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The Phoenix: Middleton's Comedy de Regimine Principum

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Marilyn L. Williamson
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Extract

The Phoenix is the most sententious and didactic of all Thomas Middleton's plays. Even his tragedies and tragicomedies are not as pervasively moralistic as this play. The reason for this difference in The Phoenix has never been explored because only the more attractive, realistic parts of the comedy have been singled out for comment.

Like A Fair Quarrel and The Old Law, which are also more didactic than the rest of Middleton's dramatic work, The Phoenix was performed before the King: the quarto edition has the subtitle, ‘as it hath beene sundrye times Acted by the Children of Paules, And presented before his Maiestie’. The sententiousness of The Phoenix derives, I think, from a definite attempt by Middleton to interest the King and in a sense advise him. The Phoenix, I hope to show, is a comedy written for a king.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance News , Volume 10 , Issue 4 , Winter 1957 , pp. 183 - 187
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1957

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References

1 See Ellis-Fermor, Una, The Jacobean Drama (London, 1936), p. 131.Google Scholar

2 Middleton, Thomas, Works (London, 1885-86), ed. Bullen, , 1, 101.Google Scholar All references to the play are to this edition.

3 In fairness I should note two arguments against my interpretation: (1) A Trick to Catch the Old One also had a court performance; (2) there are in The Phoenix contemporary allusions to the new knights James had created (1, vi, 150; II, iii, 4), to the unsettled state of Ireland (1, v, 6), and to the unfortunate monetary policy in Ireland (iii, i, 151).

4 See Paul, H. N., The Royal Play of Macbeth (New York, 1950)Google Scholar, and Anderson, Ruth, ‘Kingship in Renaissance Drama’, Studies in Philology, XLI (1944), 136.Google Scholar

5 See Gilbert, A. H., The Symbolic Persons in the Masques of Ben Jonson (Durham, N. C., 1948), pp. 24–25.Google Scholar

6 James VI, The Basilicon Doron, ed. James Craigie (Scottish Text Society: Edinburgh, 1944 ), i, 71-73.

7 See Born, L. K., ‘The Perfect Prince’, Speculum, iii (1928), 504.Google Scholar

8 See Basilicon Doron, pp. 53-71 and 121-135.

9 Quoted by Born, p. 502.