[In the following essay, Barish contends that Ford intentionally departed from his historical sources when creating the character of Perkin Warbeck in an effort to enhance dramatic interest in the protagonist and to portray him as an obvious foil to the character of Henry VII.]

Justice is slowly coming to be done to Ford's achievement in Perkin Warbeck, if with the character who gives his name to the play criticism has not yet caught up with its advance guard—T. S. Eliot's essay of 1932. Eliot, after remarking on Warbeck's apparently unshakable faith that he is lawful heir to the throne of England, concludes that 'We ourselves are left almost believing that he was; in the right state of uncertainty, wondering whether his kingly and steadfast behaviour is due to his royal blood, or merely due to his passionate conviction that he is of royal blood' [Selected Essays 1917-1932, 1932]. This seems to me to describe excellently the state of suspended judgment in which Ford leaves us. But subsequent commentary has retreated from Eliot's position, largely, it would appear, through a disabling assumption that one might term the argument from authority. Fortified by their homework in such historians as Hall and Speed, and more especially Gainsford's True and Wonderful History of Perkin War-beck (1618) and Bacon's History of the Reign of Henry VII (1622), critics have assumed that Ford too was presenting the story from the point of view of the Tudor-Stuart establishment as the tale of an impostor rebelling against a legitimate monarch. They have refused to sus-pend disbelief long enough to take Perkin's claims seriously because they have assumed that Ford could not have taken them seriously. The problem is nicely stated, and (I suspect) wrongly resolved, by Clifford Leech, when he says that 'To act as he does, Warbeck must be afflicted [i.e., with delusional melancholia, or some such pathological state], yet nothing in his own words or in the attitude of the other characters confirms this necessary view of his condition' [John Ford and the Drama of His Time, 1957]. Leech, properly, can find nothing in the play that requires us to reject Perkin's claims, and yet assumes that it is 'necessary' to do so, presumably because history has settled the matter in Henry's favour. But history, as our own time has balefully shown, can suppress and distort the truth as well as investigate it, and the history to which critics appeal when they presuppose Perkin's fraudulence may merely constitute an elaborate rationalization of the status quo. According to a more recent critic, it was 'mandatory' that Ford portray Perkin as an impostor, since otherwise 'he would have been challenging the succession of the Stuarts, not to mention that of the Tudors' [Donald K. Anderson, Jr., ed., Perkin Warbeck, 1965]. But to foster an ambiguity is not necessarily to issue a challenge: Ford has sufficiently protected himself from official suspicion of subversion. More important, to imply that the creator of Giovanni and Annabella would have shrunk from pursuing a line of speculation to the danger point and beyond suggests a real incomprehension of Ford's artistic temperament, with its appetite for absolutes and extremes. The a priori argument, plainly, cannot settle the question.

One advantage of dramatic over expository narrative, at least for treating history, is that it invites a freer, less doctrinaire rumination on the issues. It can explore them as human substance rather than as patterns of abstraction, forcing us to re-experience events in something like their original disturbing density and ambiguity. Ford's play, by removing the external 'necessity' that historians impose on the story, induces us to unseat the received verdict on Perkin Warbeck. In its prologue it boldly claims that it is resurrecting the disused mode of the English chronicle play. After a hiatus of some decades, Ford is reverting to an earlier fashion with a certain sophisticated archaism; it would be strange if the resemblance went no further than the raw material. We find, in fact, that he is rephrasing some of the questions that Shakespeare had probed a generation earlier—the nature of kingship, the origins of legitimacy, the relations between de jure and defacto rule, and between the king's private and his public personality. In King John Shakespeare had insisted, over and above the requirements of recorded fact, on John's position as a usurper, so as to be able to ponder the paradox of a government under a strong usurper rightly superseding a dynastically more authentic but politically ineffective contender. Whatever the superior validity of Arthur's claim to the crown, it seems clear that John must continue to wear it, though the fact of usurpation taints his reign with perjury and civil war, and contributes to his own violent death.

Some of the same preoccupations, transposed into a Fordian key, recur in Perkin Warbeck. Critics who dismiss Perkin himself as a mere fool and madman have been taking their cue not so much from Ford as from 'history'—from the official version of events sponsored by the ruling house, which is precisely what the play may have been designed to call into question. Oddly enough, the voice of Henry VII, the one that above all others ought to be most sceptically listened to, is the one most often called in to settle arguments. Or if not Henry the also deeply suspect voice of Lambert Simnel.

One of the better early comments on the play appears in J. Le Gay Brereton's introduction to his edition of 1896. Brereton distinguishes between our dramatic sympathy for Perkin and our rejection of his political claims:

Although Ford does not for one moment allow us to doubt that Perkin is an impostor, he, and not Henry, is the hero of the play. To avoid a conflict with history, the poet has had recourse to an ingenious device. Perkin himself never, by word or deed, by want of dignity and kingly bearing, or by any confidence or soliloquy, betrays his identity with the Duke of York. … But it will be noticed that his pretensions are in no case able to impose upon any men of real worth. The King of Scotland gives no consideration at all to the value of the suppliant's claims, but adopts his cause in a lordly fashion, partly from pure obstinacy and partly from desire to win for himself the credit of aiding the weaker side—a piece of shallow chivalry that is on a level with his challenge to the leaders of the English army. … [Perkin's] followers, those who apparently do believe in his pretensions, are utterly vulgar, mean, and unintelligent; so much so that they excite the ridicule of the Scottish court. And the poet has deliberately so described them. … Critics, however, have objected to Ford's device. 'Why', they say, 'if Perkin's character is so noble, can he not get a noble following?' The answer is that 'his fair demeanour, lovely behaviour, unappalled spirit' can and do win him noble friends. But his claims are so airy, so improbable, so contrary to common knowledge that they cannot persuade an unbiassed and intelligent person.

If we ask why Perkin's claims are 'so airy, so improbable, so contrary to common knowledge', the answer, of course, is that they conflict with the received version of events as enshrined in the chronicles. In his eagerness, moreover, to reduce the facts of the play to the facts of history, Brereton makes an astonishing mis-statement. In order, he says, to avoid a conflict with history, Ford has not allowed Perkin to 'betray' (i.e., undermine or subvert) his identity as Duke of York. But history says the opposite! All of Ford's sources conclude the tale of Perkin with an account of his confession, read from the stocks at Westminster and at Cheapside, and a third time from the gallows at Tyburn prior to his execution. Hall and Gainsford re-print the confession in full, and it is remarkably circumstantial. Ford's departure from this crucial event, far from being an attempt to avoid a conflict with history, constitutes a most audacious attempt to provoke one. It serves notice on us, if notice were needed, that we are not to equate the Perkin of the play with the vulgar upstart of the historians. The fact that Perkin never for an instant in Ford surrenders his assurance of his royal destiny removes the one basis on which his claim could be swiftly and definitively rejected. This prop removed, commentators have had recourse to the testimony of Henry VII, the alleged foolishness of James of Scotland, and the seedy character of Perkin's entourage. The last circumstance may mean no more than that by the time the events of the play occur, Perkin's cause is already lost. As for King James, to say that 'he gives no consideration at all to the value of the suppliant's claims' means nothing: he gives as little and as much consideration as anyone else in the play; nor is there a single character who could properly be described as 'unbiassed'. History contains no unbiassed characters, except sometimes those writing it. To say mat James adopts Perkin's cause from 'obstinacy' is to confound his reasons for supporting Perkin with his manner of supporting him; 'obstinacy' can apply only to his persistence in his course, not to the initial choice itself of that course. As for the 'desire to win for himself the credit of aiding the weaker side', the validity of this proposition—if it is valid—would not affect the strength of Perkin's claims, nor would it be so automatically damning as Brereton implies, any more than would the quixotic challenge to Surrey later on. Is it a vice in kings to wish to succour the weak? Is James's chivalry necessarily more shallow than that of Prince Hal offering to fight Hotspur in single combat? Would it not make as much sense to describe it as mettlesome, courageous, and honourable?

In a useful article in 1960, Donald K. Anderson, Jr. demonstrated that Ford's portrayal of Henry VII improves the image of that monarch as reflected in both Gainsford and Bacon: Ford minimizes the king's least attractive trait, his avarice, construing it as prudence, and making it part of a general picture of sound statesmanship. But Anderson too finds it necessary to explain away King James's favourable reception of the pretender. Ford, he suggests, 'depicts in the Scottish king a gradual change from folly to wisdom', the shift from the 'intractable autocrat' of Act II to the 'political realist' of Act IV ['Kingship in Ford's Perkin Warbeck; ELH XXVII, 1960]. Now there is no doubt that James dismisses the opposition to Katherine's marriage peremptorily—though not so autocratically as has sometimes been claimed—and that in the course of the action he acquires a political canniness that he does not have at first. But if James abandons his espousal of Perkin on grounds of self-interest, then his withdrawal leaves Perkin's claims unaffected. Increased worldly wisdom, moreover, may not be a fact to be indiscriminately rejoiced in. What James learns and what we learn, from the whole sequence of events, is that even kings, given the way of the world, cannot always act according to their own most generous impulses. 'Your strong possession much more than your right', murmurs Queen Elinor to her son John at the outset of Shakespeare's King John (I. i. 40), and it is on the basis of strong possession much more than of right that dynastic disputes are settled here as well.

H. J. Oliver is another critic for whom Henry VII's comments on Perkin have the status of direct authorial pronouncement, but for whom it is Lambert Simnel, in the later moments of the play, who actually gives 'the facts about Warbeck'. 'Until this point of the action, there is always the theoretic possibility that Warbeck has a genuine claim to the throne; and so by not making it certain that Warbeck is an impostor, Ford preserves such conflict as the play has, as a real conflict: one claimant to the throne opposes another' [The Problem of John Ford, 1955]. Here is a distressing instance of the critic discarding his own best insight. Oliver sees that up to this moment there can be no certainty about Perkin. But trapped by the 'necessity' to find certainty at all costs, a certainty that con-curs with history, he turns, with something like desperation, to Lambert Simnel. But if the situation has fostered real doubt until this moment, what could the wretched Simnel, with his supposed 'facts', add to the picture? How could anything said by this brain-washed wreck, interested only in three meals a day and his personal safety, outweigh our own immediate, vivid experience of Perkin? The treatment of the incident—Ford's own invention—offers an illustration of the boldness with which he contradicts his sources, all of which present the Simnel episode as a kind of dress rehearsal for the more elaborate but essentially identical Warbeck escapade. Ford makes them a total contrast; no moment in his play provides more unequivocal testimony to Perkin's stature than the meeting between this broken time-server and the kingly protagonist. Henry himself has supplied the terms for our appreciation, in his amused scorn at Simnel's readiness to assume the drudge's role: 'strange example! / Which shows the difference between noble natures / And the base born' (I. i. 66-68). The difference—the gulf indeed—between the noble nature and the base born is precisely what emerges in the meeting between the two pretenders, and no moment in the play better illustrates how little Perkin's enemies understand him. For it is not Perkin himself but Lambert Simnel, in this scene, who answers to the descriptions of Perkin given by his foes, while Perkin maintains a demeanour of un-impeachable princeliness. Oliver echoes Brereton, again, in the observation that 'nobody both disinterested and intelligent ever believes Warbeck's claims' (p. 104). But who, in this play, is disinterested? Is Henry Tudor, Perkin's bitterest enemy, a more impartial witness than James of Scotland?

In short, much of what critics have seen as 'evidence' for disallowing Perkin's claim is simply an endorsement of the verdict of history, which happens to coincide with the verdict of Perkin's enemy. Ford, it would rather seem, invites us throughout, and more strongly as the play nears its end, to entertain the hypothesis that Perkin may be telling the truth. Which is not to say that that truth should be the basis of violent political action. The politics of pragmatism decree that Perkin will not succeed, and that this will promote the well-being of the kingdom. Yet like some other Elizabethan tragic heroes, Perkin wrings from defeat a triumph peculiar to his virtues, and it is a royal one.

Ford himself, dedicating the play to the Earl of Newcastle, reminds us of the difference between history and theatre: 'In other labours you may read actions of antiquity discoursed; in this abridgement, find the actors themselves discoursing' (lines 4-6). When it is the actors discoursing instead of being discoursed upon, the case is altered. Ford's sources repeatedly assert, without qualification, that Perkin was an impostor, the tool of powerful traitors operating from the continent and infiltrating the English nobility. They speak of him regularly, in a vein of scathing belittlement, as a knave, a caitiff, a varlet, a 'mischievous and dismall wretch'; a 'Mawmet'; an 'Idoli of defiance', a 'lump of deformity', a puppet, a player, a counterfeit stone, a sycophant, a juggler, and so forth. The language used to characterize Perkin resembles that used to condemn Lambert Simnel, and the judgment in both cases is the same. But when Ford multiplies the injurious epithets and transfers them to the mouths of Henry and his counsellors, when it is they who berate Perkin as a 'cub', a 'mongrel', and an 'eager whelp', a 'swabber' a 'straggler', a 'viper', and a 'vagabond', a 'wild runagate' and an 'obscure peasant', the effect is totally different. These no longer represent a dispassionate judgment on the story, but bitterly partisan words spoken by participants in the story, Perkin's deadly foes, whose safety depends on destroying him. Accordingly, a certain reserve toward their views becomes appropriate.

Parallels have been noted between the scene of Perkin's landing in England and that of Richard II landing in Wales, and there are others, both to that play and to other Shakespearean history plays. One such, I imagine, occurs in the opening lines, which seem to echo those of 1 Henry IV. Henry IV greets his court with a despondent survey of the state of the kingdom—'So shaken as we are, so wan with care'—and goes on to hope for a remission of civil strife. Henry VII greets his court in a mood of similar dejection, and with a similar rhetorical pattern—'Still to be haunted, still to be pursued, / Still to be frighted with false apparitions' (I. i. 1-2), and proceeds to outline the threats to his throne. Even if the echo is shadowy and unintended, it hints at a connection in Ford's mind. In both scenes we meet a troubled king, who has ascended the throne after killing the previous occupant of it, and who must now deal with threats to his legitimacy. Henry Tudor, though he has eliminated a universally execrated king, derives his legitimacy from possession much more than from right, as does Henry Bolingbroke. Both, finally, by virtue of clutching the sceptre firmly in their fists, become de jure monarchs, and therein lies much of the anguish and tragedy of politics.

Henry VII's first act, in the present play, is to deal with the complicity of some of his own vassals in the Warbeck uprising. He does so in what appears to be a satisfactorily statesmanlike fashion, yet the whole episode remains murky. The histories themselves leave obscure, or 'in dark memory', as Bacon puts it, the nature of Stanley's crime, 'what the case of this noble person was, for which he suffered; and what likewise was the ground and cause of his defection' (p. 151). The alleged treasonable words that bring on Stanley's disgrace are admitted to be disquietingly ambiguous by both Gainsford and Bacon, who imply that Henry seized this opportunity to rid himself of a follower whose claims on him were too great for comfort, and between whom and himself relations had been deteriorating for some time. Ford does little to dispel the mystery. He refrains from having Stanley confess his guilt in our hearing, or even allude to it except in an enigmatic manner: '"Subjects deserve their deaths whose kings are just'" (II. ii. 109). But Stanley does not state that Henry is just, nor that he, Stanley, deserves his death. The deliberately riddling utterance can be as easily construed as an indictment of the king as it can be interpreted as self-inculpation. By contrast, in a vivid moment Stanley sets the traitor's mark on the forehead of the state informer Clifford, arousing our abhorrence for the spy without in any way corroborating his accusation. The whole incident preserves a certain quality of shadow-play. It proceeds by hints, half-statements, and significant omissions, and reduces us, in consequence, to conjecture. Is Henry speaking the truth when he declines to confront his condemned chamberlain on the ground that the sight of him might cause him to relent? We cannot know, nor, in my guess, does Ford wish us to.

Perkin himself does not enter until Act II, by which time we have had much unflattering advance notice of him from the English nobles. Ford has, however, carefully avoided staging any scenes from his early life which might substantiate the charges we hear. He gives us nothing like Bacon's flat assertions concerning Perkin's origins, his education in imposture at the hands of Margaret of Burgundy, and her deliberations as to how to proceed with her plots. Nor has he dramatized the scene in which Bacon, expanding on earlier accounts, imagines her making Perkin's acquaintance in public for the first time, feigning initial scepticism as a result of the Simnel fiasco, and then breaking into transports of joy and wonder at the supposed miracle of his resurrection. The reduction of all this to a single caustic exchange between Henry and his peers means that the case against Perkin has been removed from the hands of the omniscient historian and vested entirely in the hands of his fallible foes. Ford himself studiousl refuses to declare for either party in the dispute.

The colloquies about Perkin in Act I, then, present only the view of him officially approved at the English court. Act II shows us the reality, or at least a glimpse of it. However low our expectations of Perkin may be—and in an English audience of the 1630's they would have been low indeed—they are confounded by Perkin's actual presence. Instead of a transparent sham, we are met by a figure of impressive regality. Nothing in his ceremonious opening speech arouses suspicion. Far from it: if we tried to imagine for ourselves how an unfortunate young prince with such a history might sound, we could hardly improve on what Ford has provided. We might, to be sure, feel that the emphasis on sorrow, the dwelling on past misfortune, betrayed a temperament too emotionally effusive to augur well in one aiming at political dominion. Perkin's tendency to luxuriate in persecution is Ford's most notable contribution to the speech as he found it in Bacon. But no-where does it ring false, and nothing in the context invites us to take it as deceitful, unlike its Baconian model, which forms one in a series of political orations every one of which is a masterly study in duplicity. Bacon further contrives to insinuate hypocrisy into the content of the speech by making Perkin harp piously on the role of the Almighty labouring in his behalf. Ford strips the speech of its sanctimoniousness—and of its vituperation—so that nothing remains to provoke scepticism or incredulity. The ladies of James's court, who have previously jested at Perkin's beggarly entourage, find themselves unexpectedly moved by his words, and James, who has favoured his visitor's cause from afar, starts to cement a renewed faith in him. As pledge, he bestows on Perkin the hand of his cousin Lady Katherine Gordon, whose royal blood makes her a suitable consort for a prince. He does so, we may add, not as an 'intractable autocrat', but with the lady's free consent; there is no forcing of her affections. And the forging of this link, fortuitous at first, creates an objective bond that can never be gainsaid in the remainder of the play. Whatever the status of Perkin's dynastic pretensions, his marriage to Kate possesses absolute validity, and confers on both of them a royalty independent of lineage.

Acknowledge me but sovereign of this kingdom,
Your heart, fair princess, and the hand of
  providence
Shall crown you queen of me and my best fortunes,
                                    (II. iii. 81-3)

Perkin declares solemnly, and Katherine, shortly afterwards, replies in kind, 'You must be king of me' (III. ii. 168). Sovereignty in love is what Perkin will ultimately have to content himself with, but it will do much to offset his failure to achieve political supremacy.

Not only does love bulk large at the Scottish court—we hear nothing of it in England—but there is also ceremony and revelry, music, dancing, feasting, and masquing. James bids the hautboys 'sound sprightly music' when Perkin first approaches, and the formal meeting between the two moves with a ritual gravity proper to princes. James dispenses a bounteous hospitality. His welcome to Perkin expresses everything in the temper of his court and in himself that responds to the exile's enterprise:

Come, we will taste a while our court delights,
Dream hence afflictions past, and then proceed
To high attempts of honour.
                                     (II. i. 111-113)

Here we have the taste for pleasure, the imaginative power to 'dream hence' ill memories, with perhaps a bit of the dreamer's tendency to wish away coarse actuality as well, and a youthful eagerness for 'high attempts of honour', which make this court more inviting than that of England, where little transpires but business and intrigue. The marriage itself between Katherine and Perkin is celebrated in many sorts of music, with healths and knacks and antic masquers.

Critics have been severe on King James, mostly in order to get round his initial endorsement of Perkin; they turn with relief to his later politic rejection of him. No doubt James does become more wily and practical. But to gloat over this process is a shallow pragmatism that ignores the human cost—that a young, high-spirited prince, fired by aspirations to honour, should be forced to leave the high road of chivalry and take refuge in the thickets of policy. It is also to miss the unmistakably sneering and disagreeable note that creeps into James's voice when he first begins to find his association with Perkin irksome. James's challenge to Surrey, an impulsive and histrionic gesture no doubt, proceeds from magnanimous impulses, and is admired by those to whom it is addressed. 'So speaks Kings James', concludes the herald who has delivered the challenge. 'So speaks King James; so like a king a' speaks', answers Surrey admiringly (IV. i. 35-36), somewhat as James himself had first answered Perkin. The challenge earns respect in some quarters at the English court as well: 'The Scottish king', says Oxford, 'showed more than common bravery / In proffer of a combat hand to hand / With Surrey' (IV. iv. 10-12). Nor is Perkin dissociated from the gesture, since at the moment it is made, he pleads to be allowed to be the one to make it. For better or for worse, he and James are two of a kind. When he must leave Scotland, obeying the despotism of national politics, he takes a courtly departure, stressing the bond between him-self and his host: 'Two empires firmly / You're lord of—Scotland and duke Richard's heart' (IV. iii. 92-93). So the kingly rhetoric continues to coin metaphorical kingdoms in its stately progress.

Ford handles the whole incident of the incursion into England so as to remove the taint of highhandedness found in the original accounts. The historians report that Perkin preceded his entry into England with a proclamation in which he called on all loyal subjects to forsake the usurper, 'Henry Tidder', and rally behind their rightful ruler, Perkin himself. The proclamation, freely transcribed and amplified in Bacon, includes much recrimination and churlish defiance of Henry, together with an express invitation to his subjects to rid themselves of him by assassination, so as to smooth the way for the true occupant of the throne. Of all this scarcely a trace remains in Ford. The proclamation is barely alluded to; its contents are never discussed; nor does Perkin, at any point in the play, descend to personal abuse of Henry. He proceeds not only like a king but like a principled and highminded one, unwilling to owe the recovery of his crown to any baseness. And perhaps one may in consequence place a favourable interpretation on his attempt to dissuade James from ravaging the English countryside, once the military attack has failed. He may simply be masking his own inability to acquire a following, as the chronicles think, and as James thinks; but he may equally well be in earnest, anxious to preserve the wellbeing of 'his' subjects. What James really objects to, at this strained moment in their relations, is that Perkin should play the king to such a pitch where he so patently lacks the king's power. But this, again, has little to do with the facts about Perkin's family stock.

Commentators have noticed how the uncoerced fidelity of Perkin's wife, the loyalty of his erstwhile rival Daliell, and the grudging respect at last accorded him by his resentful father-in-law and by Crawford, all tend to ennoble Perkin. Perkin commands in defeat, in fact, a warmer loyalty than Henry in victory, and our favour toward him increases with his steadfastness in adversity. We have already had, in the opening scene at the Scottish court, a chance to measure the unjustness of the contemptuous references to him heard previously in England. Now, when we hear him reviled as a 'slave', a 'vagabond', a 'creeping worm', and a 'rascal' (IV. iv. 33-34, 39, 95), we have experience of our own to contradict these gross terms.

The contrast between the ceremoniality and sportiveness of James's court and the relentless intriguing of Henry's does little to make the latter attractive. As for Henry himself, Ford has succeeded in making him admirable without making him lovable. Alongside the more simple, sensuous, and passionate Perkin he cuts an unappealing figure. Henry's talk runs much to metaphors of hunting and trapping, snaring and angling, and clever play at cards. 'King Ferdinand', he observes at one point, 'is not so much a fox /But that a cunning huntsman may in time / Fall on the scent' (III. iii. 39-41); while at another, more aphoristically, 'He fondly angles who will hurl his bait / Into the water 'cause the fish at first / Plays round about the line and dares not bite' (IV. iv. 29-31). The king who thinks of other men mainly as animals of prey to be trapped or hooked does not endear himself to us as a human being. The fact that Frion has been seduced away from Perkin by Durham, 'caught' in the toils of the king's diplomacy, constitutes a judgment not on Perkin but on Frion himself, and indirectly, perhaps, on the king.

By providing Perkin with a crew of such raffish hangerson, Ford has sometimes been said, as by Brereton, to be undercutting his claim to royal blood. But at the beginning of the play a faction of noblemen close to the English crown are also discovered to be his adherents. The political realities thereafter, and Perkin's waning prospects, insure that only the desperate and derelict will dare proclaim their allegiance openly. Perkin's dismissal from Scotland leaves him unarmed, but, after a single panicky moment, not a whit dismayed. Most remarkable of all, he handles himself superbly in confrontation with King Henry. Faced with his captor, Perkin boldly applies the moral of Milford Haven and Bosworth Field to himself: 'Fate, which crowned these attempts when least assured, / Might have befriended others like resolved (V. ii. 73-74). Characteristically, this is long on analogy but short on astuteness. It recognizes the role of fate in placing kings on their thrones, but leaves the matter too exclusively in fate's hands, as though human agency played only an insignificant part.

The critic who first documented Ford's debt to Gains-ford, Mildred Struble, also illustrates perfectly the tendency to read the chronicle back into the play. Henry, says Miss Struble [in A Critical Edition of Ford's "Perkin Warbeck, " 1926], is now 'treated to the spectacle of the counterfeit Duke, who, like some exotic flower once thought noxiously beautiful, proves but a curious weed. For the nonce the sovereign is interested, even amused, but in the contrast between majesty and pretence, Perkin, who up to that moment may have won the confidence of the credulous, shrivels before the searching sun—deceiving only himself by his bombast'. Here the parti pris of the critic, seeking the mysterious moment in which Perkin's falsehood can be said to disclose itself unmistakably, finds it in a scene of her own invention. In Ford's scene Perkin—noxious or not—remains beautiful. Far from shrivelling, he remains in complete possession of himself, while it is the king who loses patience, and testily orders his rival to drop his pretences, coupling the order with a threat:

             Sirrah, shift
Your antic pageantry, and now appear
In your own nature, or you'll taste the danger
Of fooling out of season.
                                              (V. ii. 87-90)

There is nothing resembling bombast, or even bravado, in Perkin's answer, which calmly accepts the penalty for failure while requesting clemency for his followers. As earlier in the greeting to King James, it is hard to imagine how a 'real' king could behave more regally. The majesty of his bearing strikes an answering chord in us, and it is Henry, surely, who appears diminished in this interchange. His answer to Perkin's plea for mercy to the followers lacks resonance—'So brave! / What a bold knave is this!' (99-100). The wooden inadequacy of this as a response to the total phenomenon of Perkin stamps Henry as the smaller, drier, more prosaic personality. He can bring down his opponent by force and guile; he can score no points off him in a face-to-face encounter.

In A Line of Life, the ethical meditation published some years before the plays, Ford speaks of three crowns to which men of heroic spirit may aspire: Action, 'the Crowne of Vertue'; Perseverance, 'the Crowne of Action'; and Sufferance, 'the Crowne of perseuerance'. Each crown brings the quality in question to its sovereign perfection. It follows then that

action, perseverance in action, svfferance in perseverance are the three golden links that furnish vp the richest Chain wherwith a good man can bee adorned; They are tripartite counterpawne, wherby wee hold the possession of life …

In these sentences may be said to lie much of the meaning of Fordian tragedy, and much of the essence of Perkin Warbeck himself. Throughout the play he pursues his course of action, undaunted by setbacks, submitting finally to the extremest form of 'sufferance' rather than ceasing to persevere. We may surmise that in Ford's eye this persistence, this sufferance, earns for Perkin an ethical kingship more precious than the tangible one. It bestows on him a triple crown of virtue that makes the visible earthly one irrelevant. And in doing so it validates, in an unforeseen way, the royal identity he has claimed from the start.

'It may be said', pursues Ford, concerning the heroic lone perseverer, 'what profit can redound, what commendation, what reward, for one man to bee singular against many? O the profit is infinite, the commendation memorable, the reward immortali' (Sigs. C7^V-C8). As the play nears its catastrophe, Perkin seems more and more consciously animated by the desire to reap this commendation and this reward. As the king's entourage becomes increasingly abusive, he seems increasingly exalted, increasingly tenacious of his kingly identity. The confrontation with Simnel leaves him positively thirsting for his 'martyrdom of majesty' (V. iii. 75). To Urswick and Oxford, as to Gainsford, he is a witch, diabolically inspired. 'Remember, lady, who you are', Oxford urges Katherine, 'come from / That impudent impostor' (V. iii. 111-112). Katherine replies with absolute finality:

          You abuse us:
For when the holy churchman joined our hands,
Our vows were real then; the ceremony
Was not in apparition, but in act.
                                        (111-115)

And Perkin joins her in exulting over the one form of sovereignty that cannot be wrested from them.

         Spite of tyranny,
We reign in our affections, blessed woman! …
Even when I fell, I stood enthroned a monarch
Of one chaste wife's troth pure and uncorrupted.
                                                  (121-127)

Ford underscores the exemplary character of this domain of love by making Katherine take a solemn vow of life-long widowhood—in contrast to her historical self who went on to marry three more times. One final form of kingship still remains to Perkin. 'Illustrious mention', he promises his followers, 'Shall blaze our names, and style us Kings o'er Death' (V. iii. 206-207). The 1634 quarto edition of the play gives typographical prominence to the final phrase by setting it entirely in capitals. It is a claim, like the claim to the kingdom of love, that we must grant, admitting it as a form of sovereignty superior, in some ways, to the earthly power wielded by Henry.

Henry, like some of his counterparts in Shakespeare—ark Antony in Julius Caesar, Octavius in Antony and Cleopatra, Aufidius in Coriolanus—pays respectful tribute to his defeated enemy's courage, and moralizes over his defeat in terms we may or may not be willing to underwrite. What is not in doubt is that we have witnessed the passing of a human being of exceptional stature. This we can better assess if we recall the words of the historians on the same event: Gainsford, for whom Perkin was 'carried to Tiborne, and there swallowed vp by the neuer satisfied paunch of Hell, for his former abuses and intolerable wickednesse' (Sig. Q2)—a nice illustration of this author's heavyhanded moralism—and Bacon:

This was the end of this little cockatrice of a King, that was able to destroy those that did not espy him first. It was one of the longest plays of that kind that hath been in memory, and might perhaps have had another end, if he had not met with a King both wise, stout, and fortunate.

(p. 203)

Here we find the characteristic tone of scornful belittlement from which Bacon never deviates, and the last of many references to Perkin as a 'player' and the whole incident as a 'play'. Ford has adopted this last notion, but completely changed its character, removing its pejorative implications. Perkin is indeed the player king, who dwells in an imaginative element distinct from mundane reality, and who fires our imaginations in response. Had he started with the sceptre in his grasp he might well have had it wrested from him, like Edward II or Richard II, by a more forceful rival, and for similar reasons. The king in the real world must be one who can manipulate political forces like treasuries and armies. By the time the play is over, it does not much matter whether Perkin is a true heir or a megalomaniac with delusions of grandeur. In either case he has been so decisively outflanked that the debate over his antecedents has become academic. But not the continuing dialectic between two modes of sovereignty. If it is Henry who wins the political struggle, it is Perkin who continues to marshal our imaginative allegiance, somewhat as do Brutus, Antony, and other Shakespearean heroes brought low by efficient politicians of lesser spiritual status. As in Richard II, we find a contrast between the storybook monarch, the one who plays the king beautifully, and the manipulater who rules adroitly without commanding love. Tragedy lies in the fact that the very qualities which make Perkin a king of hearts disable him as a king of practical reality, while the qualities which make Henry an effective ruler chill our imaginative sympathies. More even than Marlowe's Edward II or Shakespeare's Richard II, Perkin Warbeck reminds us of how, in our dreams, we would like kings to appear, and how, in reality, it is nearly impossible that they should.