Shakespeare Bulletin

This performance of A King and No Kingwas staged as part of the American Shakespeare Center's Actors' Renaissance Season. The season, now in its fifteenth year, explores the performance conditions of early modern theater by having an ensemble of actors stage four plays, rehearsed in fewer than ten days without the guidance of a director. Under these constraints, the actors mounted an entertaining and highenergy production of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher's A King and No King, a play whose subject matter—tyranny, incest, attempted murder—provocatively contrasted with the production's light comedic touch. In an unsettling echo of theatrical history, this production, like its early modern counterparts, was performed under the looming threat of contagion, as many performance venues in the US were closing due to the coronavirus outbreak. [End Page 666]

As always at the ASC's Blackfriars Playhouse, the actors provided pre-show musical entertainment as audience members took their seats. The actors crowdsourced the musical selections, and the songs chosen for A King and No Kinganticipated some of the play's own preoccupations, including war, the abuse of power, and sex. Ronald Román-Meléndez's Spanish-language performance of "La Bala" ("The Bullet"), an antiviolence protest song by Puerto Rican group Calle 13, was followed by ensemble performances of Death's protopunk "Politicians in My Eyes," Lauryn Hill's "Doo Wop (That Thing)," and Steely Dan's "Night by Night." The inclusion of "La Bala" hinted at the possibility that this production would explore the play's more topical geopolitical references, its participation in the "Jacobean Hispanophilia" of the Stuart court. Beyond a few costume and makeup choices, however, the alterity of locale was largely downplayed. (One obvious exception was Gobias's high-collared cape and turquoise eyeshadow, reminiscent of a glam-punk Bela Legosi.) But alterity itself remained a major concern of the production. When Panthea saw Spaconia for the first time, she greeted her with an overpronounced "YOU ARE WELCOME!"—only to be surprised that Spaconia already spoke her language. The vague and inconsistent markers of foreignness in the play, which otherwise unfolds in a conventional fantasy space of tragicomedy, underscore the play's themes, especially the tension between the familiar and unfamiliar. As bonds of kinship unravel, what is foreign—what is other—is continually called into question. Indeed, pronouncements of "strangeness" are among the most common refrains of the play. The ASC production derived much of its comedic energies from establishing or collapsing the differences between victor and captor, brother and sister, captain and churl.

The production opened with Mardonius and Bessus describing their king Arbaces's recent victory over Tigranes, the king of Armenia. Arbaces himself then entered to the sound of trumpets, brandishing his sword and gesturing to the audience to applaud, as much the picture of a victorious quarterback as a king. His youthful energy and endless capacity for self-praise marked him as a bragadacciowho merited Tigranes's censure: "You should have kept your temper / Till you saw home again, where it's the fashion / Perhaps to brag" (1.1.117–19). Physically and verbally, the two kings were well-matched, and clever choreography revealed comically that Tigranes was perhaps the stronger of the two, despite Arbaces's earlier victory. Arbaces's "vainglory" was mirrored in the clown-captain Bessus, whose peacetime swaggering belied battlefield cowardice. The knockabout humor of Bessus's failed attempts to uphold his honor (which culminated in a thorough, and ultimately unfounded, beating by the aged [End Page 667]Lygones) kept the theme of excessive pride front of mind for the audience. The production also exposed the transactional quality...