![]() ![]() I liked the cheese-baited trap the mission provided to capture the King □ I’d heard that this was another tough level, and the rat attacks were fairly relentless with King Rat himself appearing from the sewers in my base, but I set my heroes to defend a tower by the nearest sewer, and they levelled up on the streams of rats while earning money for better gear. The next mission was the Mortal Foibles of Kings, in which I had to capture and defeat King Rat. The Royal Feat caused me some trouble, though it did teach me to get heroes started on enemy nests as soon as possible, both for levelling and so that they start earning and spending reward money. I was surprised, but pleased, by how tough some of the missions have been. I have the extra missions, and various expansions to go! □ ![]() (2) In other words "the hollow crown / That rounds the mortal temples of a king," described by William Shakespeare's Richard II, must be filled by one ruler after another.Well, I’ve completed the campaign at least. To echo Ernst Kantorowicz, in order for the body politic to remain lively, succession must proceed, however vexed the transfer of power might be. But in order to render these past treasons and transgressions in a palatable fashion-so that they might be enjoyable entertainment even for the sitting monarchs who patronized playing companies-playwrights oriented these plays to the present moment of composition, performance, and publication. History plays traffic in the drama of succession: challenged claims, usurpations, rebellions, pretenders, and even infertility, all issues that plagued the orderly ascension of England's medieval and Tudor kings. Ford's play about a pretender's threat to the Tudor succession participates in the prophetic and shistorical modes of the chronicle genre to imagine multiple temporalities and varied futures for England's polity. Despite the prologue's protestations, Perkin Warbeck is no mere fossil. Although fewer new history plays were staged in the Caroline era than in the 1590s, dramatic works about the English past continued to be written, printed, reprinted, and performed. By following Ford's assessment and closing the book on the history play with Perkin Warbeck in 1634, or with the official closure of the public theaters in the 1640s, we have overlooked the ongoing popularity of the history play, especially in print. Generations of readers and scholars have seen Ford's prologue as the death rattle of the genre or, at the very least, a prescient reflection appended to the last new history play printed before the theaters closed in 1642 and remained shuttered during the English Civil Wars. (1) Ford's tale of a persuasive pretender's rise and fall might transcend the opinion that history plays were "out of fashion" because it was cleverly "couch'd" in the entertaining trappings typical of Caroline drama (2 and 14). THE prologue to John Ford's Perkin Warbeck (1634) laments the decline of the history play genre and pleads that his unfashionable chronicle play is rather "a History, couch'd in a Play" and, by virtue of this "couching," entertaining, rather than passe. These brief, dramatized chronicles bring pasts, presents, and futures to life on the stage. I show that Ford's Perkin Warbeck, instead of revealing the limits of the history play, celebrates the affordances of the genre. The play represents both history as it unfolded and the possible counterfactual projected by Perkin's desired succession. I argue that Ford's pretender plot is equally about the past and the future. Although Perkin aspires to be planted in his "own inheritance" and ascend to the throne, Ford's play first entertains and then dismisses the aspirations of this pretender. This article investigates John Ford's use of mixed temporality to stage succession in Perkin Warbeck. ![]()
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