A King and No King

The play's title became almost proverbial by the middle of the 17th century, and was used repeatedly in the polemical literature of the mid-century political crisis to refer to the problem and predicament of King Charles I.

The drama was acted at Court by the King's Men on 26 December 1611, again in the following Christmas season, and again on 10 January 1637.

[1] The first edition was the 1619 quarto issued by the bookseller Thomas Walkley, who would publish Philaster a year later.

Cyrus Hoy, in his survey of authorship problems in the Fletcher canon, provided this breakdown of the two dramatists' respective shares:[4] — a division that agrees with the conclusions of earlier researchers and commentators.

Tigranes' fiancée Spaconia accompanies him into exile, hoping to avert Arbaces' plans for the marriage alliance.

On his return Arbaces finds that he now has a powerful sexual attraction to his beautiful sister, the princess Panthea, whom he hasn't seen since childhood.

Gobrius had plotted that his son would become the legitimate king, by marriage with Panthea; Arbaces does marry the princess, but steps down from the kingship.

His character is explained by the trick of his birth: he cannot behave with the nobility of a king, because he isn't one by "blood."

[9] Its "distinctiveness" has been described as "a firestorm of theatrical tricks meant to indulge the erotic fantasies and jaded tastes of Jacobean audiences..," combined with a "philosophical drama...of substantive political and ideological concerns.