such as Marston in certain plays, and Beaumont and Fletcher borrowed Jonsonian satiric techniques but forgot about his serious purposes. The personified humours of Jonsonian comedy are used to expose human vices, but in the hands of Beaumont and Fletcher these type characters are means to sensational theatricality. The protean characters of Beaumont and Fletcher, like Jonson's humours, wear masks to create exciting theater by the contrived situations in which the various masks are displayed. Moreover, Jonson's satiric tone is replaced by the mingling of tragic and romantic tones in Beaumont and Fletcher, and the creation of their middle mood is a major factor in the drama's withdrawal from the real world during the Jacobean and Caroline periods.

Una Ellis-Fermor [in The Jacobean Drama: An Interpretation, 1958] has outlined three major phases in Elizabethan drama, and she has indicated the dominant tone that one discovers in each of these three phases. The drama of the earlier Elizabethan period, from its beginnings to 1598, reveals a sense of optimism and vitality which is best exemplified in the plays of Greene, Kyd, Peele, Marlowe, and the early plays of Shakespeare. The second phase, from about 1598 to 1610 or 1611, presents a mood of pessimism, of spiritual despair, and of "preoccupation with death where the Elizabethan had been in love with life." This mood may already be discovered in the earlier period in the plays of Marlowe and his exploration of the political system of Machiavelli. Barabas, in The Jew of Malta, for example, is one of the characteristic "overreachers" of Marlowe's plays, and he is a study in the policy and materialism of Machiavellianism as described in Gentillet's Contre Machiavel (1576). Irving Ribner [in Jacobean Tragedy: The Quest for Moral Order (1962)] writes that "Marlowe began, in short, embracing the new challenge to the old orthodoxy, and he ended disillusioned with the new but still incapable of accepting the old. He arrived at the spirit of negation and disillusion which is the mark of Jacobean tragedy." Robert Ornstein [in The Moral Vision of Jacobean Tragedy, 1960] has also pointed to the cynicism, the preoccupation with evil, the disorder of experience, and the disillusion which characterize the Jacobean period. In such plays as Hamlet, The Malcontent, Volpone, King Lear, Macbeth, The Alchemist, The Revenger's Tragedy, The Atheist's Tragedy, and The White Devil one finds the mood of spiritual uncertainty characteristic of Jacobean drama:

Comedy thus … becomes increasingly immediate and concentrated upon the manners, habits and morals of man as a primarily social non-poetic and non-spiritual animal…. Most significant of all, tragedy, the form of drama responsible for interpreting to man the conditions of his own being, becomes satanic, revealing a world-order of evil power or, if it attempt excursions beyond man's immediate experience, bewildered and confused.

[Ellis-Fermor, The Jacobean Drama]

The third phase of Elizabethan drama begins about 1610 or 1611 and lasts until the closing of the theaters in 1642. Beaumont and Fletcher are the dominant playwrights of this period, and the "emotional irresponsibleness" of their plays makes for a drama more sensational, more narrowly theatrical, and less concerned with exploring the significance of serious problems. The exploitation of serious moral issues for sensational theatrical moments devoid of coherent meaning is a major feature of the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher and their followers. The decadence of this drama, as L. C. Knights has indicated [in Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson, 1937], stems from its cultivation of pathos and its exploitation of emotions. In their plays the form counts for more than the truth, logical or human. This emphasis upon form makes for cleverly manipulated situations and exciting theater in the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, but it is achieved at the expense of coherence and seriousness of artistic purpose.

The cause for the differences in tone between the drama of the first period and that of the Jacobean and Caroline periods has been attributed to the Court whose influence and patronage created a drama appealing to special aristocratic tastes. The growing importance of the private playhouse at Blackfriars after 1600 indicates the shift from a popular drama playing at the Globe before audiences drawn from a large spectrum of life to one which instead appeals to aristocratic tastes…. [T]he result of such Court influence was that between September 1630 and February 1631 there were ten plays of Beaumont and Fletcher produced to one by Shakespeare (A Midsummer's Night's Dream) of the twenty plays produced by the King's Men.

Increasingly one can see that from 1600 to 1642 there is the strong pressure of special interests which forces the drama to emphasize entertainment at the expense of meaning. It is this pressure which produces the decadence.

During the Jacobean period the dramatic types which had been popular in the 1590's are largely retained with certain changes in tone and treatment. Chronicle-history plays disappear for the most part, but romantic tragedies and romantic comedies continue to appear, and romantic tragicomedy becomes an important dramatic type. What is really new, however, is satiric comedy with its realistic and moral bias and its obvious contrast in tone to the romantic comedies that appeared in the earlier years of the decade. Ben Jonson, of course, is the dramatist chiefly responsible for this innovation. Jonson believed that romantic drama eschewed what he held to be the essential function of drama, and he challenged its pre-eminence by creating plays more avowedly realistic and serious. He presented his essential dramatic theory in the prologue to the 1616 folio edition of Every Man in His Humour (1598) where, after criticizing the romantic tendencies in drama, he declared his purpose was to show:

But deedes, and language, such as men doe use:
And persons, such as Comoedia would chuse,
When she would shew an image of the times,
And sport with humane follies, not with crimes.

To show the follies of the times Jonson created the comedy of humours. George Chapman in his Blind Beggar of Alexandria (1598) and in An Humorous Day's Mirth (1599) had employed characters dominated by humours, but it was Jonson who fully realized the type for the stage. Though Every Man in His Humour illustrates features of the type, its full development is reached in Every Man Out of His Humour (1599) and Cynthia's Revels (1600).

Characterization in Jonson resembles the abstract personifications of morality drama. In Every Man Out of His Humour, Asper, the satirist, becomes Macilente when he enters the world of the play, and through the assumed mask of envy he comments on the affectations of others until each of the characters is dishumoured at the end of the play. In its essential pattern, this development obtains in Jonson's major comedies Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair. Each of these plays is structured about a moral idea and in each characters represent the various social and moral evils which Jonson aims to expose by unmasking their true natures. It is in these comic masterpieces that Jonson's seriousness of artistic purpose may be seen, for throughout his satiric comedies Jonson constantly offers society a vision of its abuses and by so doing intends a moral therapy for both man and society. Plot is of secondary importance in Jonsonian comedy because thematic unity is the end to which situation and intrigue contribute. Volpone, for example, is constructed of a series of situations basically repeating the exposure of vice and implicitly revealing the moral norms against which characters are to be seen. There is not in Volpone or in Jonson's other comedies a linear progression of narrative; instead there is a circular and repetitive structure which unmasks vice. A number of these features influence the dramatic techniques of Beaumont and Fletcher; however, Jonson's satiric tone is quite different from the romantic tone of Beaumont and Fletcher. Asper-Macilente anticipates the protean characters of tragicomedy while Jonson's concentration on situations unified by their relationship to a moral idea suggests the scenic development in Beaumont and Fletcher. Unfortunately Jonson's influence on his contemporaries was mainly through his craftsmanship. His fellow dramatists often elected to ignore his concern for serious exploration of moral issues.

The avowedly serious moral purpose of Jonson's comedies is in complete accord with the general tenets of Renaissance criticism which emphasized the moral function of literature. Opponents of the drama, especially the Puritans, had long argued against the immorality, sensationalism, and vice presented on stage. Stephen Gosson in his Plays Confuted in Five Actions (ca. 1582) scornfully rebuts the argument of Thomas Lodge in his Defence of Poetry, Music, and Stage Plays (1579) that drama instructs. Gosson argued that the substance of plays was immorality:

The argument of tragedies is wrath, cruelty, incest, injury, murther either violent by sword, or voluntary by poison. The persons, gods, goddesses, furies, fiends, kings, queens, and mighty men. The ground work of comedies is love, cosenage, flattery, bawdry, sly conveyance of whoredom; the persons, cooks, queanes, knaves, bawds, parasites, courtesans, lecherous old men, amorous young men…. The best play you can pick out, is but a mixture of good and evil; how can it be then the schoolmistress of life?

To counter such charges playwrights argued that poetic justice prevailed in their plays. Thomas Heywood, for example, in his Apology for Actors (1612) has Melpomene argue that tragedy is a moral teacher:

Have I not whipped Vice with a scourge of steel,
Unmasked stern Murder, shamed lascivious Lust,
Plucked off the visor from grim Treason's face,
And made the sun point at their ugly sins?

George Chapman in the dedication to The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois, printed in 1613, defended himself from those who would require historical truth in tragedy by maintaining the purpose of tragedy was to provide:

… material instruction, elegant and sententious excitation to virtue and deflection from her contrary, being the soul, limbs, and limits of an authentical tragedy.

Such sentiments are typical of the rather frequent ethical justifications which appear to counter attacks against the drama. They also reflect the avowedly moral bias of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama that in many plays of the periods appears to be at odds with the dramatic intention.

Moralizing in Elizabethan drama ranges from the overt didacticism of Gorboduc to the ethical generalizing found in the plays of Chapman, Marston, Webster, and Tourneur. In the greater plays of the period, such as Shakespeare's and Jonson's, Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, and Middleton's The Changeling, the moral significance is discovered by implication through the organic interplay of character and action. However, in many other plays it is difficult to determine whether the ethical generalizing is meant seriously, or whether it is provided in deference to conventional tastes. One often suspects that the dramatist's real purpose is to tell an exciting story and that the moralizing is an afterthought. This confusion of the ethical and the aesthetic is particularly apparent in the plays of Dekker and Heywood who are both overtly moral, but who puzzle one whether this is their real intention or whether they are appealing to a bourgeois, sentimental taste.

Dekker's The Honest Whore, Parts I and II (1604-1605) are cases in point. In Part I Dekker dramatizes the romantic story of the feigned deaths of Hippolito and Infelice, their separation through the villainy of Infelice's father, the Duke of Milan, and their ultimate reunion and marriage. The serious tone of this action, which resembles Romeo and Juliet in many ways, is joined with a sub-plot, more realistic in tone, concerning the repentance and conversion of the beautiful whore, Bellafront. A further sub-plot presents the humour character Candido whose patience withstands the assaults upon it made by his wife, Viola. In Part II a plot of Italianate intrigue shows Bellafront, the reformed courtesan, as a Griselda-like figure enduring the torments of her profligate husband, Matheo. Hippolito reverses roles from Part I and tries to seduce Bella-front, while Candido again exhibits his patience in comic fashion. As in Part I, Dekker repeats the presentation of a serious moral problem in the testings of Hippolito, Bellafront, and Matheo. But this serious problem in both instances is grafted onto the pattern for complication and solution of romantic comedy. The ending of Part II, wherein Bellafront forgives Matheo and Hippolito reforms by defending Bellafront's chastity, seems too good to be true. The extended debates on the harlot's life versus chastity, in Part I to reform Bellafront and in Part II to make her turn whore again, explicitly state motives which are not so much real determinants of the action as they are used to create exciting scenes. The morality-like opposition between Hippolito and Bellafront in Part II results in the ultimate triumph of virtue, but both plays are troubled by the same failure to fuse the disparate tones of romance, realism, and satire into a coherent and aesthetically satisfying whole. In its mingling of serious moral problems with romantic story and device, Dekker's The Honest Whore, Parts I and II look forward to the middle mood of Beaumont and Fletcher's plays.

Heywood's domestic tragedies, A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603) and The English Traveller (ca. 1625), reveal the heavy moral emphasis of the dramatic type which has been called "the dramatic equivalent of the homiletic tract and the broadside ballad" [Henry Hitch Adams, English Domestic or, Homiletic Tragedy, 1943]. The influence of morality drama upon the structure of domestic tragedy is obvious in its patterned progression of action from temptation and sin, to repentance and punishment. Domestic tragedy draws its stories from sensational accounts of contemporary crimes as in Arden of Feversham (1592) which is based on an actual crime recorded in Holinshed's Chronicles (1577). A sense of realistic immediacy is thus provided for an action safely moralized in the traditional manner of exemplaristic morality teaching by characters drawn from everyday life acting in localized settings in domestic tragedy. In Heywood's A Woman Killed with Kindness a realistic plot concerning Master Frankford's deception by his wife Anne and her lover Wendoll is joined with a highly romantic sub-plot dealing with the trials of Sir Charles Mountford and his sister Susan, both enemies of Sir Francis Acton. These two plots are quite sentimentally handled. In the main plot Frankford eschews revenge against his wife and punishes her with his kindness. His extraordinary virtue together with her sufferings leads to an ending of repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation just before the erring wife's death. The romantic sub-plot, meanwhile, parallels the main plot by also ending in reconciliation since the marriage between Sir Francis and Susan dissolves the animosity of Sir Charles toward Sir Francis and produces thereby the harmonious ending of romantic comedy. L. C. Knights correctly points to the sentimental exploitation of situations in Heywood's play:

In Heywood's general dramatic technique statement takes the place of evocation: Mrs. Frankford is stated to be the model wife, and the moral of the play is stated, not implicit; in other words Heywood's drama is sentimental rather than ethical. And sentimental drama is made by exploiting situations provided by conventional morality rather than by exploring the full significance of those situations.

Heywood's emphasis upon the sentimental and his use of a romantic sub-plot makes the moralizing of A Woman Killed With Kindness appear suspect. Furthermore his play reveals the process by which domestic tragedy moves from stories of actual crimes to more romantic materials until the type ultimately is finally indistinguishable from such orthodox romantic tragedies as Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore.

Heywood's The English Traveller, a less fortunate venture in the domestic vein than A Woman Killed with Kindness, dramatizes the story of Géraldine voyage home after a long absence and of his meeting Mistress Wincott, his former sweetheart now married to the aged Wincott. Geraldine, remaining honorable, vows to marry Mistress Wincott only after her husband's death, but then to his distress he discovers her in her bedchamber with the villain Delavil. Geraldine's reproaches so affect Mistress Wincott that she repents before her death. Pathos, in this, Heywood's "domestic variety of Fletcherian tragicomedy," [according to Arthur Melville Clark in Thomas Heywood: Playwright and Miscellanist, 1931] is elicited through emphasis on Géraldine extraordinary virtue and forbearance and through concentration on Mistress Wincott's repentance, which like that of Mistress Frankford, we are led to believe, gains salvation for her. Both of Heywood's domestic tragedies, though following a conventional morality in their actions, seem intended to exploit this morality to produce sentiment and pathos, and because of this they bear resemblance to plays deliberately designed to produce emotional responses.

In George Wilkins' The Miseries of Enforced Marriage (ca. 1605), which dramatizes the same story as that of A Yorkshire Tragedy (ca. 1605), namely that of the sensational murder trial and execution of Walter Calverly in 1604, emphasis on sentimental appeal is pronounced. Wilkins omits the murders and instead dramatizes the story of a prodigal wastrel, William Scarborow, who is forced into an unhappy marriage by his guardians. The play is really a pièce à thèse arguing against constrained marriage and its happy ending provides the averted catastrophe demanded by an appeal to sentiment. Wilkins' play, like those of Heywood, shows the same puzzling combination of overt moralizing and appeal to sentiment that leaves one confused as to the play's real intentions. However, the tendency in these plays is to stress emotional responses, to heighten characters, and to appeal to sentiment rather than to dramatize actual crimes. Increasingly domestic tragedy takes on the tone of romance as dramatists become more concerned with moving audiences than with dramatizing moralized narratives of actual events.

There are other plays, too, which reveal much the same problem of adjusting means to ends which in the case of domestic tragedy makes us wonder how seriously the overt moralizing is to be taken. John Marston's Antonio and Mellida (1599) is a tragicomedy of romantic plot revealing somewhat similar confusion as to the play's purpose. The play deals with the defeat at sea of Andrugio, Duke of Genoa, by Piero, tyrannical Duke of Venice. Antonio, Andrugio's son, is in love with Mellida, Piero's daughter, and after numerous dangers are overcome, the lovers are united at the end of the play. Marston's melodramatic cultivation of surprise for theatrical effect is a staple of his dramatic technique, and in Antonio and Mellida he uses it in the supposed death of Andrugio early in the play and again later when Antonio is presumed dead only to leap from the coffin when Piero wishes that he were still alive. Theatrical effect is also sought in the narration by Antonio to Mellida of the tale of his own death at sea, in the exchange between Andrugio and Antonio before their reunion, and by Antonio's disguise as an Amazon. The conclusion of the play reverses the whole direction of the plot from one of serious, tragic encounter to one of reunion and reconciliation. Piero's sudden conversion is the unexpected key which unlocks all the difficulties, and it is the culminating surprise in the series of theatrical surprises central to the play.

The contrasts between Antonio's suffering and despair, Andrugio's nobility, Piero's pride, and Feliche's stoic detachment form the basis for the startling reversals on which the play is built. The sub-plot, treating the satirical display of humours before the critical glance of Feliche and Rossaline, is never really unified with the main plot, but instead it provides an action whose tone markedly contrasts with that of the romantic love plot. Character and action are not drawn into a coherent whole in Antonio and Mellida. The play's chief merit resides in the series of surprises that build to a climax in the averted catastrophe. Perhaps the most glaring instance of Marston's search for bizarre effect in the play is the scene on the marshes in Act IV where Antonio and Mellida meet after their escape and for some unexplained reason converse in Italian. This is but one of numerous instances in Marston's plays of his inability to control his dramatic material. In Antonio and Mellida romantic melodrama and satirical comedy are incoherently united.

Marston's The Dutch Courtesan (1603-1604), like Dekker's The Honest Whore, reveals the influence of the morality play in its sharp opposition of good and evil characters. The play demonstrates the differences between the courtesan Franceschina's love and that of the virtuous Beatrice, recently betrothed to Freevil, in an action structured to illustrate the debate between the demands of nature and the laws of custom. Freevil, Franceschina's former lover, resorts to the disguise of a pander to dishumour his friend Malheureux from his passion for the courtesan and to thwart Franceschina's plot to have revenge on him for deserting her. This romantic plot in which a serious moral issue is yoked to the conventional plot development and resolution of romantic comedy is joined by two comic sub-plots. The farcical Cocledemoy-Mulligrub plot concerns Cocledemoy's use of a variety of disguises to gull Mulligrub the vintner until finally he unmasks, rescues Mulligrub from hanging, and is reconciled with him. The Tysefew-Crispinella plot recalls the Beatrice-Benedick plot in Much Ado About Nothing because of its realistic and witty exchanges on the subjects of courtship and marriage. Though the wit and liveliness of dialogue in this action are appealing, the action on the whole has little relationship in theme to the main plot. What both comic plots offer is a sense of variety in the play, but this variety in action and tone is achieved at the expense of an aesthetically satisfying formal structure. The schematic opposition of characters, the debates on the conflict between reason and passion, and the fortuitous conclusion of The Dutch Courtesan give the impression of contrivance for theatrical purposes rather than for any serious investigation of the moral issues raised.

The plays of Dekker, Heywood, and Marston discussed in the preceding pages are examples of a group of tragedies and tragicomedies that are unsatisfying from a strictly formal point of view. The difficulties that these plays present arise not so much as a result of their mingling the different tones of satire, romance, realism, sentiment and moral seriousness, but they are "problem" plays because of

… the working out of a serious moral problem in an action built of improbable device and lucky coincidence. The result is only too often to make the solution seem trivial or forced.

It is the same problem that troubles Shakespeare's Measure for Measure and All's Well That Ends Well which both present a serious moral issue that is resolved by a fortuitous conclusion. In these plays the problems are viewed realistically, but their solutions are not, and the confusion between story and device results from the attempt to graft serious problems onto the pattern for romantic comedy. Tragicomedy succeeds in avoiding this confusion in the more exclusively romantic plays of Beaumont and Fletcher and of Shakespeare. In the case of Beaumont and Fletcher romantic tragicomedy is written for entertainment and sensational escapism while Shakespeare employs it as a way of coming at and of understanding reality. Beaumont and Fletcher's tragicomedies do not confuse as to their intent as do the plays of Dekker, Heywood, and Marston already discussed because there is no attempt in their plays to explore moral issues in terms of human significance.

A King and No King, performed in 1611, represents the finished Beaumont and Fletcher product. It is the story of the vainglorious Arbaces who, victorious over Tigranes, King of Iberia, returns home after an absence of nine years to fall in love with his sister Panthea, whom he initially intended for his prisoner Tigranes. The conflict in the Arbaces-Panthea affair, arising from the hypothesis that we are dealing with incestuous passion, is paralleled by the wavering of Tigranes between constancy to Spaconia, his betrothed, and his desire for the beautiful Panthea. From these basic conflicts Beaumont and Fletcher build a series of scenes which exploit the emotional and rhetorical possibilities resulting from the options facing characters tossed between the conflicting demands of reason and passion. The emphasis throughout is on response to theatrically exciting situations until in a surprising denouement the incest situation is resolved as Arbaces and Panthea are revealed not to be brother and sister. As the play depends upon extreme situations for emotional and rhetorical effects, so too Arbaces is seen in a double perspective which draws forth contrasting attitudes towards him. At times he appears as an arrogant conqueror, the object of Mardonius's satiric comments. Mardonius, the faithful captain, like Macilente in Every Man Out of His Humour, seeks to rid Arbaces of his humour and to restore him to his native balance of good qualities, which are implicitly revealed in Mardonius's reforming comments. While Mardonius acts as good angel for Arbaces, Bessus, the miles gloriosus, supplies the moral antithesis to Mardonius. Panthea, on the other hand, in her catalogue of Arbaces' virtues presents the other side of the conqueror, the side which makes him the sympathetic romantic hero just as she is the idealized heroine of romance.

The mixture of romance and satire in A King and No King provides a point of contact between the remote, romantic world and the familiar world to produce an aura of actuality around the emotional conflicts of Arbaces and Panthea. It is this that makes incest a threatening evil which brings Arbaces to the brink of tragic disaster, but in the factitious and hypothetical world of Beaumont and Fletcher the threat is important because it introduces shocking depravity and is calculated to excite and titillate audiences. Incest in A King and No King is assumed to create thrilling confrontations and scenes of maximum intensity which are resolved in a fortuitous conclusion that dissolves the very basis upon which they are raised. The unreality of the play's fundamental premise is paralleled by the presentation of Arbaces' character. He is seen both as object of satire and as hero of Romance, and the extremities of his vainglory and of his incestuous passion for Panthea enable us to see satire and romance both tending to their different kinds of abstraction. Satire leads to the caricatured type while romance leads to the ideal, and oscillating between repulsion for Arbaces and attraction to him, the audience swings as on a pendulum from one contrived situation to another until the dissolution of the dilemma facing Arbaces. When the threat of incest is revealed to be non-existent, the tone of satire is silenced and the harmony of romance prevails.

A King and No King reveals a structure that places a premium on development by surprise, for the sudden reversals of characters from one extreme to another are vitally important to the creation of theatrical excitement. In Act IV, for example, Arbaces' conflict between reason and passion reaches a peak of tension when he meets with his sister Panthea and reveals to her that he must keep her imprisoned because of his lustful passion. Arbaces is seen tormented by the conflict between reason and passion:

Accursed man,
Thou bought'st thy reason at too dear a rate,
For thou hast all thy actions bounded in
With curious rules when every beast is free.
What is there that acknowledges a kindred
But wretched man? Whoever saw the bull
Fearfully leave the heifer that he lik'd
Because they had one dam?
(IV.iv.131-138)

His speech reveals the characteristic rhetoric of argument and persuasion found in Beaumont and Fletcher's plays, which in this situation prepares our response to Arbaces' election of incestuous passion since his passion is compared to that of a bull. Panthea, for her part, hovers in this scene between resistance and yielding to passion. Her initial rejection of sin yields to Arbaces' arguments for a moment when she admits, "Brothers and sisters lawfully may kiss" (IV.iv.154). As they embrace, incest seems perilously close to actuality, but suddenly Panthea feels a sense of sin and she rushes back from the abyss. Evil threatens constantly in tragicomedy, and here, as so often in Beaumont and Fletcher, the sexual sin is approached but averted. Panthea's reversal from one extreme to another and back again in this scene shows that she is of a piece with Arbaces as a dramatic character. They are not designed as consistent dramatic characters, but instead they are meant to embody the warring extremes. From the presentation of these conflicting absolutes comes the sequence of thrilling confrontations that make up the design of A King and No King. When in Act V Arbaces and Panthea learn that they are not brother and sister, the conflict fades, and they are left as romantic lovers. With the disappearance of the hypothesis we witness the true Arbaces, noble and ideal hero of romance. His worser qualities are removed much as the masks are dropped at the end of romantic and satiric comedies. Incest likewise is revealed for what it is, namely part of the pretense so important to the theatrical legerdemain.

Professor Waith has indicated [in The Pattern of Tragicomedy, 1952] that A King and No King exemplifies the typical pattern of Beaumont and Fletcher tragicomedy, and he has listed several characteristics usually found in these plays: a blending of the familiar and the remote, intricacy of plot, an improbable hypothesis, a threatening atmosphere of evil, protean characters, passion, and the language of emotion. These features form the emerging pattern of Beaumont and Fletcher's tragicomedy from The Faithful Shepherdess (1608) and Philaster (ca. 1609) to A King and No King where the emotional form shapes a play whose narrative suggests a structure of meaning which in reality is no more than a façade to the real dramatic purpose. Beneath the ostensible narrative, the seemingly real threat of evil, and the toying with serious moral issues resides the detectible pattern of action in a static, schematic, yet intricate maze which is intended to exploit its materials for momentary effect. The "smudging of issues between wrong and right" produces a "sophisticated perversion" of feelings in A King and No King, and the sympathy elicited for Arbaces' incestuous passion for Panthea forms part of the sophisticated appeal of the play that leads to a denouement which is really "a kind of moral peripeteia: sin becomes virtue." The apparent serious concern for issues involving moral absolutes such as reason and passion, love and honor, and constancy and inconstancy provides the seeming reality that makes an implausible hypothesis seem terrifying for awhile until the play's true purpose is made known with the concluding surprising reversals and recognitions. The aim of Beaumont and Fletcher is to entertain:

They had no serious philosophy of life to offer; no profound interpretation of human nature to give; no deep political, social or poetic insight to reveal. They sought to devise plays which would grip, move, startle, surprise and amuse the audience for whom they wrote, and they developed their theatrecraft to this end.

Granted their limited purpose, their plays reveal a high degree of craftsmanship.

The Beaumont and Fletcher kind of tragicomedy may be paralleled by analogy with Corneille's Le Cid. In the French drama, an artificial donnée concerning the conflicting codes of chivalric love and honor is the basis for an exposition of the emotional impact of these absolutes upon characters caught in dilemmas of choice. Corneille provides a political background to the psychological and emotional conflict of Chimène and Rodrigue by having the Moors threaten the safety of the state only to be conquered by the heroic valor of Rodrigue. However, the chief interest of the play is in the struggle between reason and passion, duty and love, first seen in Rodrigue who accepts the duty to revenge the insult done his father by Don Gomès, Chimène's father. Rodrigue's successful revenge then places Chimène, his beloved, in the dilemma between love for Rodrigue and the obligation that she revenge her father's death against Rodrigue. Throughout the course of the play the psychological and emotional impact of love and honor are developed by both characters in lengthy debates of passionate reasoning, and Corneille, like Beaumont and Fletcher, makes plot a means to the presentation of characters in constantly shifting stances from which to reveal the nature of the code and its demands. Chimène's position that she must have revenge against Rodrigue shifts to the opposite extreme when, opposing Rodrigue's decision to offer no resistance in a duel, she urges Rodrigue to fight out of respect for their love and to win her hand in marriage over the rival claim of Don Sanche.

The unreality of Le Cid stems from its artificial donnée which leads us into a world of artifice where what is said is of more importance than what is done. Corneille's interest is in a rhetorical drama wherein linguistic gesture replaces action as the dominant interest. Although Beaumont and Fletcher share with Corneille the interest in contrived situations which they exploit for their emotional and rhetorical effects, they differ from Corneille in that they seek to persuade us of the reality of their initial hypothesis and then reveal its unreality in a fortuitous conclusion. In a sense they play it both ways; they want the danger, but not the death. Corneille, on the other hand, in Le Cid makes the love versus honor conflict with all its heroic posturing the major concern of his play while the political problem with the Moors and the Infanta's dilemma between love for Rodrigue and disparity of rank between them present subsidiary interests intensifying the conflict of the main plot. Le Cid does not offer a lifelike portrait of human struggle and choice. It is artifice on the grand scale wherein characters are mouthpieces for the absolute claims of love and honor, and wherein plot is contrived skillfully to present situations in which characters weigh the conflicting loyalties. Chimène's change of heart in true romantic fashion avoids catastrophe and leaves open the possibility of union with Rodrigue; indeed it is this continuous presence of the possibility of choice that makes Chimène's problem humanly plausible. Characters in Beaumont and Fletcher, however, do not develop, nor do they choose, because, as may be seen in A King and No King, the choice between incest and the control of passion turns out to be an unreal problem.

Although tragicomedy relies heavily upon romance for both story and device, this does not preclude its having any artistic seriousness. Beaumont and Fletcher's variety is a special type wherein what counts are the theatrical surprises and the peaks of emotion. Tragicomedy for them is an escapist drama intended for the tastes of a genteel audience more interested in diversion than in profundity. In contrast to this type of tragicomedy, Shakespeare's late dramatic romances reveal treatment of similar story materials but to radically different ends. Romance, of course, suggests the exotic, the unreal and improbable adventures of knights and their ladies, the imaginative and the ideal in literary experience, the "idealising imagination exercised about sex" [C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition, 1958], but this does not of necessity mean that it bears no relevance to life. In the hands of Spenser and Shakespeare, romance becomes a way of coming at reality. Spenser's Faerie Queene, for example, is a consistently artificial, romantic poem, but it is also a consistently serious work of art treating man's ethical and religious life. Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, based on Greene's Pandosto, likewise employs the usual paraphernalia of romance, but it too offers a profound reading of human experience.

In The Winter's Tale Shakespeare uses an old tale, a fable blending fantasy with realism to develop a pattern of dramatic action which traverses the movement of time from evil and suffering, separation and loss, to final restoration and reconciliation. The action of the play is a composite of traditional romance motifs. A babe of noble birth is set adrift or abandoned only to be saved and reared by humble parents until the child's true origin is discovered and it is restored to its true noble estate. The lover-prince in disguise, the enmity of royal parents to love, the constancy of lovers, and the accused Queen who like Griselda patiently suffers, these comprise the romance elements. Leontes' jealousy destroys familial unity and results in his son's death, but after his repentance and the passage of sixteen years, there is rebirth in the restoration of Perdita fulfilling the oracular prophecy. Perdita's marriage to Florizell gains for Leontes a son to replace Mamillius, and this marriage puts an end to the hostility between Bohemia and Sicilia. Hermione, too, is miraculously reborn and reconciled to both husband and daughter. In her rebirth can be seen the wondrous mystery of time as healer which is one of the central themes of the play, for after discord and death comes the time of renewed fertility when all-creating nature and grace yield the fruits of a new birth in love, friendship, and harmony. The marvelous, the supernatural, and the miraculous are a part of The Winter's Tale and their presence in the remote climes of Bohemia and Sicilia we accept because romance transports us beyond the everyday world and, in The Winter's Tale, brings us where desire for ideals may be satisfied:

The world of romance lies beyond space and time; in Arcadia we may expect 'poetic justice' and to see clearly what our own world presents in a glass darkly. And so the beneficient ordering of the universe, imperfectly discerned on the terrestrial plane and only properly fulfilled in eternity, may be presented in terms of an earthly life freed from historical limitations yet rendered contemporary by the living idiom of the poetry in which it is expressed.

Shakespeare uses plot and character in The Winter's Tale as vehicles to point to such themes as death and rebirth, decay and growth, suffering and reconciliation, and the healing powers of time and nature. Though he forsakes the historical verisimilitude of Holinished and Plutarch for a romantic world removed from reality, Shakespeare yet creates a dramatic world of serious artistic purpose, one relevant to human experience. The plot sustains the meaning in The Winter's Tale, and this distinguishes it from the characteristic Beaumont and Fletcher play where plot is deliberately contrived for theatrical effect. The themes of The Winter's Tale are implicit in its action and in the interplay of characters. Though surprise is used in the rebirth of Hermione whom we suppose dead, it contributes to the thematic ideas of miracle and regeneration. Surprise, on the other hand, is an end in itself for Beaumont and Fletcher, something constantly sought to produce emotional climaxes. In sum the difference between Shakespearean tragicomedy and Beaumont and Fletcher's tragicomedy lies in their different purposes as dramatists. Shakespeare employs the method of anticipation which places audiences in the position of ironic expectation while Beaumont and Fletcher's use of surprise thwarts expectations. Surprise for Beaumont and Fletcher is an essential technique to build exciting scenes and to create a drama wherein the seeming reality of all is the pretense of their art. Their method produced a brilliant drama from the technical point of view, but it remains on the whole a drama devoid of any real seriousness of purpose.