“In lieu of former wrongs”: An Introduction to
The Queen and Concubine
1A King of Sicily, paranoid about his wife’s chastity and suspecting her of having an affair with a close associate, repudiates her and brings her to a trial of questionable legality. His actions lead, seemingly, to the destruction of his heirs, but their miraculous preservation is eventually revealed at the conclusion of the play. In the 1630s, this story was played out in two forms: at the Globe and Blackfriars in revivals of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale; and at Salisbury Court in a new play written by Richard Brome, The Queen and Concubine.n10867 As the similarity between their narratives suggest, there is a peculiarly close relationship between these plays, both of which are based on Elizabethan prose narratives by Robert Greene: The Winter’s Tale on Pandosto and The Queen and Concubine on one of three stories told by the eponymous heroine in Penelope’s Web.n108682In Penelope’s Web, the Souldan of Egypt tires of his wife, Barmenissa, and divorces her in order to marry a younger courtesan, Olynda. The narrative details Barmenissa’s stoic acceptance of her exile from court, and the indignation of the Souldan’s twenty-year-old son and heir, Garinter, and other Egyptian courtiers. At the climax of the story, after Barmenissa has revealed plots against Olynda, the Souldan announces that Olynda will be given three favours, promising that ‘whatsoever he had promised to the right and lawful Queen of Egypt’ will be granted.n10869 Olynda’s vindictive demands - the death of the conspirators, the disinheriting of Garinter and Barmenissa’s banishment - bring the Souldan to declare that the ‘lawful Queen of Egypt’ is not Olynda but Barmenissa, ‘for anger is not a sufficient divorce; the will of a Prince confirmed by false witness is no law; the dated time of marriage is not mislike, but death’. He banishes Olynda and is reconciled with Barmenissa: ‘then he sent for his wife, and after reconciliation made, to the great joy of all his subjects, in lieu of her patient obedience set her in her former estate’ (E2r).3Brome follows this narrative relatively closely but he also re-jigs it so as to bring it closer to The Winter’s Tale, creating what Matthew Steggle has termed ‘an open and creative misappropriation of Shakespeare’s play’.n10870 The story is thus relocated from Egypt to Sicily, with names altered to fit the new location: Olynda becomes Alinda, Barmenissa becomes Eulalia, and the Souldan and Garinter are both renamed Gonzago. Unlike Garinter in Penelope’s Web, Prince Gonzago supposedly dies in the wake of his mother’s disgrace, his body being described in terms that strikingly recall Hermione’s statue in The Winter’s Tale; the general Petruccio tells the King that he found the Prince ‘in so sweet a posture, as no statuary / With best of skill, on most immaculate marble, / Could fashion him an image purer, slighter’ [QC 4.3.speech977]. Moreover, although the Souldan and King Gonzago both rely on the testimony of false witnesses as a pretext for divorcing their wives, Brome’s King, like Leontes, seems genuinely to believe that his wife is having an affair. His jealousy is aimed not only at Eulalia, but also at her supposed lover, Sforza, a general who came to Sicily from Naples with Eulalia on her marriage, and who has recently outshone the King in battle. The addition of Alinda to a situation which is in other respects similar to that found in The Winter’s Tale muddies further the King’s motivation, particularly as Alinda is not the practised courtesan of Greene’s narrative but Sforza’s young daughter, a formerly innocent country gentlewoman who has been seduced by the ambition of the court and who later goes mad under its pressure. The King’s actions are thus rooted in a complex mixture of envy, lust and sexual paranoia.4Like many of his contemporaries, Brome was heavily influenced by the three great Elizabethan/Jacobean dramatists: John Fletcher, Ben Jonson and Shakespeare. While the majority of his extant plays are comedies, Brome’s periodic experiments with tragicomedy are marked by sustained engagement with the plays of Fletcher and, in particular, Shakespeare. The Queen’s Exchange freely reworks King Lear,n10871 and The Queen and Concubine appropriates not only The Winter’s Tale but Shakespeare’s collaboration with Fletcher, Henry VIII or All is True, a play which specifically deals with the process and aftermath of a royal divorce, and which provides Brome with a model of how to represent - in thematic and dramaturgical terms - the separation between a ruler and his wife. Like The Winter’s Tale, Henry VIII was current on the stage during the Caroline period: in August 1628 Robert Gell wrote to Sir Martyn Stuteville that the Earl of Buckingham ‘was present at the acting of K[ing] Hen[ry] 8 at the Globe, a play bespoken of purpose by himself’.n10872 Brome had worked closely with the King’s Men in 1628-34, the period in which Henry VIII and The Winter’s Tale are known to have been revived, and it is therefore unsurprising to find that these plays exert a strong influence on his writing. In remaking Shakespeare’s plays, Brome was typical of an actively recycling theatrical culture in the 1630s, a theatre industry in which the plays of a dramatist’s predecessors retained a living, breathing presence. It is easy to overlook the impact of revivals on the writing of new plays, but, as Martin Butler has argued, ‘By concentrating on those elements in a period which to hindsight appear progressive we subtly but inevitably misrepresent the way things looked to contemporaries’.n108735As this suggests, one focus of this introduction will be the ways in which The Queen and Concubine rewrites - or, to use the language of contemporary film criticism, remakes - earlier plays.n10874 This appropriation has implications which are both political and generic in character: Brome’s engagement with his predecessors is a means through which the dramatist can reconfigure the typical structures of tragicomedy and of pastoral in response to new political pressures in the 1630s. In addition, The Queen and Concubine incorporates a range of different remaking techniques: the layering of different sources so as to create a dense, intertextual network around the play; the replaying of a particular piece of dramaturgy or a stage image from an earlier text; and a number of fleeting allusions within the play’s dialogue. Brome is not content merely to replicate the narratives, generic structures and dramaturgy of earlier drama; instead, he subjects them to sustained interrogation.6This is not to suggest, however, that The Queen and Concubine is a merely derivative work, that it cannot stand on its own merits, or that it lacks independence from its sources. As I shall explore in detail below, the play is also remarkable in other respects, not least in its two major female roles, the prominence of which seems to be directly associated with the company that performed it. Like many Caroline works, The Queen and Concubine demonstrates a keen interest in female subjectivity. In her recent reappraisal of female cultural engagement in this period, Sophie Tomlinson suggests that ‘one result of women’s increasing cultural visibility was a manifest concern on the parts of amateur and professional dramatists with issues of liberty and civility that derive from a sympathetic interest in female selfhood’.n10875 Brome takes up these issues through his development of the triangular relationship between Eulalia, Alinda and the King, and, in particular, through his interest in the psychological effects of their actions on each woman. Furthermore, in his use of pastoral and his depiction of the role of the queen consort, he engages directly with the cultural production and court politics with which Queen Henrietta Maria was involved in the early-mid 1630s. Like many plays, The Queen and Concubine demonstrates both the interpenetration of commercial and court theatre, and the capacity of popular drama to engage with key political and cultural issues.Theatrical Contexts7The Queen and Concubine was probably the first play written under Brome’s first contract to write plays for the King’s Revels company at Salisbury Court, signed on 20 July 1635. Brome promises ‘such hereafter, / To take your graver judgements’ [SG 1.1.speech2] in the prologue to The Sparagus Garden, and, as R.J. Kaufmann argues, this would fit the tragicomic Queen and Concubine.n10876 In addition, it has usually been agreed that Andrea’s comment in Act 5, Scene 3, ‘No longer brothers of the bench we’ll be, / But of the revels for his majesty’ [QC 5.3.speech1337] would seem jarring coming from another company.n10877 If this line of argument is correct, The Queen and Concubine was preceded by The Sparagus Garden and followed by The New Academy, which was almost certainly the second play written under the King’s Revels contract.n10878 Butler suggests, plausibly, that it may have been one of the plays performed at court by this company in early 1636.n108798There are other possibilities, however. Steggle notes that other plays by Brome, now lost, may have been written for Salisbury Court. The first of these, Wit in a Madness, was registered for publication with The Antipodes and The Sparagus Garden on 19 March 1640 ‘in circumstances which suggest that - like the other two - it was a successful Salisbury Court play which he was seeking to print now that his relationship with the company had broken down’.n10880 Two further plays, Christianetta, or Marriage and Hanging Go By Destiny and The Jewish Gentleman, were entered in the Stationers’ Register in August 1640 alongside The New Academy, The Lovesick Court, Covent Garden Weeded and The English Moor.n10881 However, although The Jewish Gentleman may have been serious in tone, the titles of neither Wit in a Madness nor Christianetta, or Marriage and Hanging Go By Destiny suggest an appeal to an audience’s ‘graver judgements’. Another possibility is indicated by N.W. Bawcutt, who suggests that A Queen and no Queen, licensed by the Master of the Revels for the Fortune company in 1639, may be an alternative title for The Queen and Concubine.n10882 Brome wrote for the Fortune company at other times in his career, but 1639 seems an odd time for him to return to this group, given his close association with William Beeston and his Cockpit company, Beeston’s Boys.9Although the evidence that The Queen and Concubine was performed by the King’s Revels in the mid-1630s is circumstantial, it has much in common with the remaining six known plays that this troupe seem to have performed in 1634-6: Brome’s The Sparagus Garden (1635) and The New Academy (1636), Henry Glapthorne’s The Lady Mother (1635), Nathanael Richards’ Messallina (c. 1634-6), Thomas Rawlins’ The Rebellion (c. 1634-6), and the anonymous play The Wasp (c. 1636). We have a relatively good idea of the composition of the King’s Revels company in this period. The 1640 lawsuit concerning Brome’s contract with groups of actors at Salisbury Court names the men to whom he was contracted on 25 June 1635 as Anthony Berry, Christopher Goad, Curtis Greville, Edward May, George Stutville, John Young, Timothy Reade, William Cartwright the Younger, William Cartwright the Elder and William Wilbraham.n10883 With exception of Curtis Greville, all of these men are also included in a list of actors who were refused permission to perform in Norwich on 10 March 1635.n10884 That list also includes a number of other names, most of whom seem to have been hired men, the boys or young men who played female and juvenile roles, and servants of the company.n10886 In particular, it seems likely that John Barrett, Thomas Jordan, Thomas Loveday, Thomas Lovell, Matthias Morris, John Robinson, Thomas Sands and Walter Williams were attached to the playing company as hired men or boy actors in 1635.n1088710One of the most striking features of The Queen and Concubine is the prominence that it gives to its female roles: Eulalia’s role is much the biggest of the play: her part totals 4696 words, whereas the second largest part, that of Horatio, totals 3429 words, and the third, that of the King, just under 3379. Alinda’s is the fourth largest, at just over 2749 words, and the next largest, that of Andrea, totals 1996 words. This pattern is repeated elsewhere in the known repertory: in another play, The Lady Mother, a female character has the most lines, and in another two, Messallina and The New Academy, a female character has the second most lines; in Messallina the second most prominent female character has the third largest role. (For details see Table 1.)Table 1: Female and Juvenile Roles in King’s Revels Playsn10888
| Title | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 |
| The Queen and Concubinen10889 | Eulalia (1) [4696 words] | Alinda (4) [2749 words] | Gonzago (14) [497 words] | Third Girl (17) [166 words] | First Girl (18) [148 words] | Second Girl (19=) [145 words] | Fourth Girl (19=) [145 words] | Midwife (33) [3 words] |
| Messallina | Messallina (2) [1827 words] | Lepida (3) [1489 words] | Sylana (10) [617 words] | Veneria (11) [583 words] | Vibidia (15) [196 words] | Calphurnia (17) [17 words] | ||
| The Lady Mother | Lady Marlove (1) [3001 words] | Clariana (5) [1645 words] | Belisia (11) [792 words] | Magdalen (17) [119 words] | ||||
| The New Academy | Lady Nestlecock (2) [2592 words] | Rachel (6) [1533 words] | Hannah (10) [1180 words] | Joyce (13) [695 words] | Gabriella (15) [462 words] | Blith (18) [347 words] | ||
| The Sparagus Garden | Friswood (5) [2283 words] | Rebecca (8) [1408 words] | Annabel (14) [410 words] | Martha (15) [403 words] | ||||
| The Rebellion | Evadne (4) [1017 words] | Aurelia (6) [763 words] | Phillippa (7) [763 words] | Nurse (11) [742 words] | Auristella (13) [392 words] | |||
| The Wasp | Countess of Claridon (7) [1368 words] | Filius (10) [688 words] | Katherine (11) [600 words] | Luce (18) [20 words] |
11Furthermore, it is not just the sheer size of particular female roles that is striking. A number of the King’s Revels plays feature middle-aged women in prominent roles: in addition to Eulalia in The Queen and Concubine, we find Lady Marlove in The Lady Mother (the largest role), Lady Nestlecock in The New Academy (the second-largest role), and Lepida in Messallina (the third largest role). Two further plays feature older women in substantial supporting roles: in The Sparagus Garden Friswood is the fifth largest role, with 2283 words, while in The Wasp the Countess of Claridon, the seventh largest role, nonetheless has 1368 words. Given the frequent absence of older women in early modern plays, this concentration is remarkable.12The prominence of female roles in King’s Revels plays suggests that the company had access to some extremely talented boy actors. In the case of Messallina, we know who played some of these roles, as the 1640 cast list (unusually) includes the names of some of the actors: John Barrett played Messallina, Thomas Jordan played Lepida, and Mathias Morris played Sylana. Little is known about Morris, but both Barrett and Jordan seem to have been experienced performers in the mid-1630s. Jordan was born around 1617, and had been acting at Salisbury Court since the early 1630s, and Barrett was old enough to have a child baptised on 12 November 1637.n10890 However, we do not know for certain that these actors performed female roles in The Queen and Concubine or, if they did, which roles they played. In addition, It is uncertain precisely when Messallina was first performed, although it was probably between July 1634 and May 1636.n1089113Furthermore, the distribution of roles among actors has been the subject of dispute among theatre historians. If the largest and most demanding roles went to the most talented performer, regardless of the specific requirements of each, we might expect Barrett to play the female role with the most lines in any play: Messallina, Eulalia, Lady Marlove, Lady Nestlecock, Friswood, Evadne and the Countess of Claridon. If, on the other hand, the company divided roles along the lines of a particular performer’s speciality, we might expect Barrett, who played the villainous Messallina, to play Alinda, and Jordan, who played her virtuous mother Lepida, to play Eulalia.n10892 Ultimately, the evidence is too scanty for any firm conclusions to be drawn.14Elsewhere in The Queen and Concubine, the role of the Curate is heavily indebted to Sarpego in Brome’s The City Wit, performed by the children’s company incarnation of the Salisbury Court company. Sarpego appears to have been extremely popular with audiences,n10893 and it is possible that the same actor played both roles, given that some of the actors who performed with the Children of the Revels around 1630 were still with the King’s Revels in the mid 1630s. There are also some further quirks in the casting of The Queen and Concubine. The play has nearly forty speaking roles, and a number of mutes, and so doubling must have been employed fairly extensively among the minor roles. Among more prominent roles, one interesting feature is that Sforza and Petruccio never appear on stage at the same time as Poggio and Lollio, which means that the latter do not beg forgiveness for themselves in Act 5, Scene 4, but are reliant on Andrea to obtain it for them. Thus, it is possible for the actors who play Sforza and Petruccio to double Poggio and Lollio, meaning that the actors who played the feuding generals would re-appear in a comic guise as the bickering countrymen. Although it is not possible to prove that this casting was used in the original performances, it might be effective in a modern production of the play.Patience and Productivity15As noted above, The Queen and Concubine is a striking example of the ways in which Caroline theatrical culture was increasingly pre-occupied with the representation of female subjectivity. As its title suggests, Brome’s play juxtaposes two diametrically opposed female figures. However, for a number of reasons, they do not wholly endorse the virgin/whore dialectic that commonly animates early modern texts. In the first place, Alinda’s status as the ‘courtesan’ is not as secure as the title suggests. Brome, unlike Greene, at first presents her as an attendant of Eulalia, brought to the court by the queen ‘to be some comfort in [the King’s] long absence’ [QC 1.1.speech65]. Eulalia praises her ‘simple country innocence’ [QC 1.1.speech67] and her ‘pretty, lively spirit, which becomes her, / Methinks, so like her father’s’ [QC 1.1.speech69], and Brome makes it clear that Alinda’s ambition to usurp her mistress has been inculcated and cultivated by the corrupt courtier Flavello, who has clearly prepared the ground for his master; Flavello tells the King, ‘I’ll not boast / The pains I took to fit her to your appetite / Before she saw you.’ [QC 1.3.speech122], and the dialogue between the two men suggests that this is a long-standing relationship, in which Flavello is trusted to prepare ambitious court ladies for the King’s advances. Unlike her male supporters, who are quick to refer to Alinda as a ‘lewd woman’, a ‘concubine’, a ‘shame of women’ and a ‘strumpet’,n10894 Eulalia is less ready to condemn the younger woman. However, her passive acceptance of her fate becomes in itself a form of aggression - at the very least, it is interpreted as such by Alinda. For instance, at the point at which Eulalia is exiled from court she tells Alinda,whilst you love the King, and he is pleased,
I shall no less obey you than I loved you
When I sent for you to the court, and there into
This heart received you.[QC 2.1.speech255]16Alinda interprets this statement as a deliberate slight, exclaiming, ‘I am plainly jeered’ [QC 2.1.speech256].17In view of her determination to remain moderate in her reaction to her deposition and Alinda’s betrayal, Eulalia’s reaction in Act 4, Scene 2 to the (forged) letter promising a conspiracy against the new queen is remarkable. At first she is sceptical, but she then reaches a belief thatA noble fury has stirred up some friends
To this high enterprise, whereby I gather
My cause is weighed above, whence I shall see
How well my patience overrules my wrong,
And my foes ruined with mine honour’s safety.
But let my better judgement weigh those thoughts:
I do not seek revenge, why shall I suffer it?
My causeless injuries have brought me honour
And ’tis her shame to hear of my mishap.
And if by treachery she fall, the world
Will judge me accessory, as I were indeed
In this foreknowledge of the foul intent,
Should I conceal it.
Then here’s the trembling doubt, which way to take?
Whether to rise by her destruction
Or sink my friends, discovering their pretence.
Friends have no privilege to be treacherous:
She is my sovereign’s wife, his chief content,
Of which to rob him were an act of horror
Committed on himself. The question’s then
Whether it be more foul ingratitude
To unknown friends, and for an act of sin,
Than to be treacherous to the prince I love?[QC 4.2.speech964]18The soliloquy follows Eulalia’s thought process as she ponders the legitimacy of revenge against Alinda, and the duty that she still owes to the King as his subject. Particularly powerful is the pause after ‘Should I conceal it’, where it appears that Brome has deliberately left the line as a half-line, a moment at which it appears that Eulalia is genuinely undecided, and that she might allow action to be taken on her behalf. Butler notes that in The Queen and Concubine ‘the queen submits scrupulously to the king’s pleasure, but in lesser mortals passive obedience receives shorter shrift’;n10895 nonetheless, stoic acceptance is not a state that necessarily comes naturally to Eulalia.19A similar focus on female subjectivity can be seen in Brome’s depiction of Alinda, whose mental breakdown is juxtaposed with Eulalia’s increasing power within the rural community of Palermo. Alinda uses her influence over the King to procure the execution of her father, Sforza, who has attempted to forbid her adulterous relationship with him, and in Act 3, Scene 3, Petruccio brings Sforza’s earring as proof of the general’s death. Already maddened by her ambition, Alinda quickly loses control, and in this scene and in an extraordinary sequence in Act 4, Scene 3 she berates the King for his political and erotic failings, questioning his ability to rule effectively and belittling his sexual potency. Alinda’s insanity is atypical in terms of the conventional presentation of female madness on the Caroline stage. Unlike the madness of Constance in The Northern Lass and Martha in The Antipodes, it is not caused by unrequited or unconsummated love; unlike the madness of Shakespeare’s Ophelia (one of the most influential models for the stage madwoman) it is not purely the result of grief, although it is exacerbated by the supposed death of Sforza and her complicity in his murder. In contrast with the majority of her predecessors, Alinda’s madness is the ultimate expression of her ambition and pride, which have produced a kind of egomania. Whereas the madness of Ophelia and Constance is aestheticised through the use of song, Alinda’s madness is more prosaic, and more politicised. Most importantly, her madness gives her a position from which she can challenge the King (who is more used to loyal and terrified sycophancy), and she becomes practically the only character in the play who dares to criticise him to his face.n1089620The crucial contrast between Eulalia and Alinda relates to the ability to moderate one’s behaviour: it is not that Eulalia does not feel emotions such as resentment and the desire for revenge, but she, unlike the younger woman, is able to control them and, ultimately, to act more effectively as a result. These issues were central to Caroline political ideology and to King Charles’s self-presentation. As Richard Cust writes, Charles ‘was renowned for his displays of patience and self-control, and for the chastity and decorum he sought to infuse into his family and household’; the King wrote to his son, the future Charles II, ‘We have learnt to own ourself by retiring into ourself … if God give you success, use it humbly and far from revenge’ and ‘Let … no passion betray you to any study of revenge upon those whose own sin and folly will sufficiently punish them in due time’.n10897 As I will explore in greater detail below, the capacity of the ruler for self-control is crucial to the depiction of Brome’s King Gonzago and the effects of his actions on his realm.21In these ways, Brome’s depiction of Eulalia transcends, or at least complicates, common stereotypes about female passivity and obedience. Critics have often drawn comparisons between Eulalia and the archetypal figure of Patient Griselda, the longsuffering wife who withstands the tests of a cruel husband and is eventually ‘rewarded’ by being reunited with him. In particular, parallels have been drawn between The Queen and Concubine and a dramatic version of the narrative, Thomas Dekker’s Patient Grissill, performed by the Admiral’s Men in 1600.n10898 Although there are similarities between Grissill and Eulalia - both are banished from their husbands’ courts, and in both plays the husband’s sycophantic followers are willing to help him in the persecution of his wife even though they know her to be loyal and innocent - Eulalia is not as abject as Grissill, who tells the Marquis, ‘’Tis but my duty; if you’ll have me stoop, / Even to your meanest groom, my lord, I’ll stoop’.n10899 This is probably in part due to another key difference between the two women: while Grissill is the daughter of a poor basket-weaver, Eulalia is the daughter of a King, and is well aware of her own status.22The most important similarity between the two women is an iconographic one. When Grissill is first introduced in Dekker’s play she is making baskets, and elsewhere Patient Griselda is often depicted with a spinning wheel.n10900 Spinning is also key to the source tale in Greene’s Penelope’s Web, in which Barmenissa declares that her father, ‘the great Chan of Tartaria’, ‘knowing that principality is no privilege against Fortune, and that the highest estate is no warrant against mishap, learned me to use the needle and the wheel, that both I might eschew idleness in my youth, and (if the Destinies had so decreed) the better brook poverty in my age’ (D4r). Interestingly, Brome mystifies the origin of Eulalia’s ability to work with her hands, making it the gift of the Genius, but he also increases the range of the former queen’s activities, which also include healing and teaching the young girls of the rural community to write.23Spinning and needlework were activities recommended as virtuous activities for women of all classes in the seventeenth century. Although financially unreliable, they were often recommended as useful and virtuous work for poor women; V.R. Geuter details a number of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century schemes instituted by civic authorities and private philanthropists.n10901 She also notes that these activities were recommended in conduct books and other texts ‘not as employment to earn money, but as a means for women of all social positions to avoid the sin of idleness and to accrue respect and personal commendation’.n10902 Eulalia’s work in teaching the girls of Palermo to read and sew reflects the desires of early modern men such as Henry Foote, a yeoman of Wivenhoe, Essex, whose 1595 will appoints his wife as executrix and entrusts to her ‘the keeping and bringing up of my daughter until she is 14 and have towards it 40s., she to be taught to read and make plain work of linen and to be educated in the fear of God’.n10903 In a poem prefacing the 1631 edition of the embroidery pattern-book The Needle’s Excellency, John Taylor writes,Thus is a needle proved an instrument
Of profit, pleasure, and of ornament:
Which mighty queens have graced in hand to take,
And high-born ladies such esteem did make,
That as their daughter’s daughter up did grow,
The needle’s art, they to their children show.n10904 24Taylor follows this poem with sonnets praising ‘queens and great ladies who have been famous for their rare inventions and practice with the needle’ (B1r); these include Katherine of Aragon, who is described after her divorce from Henry VIII, when ‘virtuously / (Although a queen) yet she her days did pass / In working with the needle curiously’ (B1v). Eulalia’s activities may thus be appropriate both for her original high status as the daughter and wife of Kings, and her reduced status as a poor divorcee.25Activities within the home were part of a general ideology of femininity, recommended to women of all ranks; to quote Geuter, ‘even high-ranking ladies were praised after death as having been good housewives, skilled in sewing, cooking and the production of home remedies’.n10905 As Rozsika Parker suggests, the woman working on needlework is aligned with the stereotype of the chaste, silent and obedient woman;n10906 Taylor argues that ‘It will increase [women’s] peace, enlarge their store, / To use their tongues less, and their needles more’, continuing, ‘The needle’s sharpness, profit yields, and pleasure, / But sharpness of the tongue bites out of measure’ (A1r-A2r). The ideological force of the image of a woman spinning or engaging in needlework can be seen in the title-page of The Needle’s Excellency (London, 1631), which features three female figures: Wisdom, standing with a book, in Elizabethan costume; Industry, sitting working at her needle, and an aggressive and modishly dressed Folly, gesturing towards Industry, who gazes back at her [IMAGEXX_1].26This image seems particularly relevant to the sequence in Act 5 in which Eulalia presents the work of her students to the King and Alinda. Alinda attempts to leave, only to be called back:EulaliaSeem not to turn away, most gracious madam,
Before I show for which I hoped you came:
The manner how I get a competence to live.Shows her works, and makes a brave description of pieces: as sale-work,
day-work, night-work, wrought night-caps, coifs, stomachers.
AlindaYour work, you say; though’t be o’th’ newest frame,
I fear your play is still at the old game.
Both ways bring money: is’t not so, forsooth?27In opposing the industrious Eulalia with the idle and scornful Alinda, Brome thus invokes a strong cultural stereotype about appropriate female behaviour. However, the stage image’s relationship with the dialogue that surrounds it is somewhat complex. The direction ‘makes a brave description’ may suggest that Brome intended to write some dialogue for Eulalia, and it is possible that at least some of the words specified in the text may have been spoken. Matthew Steggle argues that Eulalia ‘is a lively enough figure to present herself as a dynamic saleswoman, and not merely a long-suffering martyr-figure: particularly since sale-work, day-work, and night-work as descriptive terms seem more likely to be cues for bawdy jokes rather than descriptions of particular items’.n10907 Even if the sequence was heavily dependent on gesture and props - it is worth noting that OED includes ‘Pictorial representation; a picture, painting’ among its definitions for ‘description’ - this impression would not necessarily be dispelled. Geuter notes that ‘There is no suggestion by philanthropists or moral and educational writers that any woman should be encouraged to take the goods she had made to the public market place herself’,n10908 and for a moment, Eulalia may have more in common with the entrepreneurial Alicia Saleware in A Mad Couple Well Matched than with Patient Griselda.Love, Marriage and Divorce28The representation of femininity and female subjectivity in The Queen and Concubine is complex and nuanced, and neither Eulalia nor Alinda fall easily into conventional stereotypes. The issues raised in the introduction thus far are also relevant to the treatment of the dramatic climax of the first half of the play: the divorce between King Gonzago and Eulalia, and the King’s re-marriage to Alinda, the depiction of which has important ramifications on both thematic and generic levels. The representation of divorce itself posed problems. England was the only Protestant country in Western Europe to maintain Catholic prohibitions against the dissolution of marriage, and when canon law was revised after the succession of James I, separations were allowed in some cases but divorce was explicitly prohibited.n10909 Many commentators rejected divorce on biblical authority, declaring that marriage was intended to last until the death of one of the spouses; Greene’s Souldan conforms to this orthodox position in his eventual conclusion that ‘the dated time of marriage is not mislike, but death’. In Of Domestical Duties, published in 1622, William Gouge makes a case for the impossibility of reversing the divine ‘ordinance’ that has ‘made of two, one flesh’, writing, ‘Such is the nature of the matrimonial bond as it maketh of two one, and more firmly bindeth them two together than any other bond can bind any other two together; how then should they be two again?’n10910 If man and wife are truly to become one flesh, then no mortal authority has the power to divide them.29There was nonetheless some debate about whether divorce ought to be allowed in specific circumstances, notably in cases of adultery. In 1617, William Whateley’s A Bride-Bush proposed that divorce ought to be allowed in cases of adultery or non-cohabitation of the spouses; on the publication of the second edition in 1619 he was called to explain himself before the Court of High Commission and he was reluctant thereafter to comment explicitly on this issue.n10916 A couple of years later, William Gouge argued that adultery was the only possible cause for divorce. He writes, ‘The vice contrary to matrimonial chastity is adultery, one of the most capital vices in that estate: a vice whereby way is made for divorce […] For the adulterer maketh himself one flesh with his harlot. Why then should he remain to be one flesh with his wife? Two (saith the law) shall be one flesh, not three’.n1091730Despite the prohibitions against divorce, a number of early seventeenth-century plays deal with annulments, separations and even, in some cases, divorce itself. Most feature projected divorces that are not carried through, or conclude their plots with the re-marriage of the divorced spouses. For instance, in John Marston’s The Fawn, performed by the Children of the Queen’s Revels in 1604-5, Donna Zoya is eventually reconciled with her foolishly jealous husband Don Zuccone, who has declared himself divorced from her, while in John Ford’s The Lady’s Trial, performed by Beeston’s Boys in 1638, Levidolche eventually remarries Benatzi, the husband she has divorced before the play’s opening. Those few plays where divorce is not reversed or negated tend to be generically complex and tragicomic in form. Henry VIII, which technically deals with an annulment rather than a divorce, treads carefully so as not to demonise either Katherine of Aragon or Anne Boleyn, and its conclusion with the christening of the future Elizabeth I cannot fully efface the play’s double-edged treatment of the baby’s father and his marital progress. In John Fletcher and Philip Massinger’s The Double Marriage, performed by the King’s Men around 1621, the pirate’s daughter Martia agrees to free Virolet from captivity only if he divorces his wife Juliana and marries her. He later refuses to consummate his new marriage, and tries to return to Juliana, only to be rejected by her. In The Costly Whore, an early 1630s play that may have been performed by the same company that performed The Queen and Concubine, a Duke marries a courtesan but later attempts to repudiate the marriage and divorce her; when his wife’s virtue is revealed he abdicates in his son’s favour and retires with her to a religious life.n1091831The complexity of these narratives is reflected in The Queen and Concubine. In particular, as all four plays demonstrate, marriage functions as a synecdoche for other social and political issues. It was a political commonplace in the early modern period to represent the state as an image of the family, and this analogy is frequently exploited in plays and, in particular, tragicomedies. As Zachary Lesser has recently argued, the ‘wondrous’ conclusions of Jacobean political tragicomedies such as Beaumont and Fletcher’s A King and No King - a popular play which was also revived in the 1630s - ‘need to reconcile the politics of the state and of the family, revealing the ideological work necessary to create the Jacobean commonplace that the two corresponded transparently’.n10919 Moreover, while plays such as A King and No King construct a final political stability through marriage, others represent political instability through attacks on marriage, generally from within. As Butler notes in the context of The Queen and Concubine itself, ‘The king’s adultery is an immediately familiar emblem for the defilement of the purity of the state and the abdication of responsible government’.n1092032These issues may have had particular force in the Caroline period. As a number of literary critics and historians have argued, Charles I, like his father, used the rhetoric of the family for political purposes. Kevin Sharpe notes the placing of Van Dyck’s portrait of King Charles, Queen Henrietta Maria and their two oldest children at the end of the Long Gallery at Whitehall Palace, and comments that for Charles, ‘The representation of his family was the representation of his government’.n10921 Similarly, Robert Wilcher comments on Caroline panegyric’s treatment of the king and queen’s marriage and its fecundity.n10922 A 1631 poem by Thomas Carew, for instance, presents a king whose ‘cares by day’ are ‘season[ed]’ at night by ‘conjugal delights’ which will lead to ‘numerous issue’ whom, Carew hopes, the king will see ‘grown / From budding stars to suns full blown’.n1092333In particular, Brome draws on an influential political discourse of love. In a recent essay, Malcolm Smuts argues that during the Caroline period ‘love served as the central metaphor for a concept of governance as a process of regulating passions and appetites’ and ‘an apt metaphor for the sentient desires and emotional forces activating social and political life, while virtuous love, represented above all by royal monogamy, stood for a well-ordered polity.’n10924 Disordered, adulterous love therefore stood as a metaphor for a disordered nation, while divorce might shadow its collapse. Butler compares The Queen and Concubine with 1590s works such as Locrine, Marlowe’s Edward II, Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay ‘which presented love and politics as two complementary spheres of action in which a man’s behaviour in one illuminates his behaviour in another’.n10925 Moreover, Jessica Dyson argues that ‘Developing the theatrical representation of absolutism as madness established in The Queenes Exchange [sic] and The Antipodes, and the image of a choice between a representative of law/reason and absolutism/passion as marital partner for the monarch, The Queen and Concubine explores the corruption, disharmony and confusion which potentially occurs when reason and law are rejected in favour of passion and will’.n1092634Early in Act 1, Horatio alerts the audience to the King’s weakness; sent unexpectedly to retrieve the out-of-favour general Petruccio from prison, he confides in an aside,It must be so. This is one of his
Un-to-be-examined hasty humours,
One of his starts. These, and a devilish gift
He has in venery, are all his faults.
Well, I must go, and still be true to th’ crown.[QC 1.1.speech58]35We have already seen the extent of Horatio’s obsessive loyalty to the King, and we must therefore take seriously these criticisms of the monarch’s inability to control his political and sexual whims. Furthermore, later in the play Lodovico suggests that the King’s erotic choice is crucial to the realm’s safety in other ways; he tells Horatio,You know too well the King,
How apt his nature is to fell oppression,
The burden of whose cruelty long since,
If by the virtuous clemency of his wife
It had not been allayed and mitigated,
Had been a general subversion.
And now, that peerless princess being deposed,
Whose virtue made her famous and us happy,
And he re-married to this shame of women
Whose vileness breeds her envy and our mischief,
What can we look for but destruction?[QC 2.2.speech285]36As the narrative develops, the King’s lack of control intensifies. Unable to moderate Alinda’s behaviour, he very nearly loses his grip on his kingdom altogether, and he is only saved from the revolt of his soldiers by the miraculous reappearance and loyalty of Sforza. The depth of his crisis is actually embodied by Horatio, whose idea of loyalty is in fact an extreme form of self-preservation: while he is prepared to criticise the King in private, before the King’s face he merely agrees with everything that his ruler says or does, no matter what.37From one perspective, Charles’ public image as an uxorious husband suggests that narratives dealing with the sexual misdemeanours of monarchs provided a means by which to depict potentially dangerous matter relating to rule and tyranny, issues which were of pressing importance during the period of Charles I’s personal rule from 1629 to 1640, while safely distancing them from the ‘real’ king. Butler, for instance, reads The Queen and Concubine as critiquing moves towards absolutism that he identifies during the personal rule.n10927 On the other hand, Charles himself may have agreed with many of the arguments raised by dramatists, while nonetheless refusing to acknowledge that they might be applied to his own situation. Kevin Sharpe comments that ‘Aristotle (whose ideas dominated Renaissance theories of kingship) defined a tyrant as one who ruled for his own and not the public good; an autocrat is one who elevates his will above the law. Charles, by contrast, saw himself as the custodian of the common good and the common law’.n10928 The king and his critics shared a common language and, at times, a common vision; this does not, of course, mean that The Queen and Concubine is not a political play, merely that interpretation of its politics - or identification of the targets of its criticism - may have varied according to the spectator’s own position.Neglected Queens38In the specifics of its depiction of the dissolution of a marriage, The Queen and Concubine reworks in illuminating ways a dramatic model provided by The Winter’s Tale and Henry VIII. Gordon McMullan’s description of the ‘spurned and rejected queens’, Hermione and Katherine, might also, be applied to Eulalia. ‘Victims of cruel, self-obsessed husbands’, these daughters of foreign royalty react to their parallel situations in analogous ways; as McMullan comments, ‘Each, in the profound lack of agency that disables her resistance to the savagery of her husband, reflects both the other and the fundamentally patriarchal worlds they both inhabit’.n10929 The similarities between Eulalia, Hermione and Katherine are also created through the reworking of specific aspects of dramaturgy: each woman is the focus of an elaborately ceremonial trial, in which the Queen’s steadfastness helps to emphasize the extent to which her husband is morally compromised.39In The Winter’s Tale the trial scene is placed in the centre of Act 3; it culminates with Leontes’ rejection of the oracle’s judgement, Hermione’s apparently fatal collapse and Paulina’s fierce denunciation of an already repentant King. In Henry VIII the hearing is placed at the end of Act 3 and begins with an elaborate show of ceremony:Trumpets, sennet, and cornetts. Enter two Vergers with short silver wands; next them two Scribes in the habit of doctors; after them, the Archbishop of Canterbury alone; after him, the Bishops of LINCOLN, Ely, Rochester and St Asaph; next them, with some small distance, follows a Gentleman, bearing the purse with the great seal and a cardinal’s hat; then two Priests, bearing each a silver cross; then a Gentleman Usher, bare-headed, accompanied with a Sergeant-at-arms, bearing a silver mace; then two Gentlemen, bearing two great silver pillars; after them, side by side, the two Cardinals; two Noblemen with the sword and mace. The KING takes place under the cloth of state. The two Cardinals sit under him as judges. Queen KATHERINE[, attended by GRIFFITH,] takes place some distance from the King. The Bishops place themselves on each side the court in manner of a consistory; Below them the scribes [and a Crier]. The Lords sit next the Bishops. The rest of the attendants stand in convenient order about the stage.
(2.4.0.1-16)40When the crier requests that ‘Katherine Queen of England, come into the court’ (2.4.9-10), a stage direction indicates that she ‘makes no answer, rises out of her chair, goes about the court, comes to the King, and kneels at his feet: then speaks’ (2.4.11.SD). The ceremonial display of the symbols of religious and political authority establishes the context for the hearing and perhaps emphasises the extent to which Katherine’s agency is limited by it, but it does not prevent her from moving, from speaking and from defending herself. Later in the play, the final judgement is merely reported and Katherine is, in any case, divorced in absentia, as she refuses to attend the hearings.41In both Henry VIII and The Winter’s Tale we see beleaguered queens defend themselves against the charges made against them by their husbands. In The Queen and Concubine, in contrast, Brome keeps Eulalia offstage until the case has been ‘proved’ against her. Instead, Alinda’s ‘parasite’ Flavello describes the hearing and Eulalia’s actions to his patron. According to Flavello, when the false witnesses, a Doctor and a Midwife, testified against Eulalia,She denied all, but in such a patient way,
After her foolish fashion, that it gave strength
To th’ evidence against her. Then she wept
For their iniquity, and gave them a ‘God forgive ye’.[QC 1.5.speech213]42Michael Dobson has suggested that ‘the King of Spain was Katherine’s father, the Emperor of Russia was Hermione’s, but they seem to have attended the same school of rhetoric’.n10930 Eulalia, the King of Naples’ daughter, either did not attend this school, or was absent on the day when they were taught how to deal with divorce-seeking husbands, and her passivity enables Brome to focus on the cruelty of the divorce itself. However, as noted above, her passivity verges, at times, on passive aggression, as an extreme show of loyalty becomes the only means by which Eululia can retain any agency.43Having heard a report of Eulalia’s actions, at the start of Act 2 we are presented with the final judgement of the King against Eulalia - effectively, we, like those on stage, are presented with a fait accompli. The divorce is first represented in a dumbshow which, like the ceremonial entrance in Henry VIII, emphasises the religious and political authority which is being brought to bear on the queen:Loud MusicEnter four LORDS [including LODOVICO, HORATIO and FLAVELLO], two BISHOPS, KING [and] Prince [GONZAGO], they sit; EULALIA in black, crowned, a golden wand in her hand, led between two FRIARS. She kneels to the KING; he rejects her with his hand. Enter at the other door, a DOCTOR of physic, a MIDWIFE, [FABIO and STROZZO]. The KING points them to the BISHOPS; they each deliver papers, kiss the BISHOPS’ books, and are dismissed. The papers given to the KING. He with his finger menaces EULALIA, and sends her the papers; she looks meekly. The BISHOPS take her crown and wand, [and] give her a wreath of cypress, and a white wand. All the LORDS peruse the papers. They show various countenances: some seem to applaud the KING; some pity EULALIA. Music ceases. KING speaks.44Like Henry, who takes his place ‘under the cloth of state’ with the court carefully arranged around him, King Gonzago is initially positioned on the stage in a fashion which aims to underline and reinforce his authority. Like Katherine, Eulalia kneels in a conventionally submissive posture; unlike Katherine she remains static and silent until judgement has been passed on her. King Gonzago’s rejection of his wife is conveyed here not through words - they will follow - but in a series of stark physical gestures: ‘he rejects her with his hand’, ‘He with his finger menaces EULALIA, and sends her the papers’.n10931 The King’s visual rhetoric of rejection is continued later in the dumbshow, as the symbols of the Queen’s political power, her crown and golden wand, are replaced by items representing sorrow and penitence: a wreath of cypress and a white wand. Indeed, combined with her black robes these props suggest that Eulalia is being presented simultaneously as a widow and as one who has been found guilty of sexual misdemeanour as, in the context of the hearing, she has.45The ceremonial is, however, undercut and its dubious legality displayed through the presentation of the ‘DOCTOR of physic’, the midwife and the two soldiers, Fabio and Strozzo, who we have already been informed by Flavello are false witnesses, and in the mixed reactions of the courtiers, some of whom protect themselves by ‘seem[ing]’ to applaud the King, while others dare to pity Eulalia. As Dyson comments, the use of the dumb show emphasises the fact that ‘in this trial justice is only seen to be done; what is said and what is true is irrelevant’.n10932 Brome also undermines the King in the dialogue which follows the dumbshow, undercutting his attempt to present his case smoothly to the assembled lords (and the theatre audience) with asides by Lodovico, who cannot help but express his loyalty to Eulalia. These asides range from the sardonic - he responds to the King’s address to ‘My lord and loyal peers’ with the comment ‘A new distinction / Between spiritual and temporal’ [QC 2.1.speeches215-216] - to the outraged, as in his exclamation ‘Royal hypocrisy!’ [QC 2.1.speech219], or his allegation that the King has given Alinda ‘the bed-right that belonged to your wronged Queen these twelve months’ [QC 2.1.speech223]. The straightforward passion of Lodovico’s words contrasts with the King’s circumlocutory rhetoric, and his movement into a plain-spoken prose also undercuts the formality of the court.n10933 Like Henry VIII, the King presents himself as torn between his love for his wife and higher motives - where Henry repeatedly appeals to his conscience, the King refers twice to ‘order’ and claims that ‘honour’, ‘religion’ and ‘justice’ compel him to his ‘great change’. In both cases, however, the audience rightly suspect that the king is casting off his post-menopausal wife in favour of a younger alternative. The King indulges in a histrionic performance of sorrow which is particularly evident in the smooth, shared verse line as Horatio takes over from him to declare Eulalia’s supposed crime:KingThe proofs you see are plain, That she was found —
Pray speak it for me.HoratioIn adultery.[QC 2.1.speeches220-221]46Despite his best efforts, the King cannot conceal the ulterior motives that underlie his actions.n10934 Like Henry in Shakespeare and Fletcher’s play, he has been seen by the audience kissing his new paramour, and, as I noted above, we have been informed earlier in the play by the pathologically loyal courtier Horatio that the King has a ‘devilish gift … in venery’.47The Queen and Concubine and Henry VIII also juxtapose divorce and re-marriage in an ironic fashion. In Henry VIII, Suffolk announces in Act 3 that Cranmer has satisfied the King that he has good grounds for his divorce and that ‘Shortly’ his ‘second marriage’ to Anne Boleyn ‘shall be published, and / Her coronation’. ‘Katherine’, he explains, ‘no more / Shall be called “Queen”, but “Princess Dowager”, / And “widow to Prince Arthur”’ (3.2.64-71). The King’s hurried passage from his first wife to his second is even more evident in The Queen and Concubine, in which Alinda’s entrance ‘like a bride’, accompanied by ‘two VIRGINS’, follows immediately after Eulalia’s disgrace and mirrors the former queen’s own entrance ‘led between two FRIARS’ at the beginning of the scene. The King tells the astonished Lords that he is ‘Divorced, and free from all impediment / To make my second choice in marriage’ [QC 2.1.speech239] - a position that the Caroline audience would have found extremely dubious - and declares that he will therefore ‘solemnize’ his marriage to Alinda and have her crowned immediately.48The Kings of both plays attempt to erase their first marriages, but their mistreated wives cannot be easily effaced. Each seems to gain divine protection after the divorce, Katherine through her vision of a heavenly apotheosis, and Eulalia through her ‘Genius’, who in a dream-vision grants her powers of prophesy, healing and teaching. Furthermore, Eulalia unwillingly becomes the focus of challenges to the King’s authority. She takes refuge in Palermo, a region which had been gifted to her as part of her jointure when she married the King; the extent to which this region is symbolic of her authority as queen consort is underlined in the two diverging interpretations of the sickness of its inhabitants. Pedro tells Eulalia that the local priestsfind by divination that this punishment
Is fall’n upon this province by the sin
Of the adulterous Queen whose dowry ’twas.
…
And that until his justice take away
Her loathèd life this evil will not cease.[QC 3.1.speech489] [QC 3.1.speech491]
49This is, however, challenged by Eulalia herself; she declares, in a rare but not isolated moment of temper,Priests are but apes to kings, and prostitute
Religion to their ends. Might you not judge
As well, it was th’ injustice and the wrongs
The innocent Queen hath suffered, that has brought
Sense of her injuries upon her province?
And that if she had died her dowry here
With her had also suffered death, to make
It nothing to the King, as he made her?[QC 3.1.speech499]50Reinforcing her claim, the pain felt by the country people intensifies until she heals them.51Eulalia loves, heals and teaches the people of Palermo, and in return they love and honour her. In fact, they take their love too far for Eulalia’s liking, hailing her as their queen and attempting to have those who conspire against her tried and executed, exercising their own justice instead of relying on that of the state. Interrupting Lollio and Poggio’s attempt to hang Fabio and Strozzo, she accuses them of usurping the King’s authority:I condemn their faults, and blame their lives,
But have nor power nor will to judge the men.
You have the will, but to assume the power
You take the King’s right from him, you transgress
As much his laws in spilling of their blood
As they had done in mine had they prevailed.[QC 4.2.speech788]
52The country people are nonetheless unabashed; later in the same scene, Eulalia is told,This province is engaged unto you, madam;
The King made it your jointure, and we find
No reason but you instantly possess it.[QC 4.2.speech876]53She objects - ‘What, and the King alive?’ [QC 4.2.speech877] - only to face the retort, ‘He’s dead to you’ [QC 4.2.speech878], to which she responds,I tremble but to hear you,
And will not live an hour amongst you more
But with this freedom, to use my fair obedience to the King.[QC 4.2.speech881]54Triumphantly, a countryman retorts, ‘You shall obey the King, then, and we’ll obey your majesty’ [QC 4.2.speech882]. Butler describes the countrymen as ‘energetic, downright and ruthlessly egalitarian common men’, and he suggests that ‘In their behaviour, Brome gestures towards the aim of those real “countrymen” who desired a return to parliamentary government’ as an alternative to Charles’s personal rule.n10935 Although it is difficult to see precisely how the local political system employed by the inhabitants of Palermo functions, it is clearly based on a form of election, and the ‘petty parliament’ of the country people in Act 5 acts as a parody of and corrective to the King’s misuse of his own parliament in Act 2.Henrietta Maria and the Politics of Pastoral55As noted above, a significant aspect of The Queen and Concubine is the way in which it interacts with cultural and political currents associated in the early-mid 1630s with Queen Henrietta Maria. Indeed, Martin Butler argues convincingly that The Queen and Concubine should be linked with the activities and ideology of what Malcolm Smuts has termed Henrietta Maria’s ‘puritan followers’, a radical Protestant faction which were finding common ground with the Catholic queen in the early-mid 1630s, supporting a pro-Spanish foreign policy.n10936 In some respects, Brome’s play reflects this alliance: as Steggle notes, although the play is set in Sicily, a Catholic territory ruled in the 1630s by Catholic Spain, and two characters eventually pledge to immure themselves in a monastery and a nunnery respectively, Eulalia’s court has (despite the Marian associations that surround her) a ‘distinctively protestant flavour’. Steggle concludes that The Queen and Concubine ‘is not written as religious propaganda, but nor does it escape or even seek to avoid the religious tensions of the era in which it is written, or the tensions between the miraculous and the satirical.’n1093756Important here is the genre of pastoral, a mode favoured by Queen Henrietta Maria, and employed by Brome in Acts 3-5 of The Queen and Concubine, as Eulalia’s exile takes her to the rural environment of Palermo. Exile often plays an important part in pastoral, and Jane Kingsley-Smith summarises some of its clichés:Exile is often the means by which courtiers and shepherds meet in a bucolic landscape … A person of high birth - most often a duke or the heir to a kingdom - is banished for some unjust cause or deposed and forced into exile, often with his relatives and supporters … Subsequently, by wandering, by shipwreck and occasionally by choice, the exile enters a pastoral landscape where shepherds offer succour and a new way of life … the pastoral sojourn ends with the reconciliation of family members and/or former enemies, often preceding a betrothal. At this point the exiles are enabled to return to society.n10938 57Brome adapts this conventional narrative: in his version, for instance, the exile has a political and emotional tie to the ‘pastoral landscape’ in which she finds herself, and she only receives succour from the country people when she has already given it to them. While the ending of the play does feature the reconciliation of family members and former enemies, it does not precede a betrothal in any simple sense, as I will explore in more detail below. Nonetheless, The Queen and Concubine works with pastoral’s conventions and, in particular, the specific political connotations that the genre had developed in the Caroline period.58Older models of a rigid division and cultural rift between ‘court’ and ‘country’ in this period have been questioned.n10939 In fact, while oppositional writers often invoked the virtues of the country as a means of critiquing court corruption, as Sharpe notes, ‘the ideal of the “country” was celebrated at court as elsewhere’ and ‘pastoral, especially in the Caroline period, was a courtly mode’.n10940 We again see a shared language between the king and his political opponents, the importance of which becomes clear if we look briefly at the contexts for dramatic pastoral in the Caroline period. Queen Henrietta Maria herself produced pastoral plays at court, in which she and her ladies acted, on three occasions: Honorat de Bueil, seigneur de Racan’s pastoral play Les Bergeries, known in England as Artenice, was performed in February 1626; Walter Montagu’s The Shepherds’ Paradise followed in January 1633; and Florimène, which Karen Britland argues was commissioned from François le Metel, sieur de Boisrobert by Cardinal Richelieu and sent to the queen, appeared in December 1635.n10941 Britland also convincingly demonstrates the political importance of these plays, suggesting that Henrietta Maria’s court productions draw on the potential for comment and criticism inherent in both English and French pastoral. In particular, she suggests that The Shepherds’ Paradise ‘criticises courtly corruption and bad kingship’ and ‘draws on the opportunities for social and political commentary made available by the pastoral genre, interrogating Charles’s policy of non-intervention in Europe and also proposing new ways of social interaction at the Caroline court.’n1094259Pastoral plays from the commercial stage also appeared at court during this period. In January 1634, at least three plays with pastoral elements were performed at court by the King’s Men: Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale, and Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess. The performance of the latter play before the King and Queen on 6 January 1634 incorporated some of the physical material used in court plays: some of the costumes were recycled from The Shepherds’ Paradise, given to the King’s Men’s leading actor Joseph Taylor by Henrietta Maria herself, and the play was adapted for scenic staging designed by Inigo Jones.n10943 New pastoral plays of the same period include Randolph’s Amyntas, performed by the Children of the Revels in 1630, Shirley’s adaptation of Sidney’s Elizabethan pastoral romance The Arcadia, performed by Queen Henrietta Maria’s Men in 1632, and Joseph Rutter’s The Shepherds’ Holiday, performed by the same company c. 1633-4. A taste for pastoral drama was shared by commercial and court stages.n1094460As critics including Britland, Sarah Poynting and Sophie Tomlinson have recently explored, The Shepherds’ Paradise is notable for its attention to female subjectivity and female rule.n10945 This tendency is shared by The Faithful Shepherdess, which opens (unusually) with a female voice, in the shepherdess Clorin’s lament for her dead love. The court production of The Faithful Shepherdess heightens the feminocentrism of Fletcher’s original play in a new prefatory dialogue, written by William Davenant, which instates the queen as the play’s presiding deity in the place of Pan, and gives her authority over Charles for the duration of the performance: ‘Bless then that Queen, that doth his eyes invite / And ears, t’obey her sceptre, half this night’.n10946 The Faithful Shepherdess had notoriously flopped on its first performance around 1607, and Britland suggests that ‘Henrietta Maria and her advisors chose to rehabilitate an old play in a manner that drew a direct comparison between the apparent lack of discernment of a former age and a new Caroline sensibility that located women as the gatekeepers of an honourable society’.n1094761The relevance of this network of pastoral drama to The Queen and Concubine is evident. Although Brome’s play includes a far broader social range than the majority of the pastorals listed above, it shares with plays such as The Faithful Shepherdess and The Shepherds’ Paradise an interest in the influence and power of women within a pastoralized milieu. In each of these plays, a woman has dominion over the pastoral environment, and in The Shepherds’ Paradise she is elected annually by the female inhabitants. The Queen and Concubine mirrors this situation in the way in which Eulalia is hailed as the ruler of the country people, and the songs and dances of Act 5 encourage an audience to associate her with traditions of the Lady of May and other rural festivities.62However, while The Shepherds’ Paradise flatters the queen and draws on her interest in neo-Platonic philosophy in its specification that its rulers be both beautiful and under the age of 30, Brome draws on a different aspect of Henrietta Maria’s cultural and political influence: her role as queen consort. In a recent essay, Caroline Hibbard offers a succinct summary of the queen consort’s role: ‘Like the Queen of Heaven, who was ceaselessly invoked as their model, they were intercessors, conveyors of charity and mercy, and these traditional virtues outlasted the Marian imagery through which they were formerly elaborated. Their mediatory role was available because they were wives, and even more crucially mothers, of kings.’n10948 Horatio draws on this common idea of the queen consort’s role in his description of Eulalia’s ability to assuage the King’s tendencies towards tyranny [QC 2.2.speech285]. As a number of critics have suggested, Brome draws on hagiography and Marian imagery in his depiction of Eulalia in exile;n10949 interestingly, given Hibbard’s comments, this imagery may actually reinforce her continued claim to the position of queen consort, which her loyalty to the King constantly invokes. Such a reading is reinforced by the way in which the play concludes, with the re-instatement of Eulalia as a powerful adviser to her son.63The figure of the queen consort has complex associations, however, and Horatio’s speech also invokes the flip side of the role’s public image: the possibility that she might become what Hibbard terms ‘the quintessential evil counsellor - a foreign intruder, meddlesome, and wielding dangerous sexual power’.n10950 This is the role into which Alinda quickly falls - it is worth noting that she is, like Eulalia, originally from Naples, not Sicily, and her sexual hold over the King is repeatedly invoked. The ‘queen’ and the ‘concubine’ are thus simultaneously diametric opposites, and opposite sides of the same coin.Finding Closure64Despite the similarities between The Queen and Concubine, Henry VIII and The Winter’s Tale, their narratives conclude in markedly different ways. Henry VIII draws on chronicle history to conclude with Cranmer’s political prophecy of the future Elizabeth I’s greatness, while Brome’s play faces the problem also negotiated by The Winter’s Tale: how to conclude within the bounds of tragicomedy a narrative in which a marriage has been riven by separation or divorce. Although it works with much of the same narrative and generic material as The Winter’s Tale, The Queen and Concubine is in many ways the more systematically political play. Shakespeare clearly acknowledges the broader political implications of Leontes’ actions, and the way in which his horribly mistaken campaign against his wife and baby daughter seemingly leaves his kingdom without an heir. However, he does not directly demonstrate the effect of Leontes’ mistakes on his country, and the pastoral sequences are set in Bohemia rather than Sicily. Whereas Shakespeare necessarily removes Hermione from the action for much of the play, Brome’s focus on Eulalia in her pastoral exile allows him to foreground questions relating to proper rule and tyranny. The second half of the play cuts between Palermo and the royal court, where tyranny is represented through the caprices of the King and through the outrageous demands of Alinda, who in her final madness makes the Red-Queen-like declaration that ‘she thought that being now a queen / She might by her prerogative take heads, / Whose and as many as she listed’ [QC 4.4.speech1082].65The conclusion of each play emphasises its tragicomic treatment of a fractured marriage. But at the end of The Winter’s Tale, direct political questions are effaced, while in The Queen and Concubine they are foregrounded. After the miraculous reappearance of Hermione, The Winter’s Tale concludes with a quasi-remarriage between Hermione and Leontes, the contracting of a new marriage between Paulina and Camillo, and the confirmation of the match between Florizel and Perdita. The ending does not conceal its own problematic aspects - in addition to Hermione’s failure to address Leontes directly, we cannot forget the deaths of Mamilius and Antigonus, and even Leontes’ comment in the final lines that the protagonists should confer about what has occurred ‘since first / We were dissever’d (5.3.154-5) suggests something of the violence of former events. Nonetheless, it does seek to reconnect the bonds of marriage severed by Leontes’ behaviour in the first three acts.66Brome, in contrast, is explicit in his refusal to allow his king simply to take back his mistreated wife. In Act 5, Scene 3, Alinda follows Olynda in Penelope’s Web in demanding the death of the conspirators, the disinheriting of the King’s son and the banishment of his first wife from his domains; she actually exceeds Olynda in demanding that Eulalia also be blinded. Like Greene’s Souldan, Gonzago repudiates Alinda at this point, saying that he has ‘made sufficient trial’ of the two women and telling Eulalia to ‘take now thy wonted seat and keep it ever’ [QC 5.2.speech1231]. When Alinda tells him, ‘Remember your oath, my lord’ [QC 5.2.speech1232], he responds, ‘My oath was / To perform what I had promised unto / My lawful Queen; that’s my Eulalia’ [QC 5.2.speech1233], repeating the key phrase, ‘lawful Queen’, from Penelope’s Web.67At this point, however, Brome parts company from Greene. Rather than presenting his audience with the reunion of King Gonzago and Eulalia, and the banishment of Alinda, he inserts a further pointed scene in which the country ‘Parliament’ try to execute the corrupt courtier Flavello. In the face of his refusal to accept their authority, Lollio finally tells him,Your shoes at court are all too fine and thin
To tread out snuffs and sparks of kindling sin,
Which let alone the rushes may take fire,
Then flame, then burn up higher still and higher.
You warm you at such fire, ’tis we walk through’t
The hobnailed commonwealth must tread it out.[QC 5.3.speech1310]68Although the treatment of the country parliament is comic, the echo of political prophecy in this speech gives it additional force.n3192 In addition, the scene’s position after the elaborate show of justice towards Alinda and Eulalia emphasises the extent to which the King’s ability to judge fairly has been compromised. It also, as Butler comments, ‘would seem to act as a corrective to the king’s original misuse of parliament’ in the scene in which he divorced Eulalia.n1095169The extent to which the King can no longer be trusted to rule is underlined in the extraordinary scene that follows the country parliament and concludes The Queen and Concubine. First, Brome uses the country revels for the King’s visit to present Prince Gonzago in an oddly Perdita-like fashion, ‘dressed and crowned as Queen of the Girls’, after which father and son are reunited. Alinda is cured of her madness and her raging ambition. She is reconciled with her father, and asks to return to Naples and enter ‘Into the Magdalene nunnery at Lucera, / To spend this life in tears for my amiss / And holy prayers for eternal bliss’ [QC 5.4.speech1396]. Perhaps more surprisingly, the king then declares,She has anticipated my great purpose,
For on the reconcilement of this difference
I vowed my after-life unto the monastery
Of holy Augustinians at Solanto.[QC 5.4.speech1398]70Despite the gathered populace’s interjection - they cry in unison ‘O mighty sir!’ [QC 5.4.speech1399] - the king is determined to abdicate:’Tis not to be gainsaid.
So haste we to Nicosia, where (my son)
In lieu of former wrongs, I’ll yield thee up
My crown and kingdom. Your virtuous mother
(Whom may you forever honour for her
Piety), with these true statesmen, will enable
You to govern well. [QC 5.4.speech1400]71The phrase ‘In lieu of former wrongs’ pointedly alludes to and adapts the conclusion of Greene’s Penelope’s Web, quoted above: ‘then he sent for his wife, and after reconciliation made, to the great joy of all his subjects, in lieu of her patient obedience set her in her former estate’. In Penelope’s Web, Barmenissa’s restoration as queen and as wife to the Souldan is presented as a reward for her Griselda-like patience. In contrast, in The Queen and Concubine the King reinstates Eulalia as queen-mother, and presents his abdication as compensation for the hardships through which he has put his son. His movement in the speech quoted above from ‘thee’ to ‘you’ in addressing the Prince demonstrates on a linguistic level his determination to resign his throne to his son, a determination which is underlined in the elegiac tones of the play’s final lines:King[…]I have now
Plighted my troth to heaven, and so has she.
[All]O may, sir, such wedlock ne’er broken be.
KingNow with such melting silence as sweet souls
From bodies part to immortality,
May we for better life divided be.[QC 5.4.speeches1404-1406]72Whereas Leontes has spent sixteen years lamenting his mistakes, and has not remarried, King Gonzago has divorced Eulalia, taken a new wife and, crucially, consummated that marriage, as we are explicitly informed when in her madness Alinda questions whether his ‘lustful purpose / Was but to rob me of my virgin honour’ [QC 3.3.speech741]. Adultery is therefore key: having unlawfully divorced his wife - on the pretext of her supposed relationship with Sforza - the King has then himself committed adultery in his relationship with Alinda. As we have seen, commentators such as William Gouge saw adultery as the one offence which has the potential to dissolve lawful marriage; here, it also highlights the King’s ‘abdication of responsible government’:n10952 he is both unfit to be reunited with his wife and unfit to rule. In this context, Brome cannot to let the king off the hook for his sexual misconduct. However, the king’s abdication in favour of his son is problematic in itself in the context of a familial rhetoric of rule, as it is the political equivalent of divorce between the king and his country; King Gonzago’s sexual misdemeanours have seemingly shattered the bond between him and his people to such an extent that it can no longer be reconstituted. Rather than ending with the betrothals common in pastoral, therefore, the conclusion of The Queen and Concubine features a ‘divorce’ between the King’s body natural and his body politic, a divorce facilitated by yet another ‘marriage’, this time to a religious vocation.73In his reworking of Greene’s narrative, and of Shakespearean narrative, dramaturgical and generic structures, Brome views his source texts as things to be ‘questioned and perverted’, to adopt Sven Lü tticken’s terms.n10953 Building on the uneasy tone of the conclusion of The Winter’s Tale, and taking on the full implications of the divorce narrative presented in plays such as Henry VIII, he both questions the Shakespearean plays and uses them as a means to ‘pervert’ the narrative of Penelope’s Web, his main source text. Walter Cohen has suggested that in the majority of early modern tragicomedies ‘resolution of gender difficulties is equivalent to or quickly leads to resolution of the political crisis’.n10954 The Winter’s Tale arguably falls into this pattern, even though its ‘resolution of gender difficulties’ is somewhat arbitrary and uncertain. Similarly, the prophecy at the end of Henry VIII is an attempt, albeit a knowingly compromised attempt, to leap over the problems of succession that were caused in part by Henry’s inability to father a male heir. In The Queen and Concubine, however, the resolution of ‘gender difficulties’ and the King’s renunciation of his sexual misdeeds, actually serves to call further into question the nature and limits of royal power and authority. The effect is similar to that of A King and No King, which, as Lesser notes, because it ‘does not see royal authority as absolutist (like patriarchal authority), resolution of the political crisis in fact exacerbates the gender difficulties’.n10955 But The Queen and Concubine, written a generation after the Jacobean tragicomedies, is more problematic in its insistence in calling into question the absolutist basis of royal and familial authority. In The Winter’s Tale Leontes is allowed to regain his heir and his wife; in Henry VIII Henry gains a new wife and an heir; in A King and No King Arbaces loses his throne but gains authority over his new wife. Brome’s King, however, is removed from his position in nation and patriarchy, replaced in the body politic by his son and the woman who can no longer be his wife.***74Brome’s tragicomedies are among the most overlooked of his plays, perhaps in part because they do not easily fit preconceived notions of Brome as comic heir to Jonson. In addition, tragicomedy has been something of a Cinderella among dramatic genres, rarely accorded the concentrated scrutiny and acclaim that tragedy and comedy have received, and often associated with outmoded notions of the ‘decadence’ of drama in the Caroline period.n10958 Outside Shakespearean ‘late’ plays such as The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest and Cymbeline, Jacobean and Caroline tragicomedies are rarely accorded theatrical revival, meaning that modern playgoers remain unfamiliar with their generic conventions and dramatic potential.75An editor of a play is obviously biased in its favour, but I believe that The Queen and Concubine is overdue a theatrical reappraisal to match the valuable critical attention that it has received from the likes of Martin Butler and Matthew Steggle. As our workshops suggested, the roles of Eulalia and Alinda would offer a superb opportunity for actresses; the play also contains a large number of appealing roles for an ensemble cast - including, especially, Horatio, Andrea and Poggio and Lollio - and some striking incorporation of visual effects.n10956 The Queen and Concubine challenges many common preconceptions about early modern drama in general and Caroline drama in particular, especially in Brome’s refusal to allow the King to avoid the consequences of his actions. As Butler states in Theatre and Crisis, this ‘deeply felt and richly resonant’ work is ‘one of the most openly radical, combative plays of the decade’,n10957 and it thoroughly deserves renewed attention.
n10867 In the 1630s, this story was played out in two forms: at the Globe and Blackfriars in revivals of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale; and at Salisbury Court in a new play written by Richard Brome, The Queen and Concubine.
n10868 Penelope’s Web.
n10869 ‘whatsoever he had promised to the right and lawful Queen of Egypt’ will be granted.
n10870 ‘an open and creative misappropriation of Shakespeare’s play’.
n10871 The Queen’s Exchange freely reworks King Lear,
n10872 ‘was present at the acting of K[ing] Hen[ry] 8 at the Globe, a play bespoken of purpose by himself’.
n10873 ‘By concentrating on those elements in a period which to hindsight appear progressive we subtly but inevitably misrepresent the way things looked to contemporaries’.
n10874 earlier plays.
n10875 female selfhood’.
n10876 the tragicomic Queen and Concubine.
n10877 seem jarring coming from another company.
n10878 Revels contract.
n10879 in early 1636.
n10880 ‘in circumstances which suggest that - like the other two - it was a successful Salisbury Court play which he was seeking to print now that his relationship with the company had broken down’.
n10881 Two further plays, Christianetta, or Marriage and Hanging Go By Destiny and The Jewish Gentleman, were entered in the Stationers’ Register in August 1640 alongside The New Academy, The Lovesick Court, Covent Garden Weeded and The English Moor.
n10882 Another possibility is indicated by N.W. Bawcutt, who suggests that A Queen and no Queen, licensed by the Master of the Revels for the Fortune company in 1639, may be an alternative title for The Queen and Concubine.
n10883 Anthony Berry, Christopher Goad, Curtis Greville, Edward May, George Stutville, John Young, Timothy Reade, William Cartwright the Younger, William Cartwright the Elder and William Wilbraham.
n10884 in Norwich on 10 March 1635.
n10886 and servants of the company.
n10887 John Barrett, Thomas Jordan, Thomas Loveday, Thomas Lovell, Matthias Morris, John Robinson, Thomas Sands and Walter Williams were attached to the playing company as hired men or boy actors in 1635.
n10888 Revels Plays
n10889 The Queen and Concubine
n10890 baptised on 12 November 1637.
n10891 July 1634 and May 1636.
n10892 mother Lepida, to play Eulalia.
n10893 extremely popular with audiences,
n10894 ‘strumpet’,
n10895 ‘the queen submits scrupulously to the king’s pleasure, but in lesser mortals passive obedience receives shorter shrift’;
n10896 criticise him to his face.
n10897 ‘Let … no passion betray you to any study of revenge upon those whose own sin and folly will sufficiently punish them in due time’.
n10898 Admiral’s Men in 1600.
n10899 ‘’Tis but my duty; if you’ll have me stoop, / Even to your meanest groom, my lord, I’ll stoop’.
n10900 a spinning wheel.
n10901 private philanthropists.
n10902 ‘not as employment to earn money, but as a means for women of all social positions to avoid the sin of idleness and to accrue respect and personal commendation’.
n10903 ‘the keeping and bringing up of my daughter until she is 14 and have towards it 40s., she to be taught to read and make plain work of linen and to be educated in the fear of God’.
n10904 The needle’s art, they to their children show.
n10905 ‘even high-ranking ladies were praised after death as having been good housewives, skilled in sewing, cooking and the production of home remedies’.
n10906 chaste, silent and obedient woman;
n10907 ‘is a lively enough figure to present herself as a dynamic saleswoman, and not merely a long-suffering martyr-figure: particularly since sale-work, day-work, and night-work as descriptive terms seem more likely to be cues for bawdy jokes rather than descriptions of particular items’.
n10908 ‘There is no suggestion by philanthropists or moral and educational writers that any woman should be encouraged to take the goods she had made to the public market place herself’,
n10909 divorce was explicitly prohibited.
n10910 ‘Such is the nature of the matrimonial bond as it maketh of two one, and more firmly bindeth them two together than any other bond can bind any other two together; how then should they be two again?’
n10916 he was reluctant thereafter to comment explicitly on this issue.
n10917 For the adulterer maketh himself one flesh with his harlot. Why then should he remain to be one flesh with his wife? Two (saith the law) shall be one flesh, not three’.
n10918 his son’s favour and retires with her to a religious life.
n10919 ‘need to reconcile the politics of the state and of the family, revealing the ideological work necessary to create the Jacobean commonplace that the two corresponded transparently’.
n10920 ‘The king’s adultery is an immediately familiar emblem for the defilement of the purity of the state and the abdication of responsible government’.
n10921 ‘The representation of his family was the representation of his government’.
n10922 marriage and its fecundity.
n10923 Carew hopes, the king will see ‘grown / From budding stars to suns full blown’.
n10924 ‘an apt metaphor for the sentient desires and emotional forces activating social and political life, while virtuous love, represented above all by royal monogamy, stood for a well-ordered polity.’
n10925 a man’s behaviour in one illuminates his behaviour in another’.
n10926 which potentially occurs when reason and law are rejected in favour of passion and will’.
n10927 identifies during the personal rule.
n10928 Charles, by contrast, saw himself as the custodian of the common good and the common law’.
n10929 ‘Each, in the profound lack of agency that disables her resistance to the savagery of her husband, reflects both the other and the fundamentally patriarchal worlds they both inhabit’.
n10930 but they seem to have attended the same school of rhetoric’.
n10931 ‘He with his finger menaces EULALIA, and sends her the papers’.
n10932 ‘in this trial justice is only seen to be done; what is said and what is true is irrelevant’.
n10933 and his movement into a plain-spoken prose also undercuts the formality of the court.
n10934 Despite his best efforts, the King cannot conceal the ulterior motives that underlie his actions.
n10935 personal rule.
n10936 pro-Spanish foreign policy.
n10937 miraculous and the satirical.’
n10938 At this point the exiles are enabled to return to society.
n10939 in this period have been questioned.
n10940 ‘pastoral, especially in the Caroline period, was a courtly mode’.
n10941 Cardinal Richelieu and sent to the queen, appeared in December 1635.
n10942 social interaction at the Caroline court.’
n10943 Inigo Jones.
n10944 A taste for pastoral drama was shared by commercial and court stages.
n10945 female rule.
n10946 ‘Bless then that Queen, that doth his eyes invite / And ears, t’obey her sceptre, half this night’.
n10947 ‘Henrietta Maria and her advisors chose to rehabilitate an old play in a manner that drew a direct comparison between the apparent lack of discernment of a former age and a new Caroline sensibility that located women as the gatekeepers of an honourable society’.
n10948 ‘Like the Queen of Heaven, who was ceaselessly invoked as their model, they were intercessors, conveyors of charity and mercy, and these traditional virtues outlasted the Marian imagery through which they were formerly elaborated. Their mediatory role was available because they were wives, and even more crucially mothers, of kings.’
n10949 depiction of Eulalia in exile;
n10950 ‘the quintessential evil counsellor - a foreign intruder, meddlesome, and wielding dangerous sexual power’.
n3192 Although the treatment of the country parliament is comic, the echo of political prophecy in this speech gives it additional force.
n10951 he divorced Eulalia.
n10952 ‘abdication of responsible government’:
n10953 In his reworking of Greene’s narrative, and of Shakespearean narrative, dramaturgical and generic structures, Brome views his source texts as things to be ‘questioned and perverted’, to adopt Sven Lü tticken’s terms.
n10954 ‘resolution of gender difficulties is equivalent to or quickly leads to resolution of the political crisis’.
n10955 ‘does not see royal authority as absolutist (like patriarchal authority), resolution of the political crisis in fact exacerbates the gender difficulties’.
n10958 drama in the Caroline period.
n10956 and some striking incorporation of visual effects.
n10957 ‘one of the most openly radical, combative plays of the decade’,