"Conquering Words in "A King and No King

In an important article, Philip Finkelpearl has suggested that, in A King and No King (1611), Arbaces's inflated monologues may be calculated satire on Beaumont and Fletcher's part; for this critic, the monarch's puffed-up speech represents authorial criticism of a king who tries to make deeds of words.' This essay extends Finkelpearl's argument by locating a moral focus in the play in ultimately restorative words, a moral focus that qualifies the widespread claim that Beaumont and Fletcher wrote opportunistically, without concern for an eventual morality in their work.2 From time to time, commentators have noted the similarity of Parolles's and Bessus's characterizations, sometimes asserting that Beaumont and Fletcher on occasion drew upon All's Well That Ends Well while writing their play.3 Whatever the case, the dramatists clearly found a common inspiration in the Plautine miles gloriosus, the braggart warrior elevated to a character type in Nicholas Udall's Ralph Roister Doister and Ben Jonson's Captain Bobadil. What is noteworthy about A King and No King is Beaumont and Fletcher's retreat from comedy and stock characterization into moral drama and serious character development. By introducing into their play a second version of the miles gloriosus (Arbaces), the two playwrights can reclaim the braggart soldier by outlining his progress in acts IV and V from a humorous blusterer to a relatively worthy ruler against the fixed portrait of foolishly boastful Bessus. Caught between his incestuous feelings for Panthea and his honor, Arbaces avoids impending tragedy through the power of a few uttered words, terms for hallowed blood relationship in the family. Coming at the end of the play, these simple words displace their counterparts, garish terms of passion and self-importance which plunge Arbaces and other characters into their nightmarish predicament. Words which, when spoken, establish Arbaces within a nurturing family heal the debilitating effects of those words which originally alienated the King from his subjects. Surprisingly (in this avant-garde play), the charged words which reinvolve Arbaces in mankind reflect typically Elizabethan values. In fact, in A King and No King Beaumont and Fletcher join Shakespeare in using drama to conduct a reactionary investigation of absolutist language like that associated with King James I. The play's serious action properly begins with Arbaces leading in

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