SOURCE: "The Morality of A King and No King," in Renaissance Papers 1958, 1959, 1960, edited by Peter G. Phialas and George Walton Williams, The Southeastern Renaissance Conference, 1961, pp. 93-103.

In the essay below, Turner asserts that A King and No King presents an immoral value system in which "indulgence becomes not only respectable but very nearly sanctified."

Many of our greatest critics of Renaissance literature have commented upon the sense of defeat, spiritual emptiness, and decadence which sets the tone of Jacobean drama. The relationship of Beaumont and Fletcher's tragicomedies to the spirit of their age is variously expressed, perhaps most typically by Miss Ellis-Fermor who sees them as romantic escape literature from a reality of despondency and anxiety [Una Ellis-Fermor, The Jacobean Drama, 1953]. Miss Bradbrook feels that the slackening of the moral fibre which these plays reflect had a deleterious effect upon their literary quality. "The final test of...