Argues for the 1640s and 1650s as a watershed moment in Beaumont and Fletcher’s posthumous history, the moment of their canonization, and a point in time when praise for the formal qualities of their plays was most widely expressed and clearly articulated. Offers a new reading of A King and no King, challenging critical commonplaces that suggest that the playwrights’ popularity at this time was merely down to the political valances of their plays. Argues that, rather than a specifically royalist or republican play avant la lettre, A King or No King’s thoroughgoing interest in paradox and self-contradiction can be complexly mapped onto the vertiginous political and social mindsets of the Interregnum. The title encapsulates the paradoxical status of drama during the mid-seventeenth century, when plays were simultaneously new and old, innocuous and subversive. Describes the irony of belletristic Royalists’ appreciation of the play’s formal complexity and ambiguous politics, as part of the Royalists efforts to designate pre-Civil War drama as apolitical, itself an invested political move in the period. Explores the significance of the Interregnum circulation of A King and No King’s title apart from the play proper, as well as the play’s reception in the Restoration.