Fletcher's slight contribution to this otherwise masterly play consists, in brief, of facile dramatic dialogue, rhetorical ravings, stop-gaps complementary to the plot, and farce unrelated to it. His scenes display no spiritual insight; supply no development of character; administer no dramatic fillip to the action and no thrill to the spectator; and, exclusive of one rhetorically-coloured colloquy between the minor lovers, Tigranes and Spaconia, they are devoid of poetry. To Beaumont, then, it may be said that we owe in the creation of _A King and No King_ one of the most intensely powerful dramas of the Jacobean period, one of the most popular in the age of Dryden, and one of the most influential in the development of the heroic play of the Restoration. That it did not survive the eighteenth century is due not so much to the painful nature of the conflict presented as to the fact that it is "of that inferior sort of tragedies which" as Dryden says "end with a prosperous event." The conflict of motives, the passions aroused, have overpassed the limits of artistic mediation. The play would better have ended in a catastrophe of undeserved suffering--that highest kind of tragedy, inevitable and inexplicable. But though this be a spoiled tragedy, it is not, as many assert, an immoral tragicomedy. That error arises from a careless reading of the text. From the first, the spectator is led to divine that the protagonists are not brother and sister. And as for the protagonists themselves,--when the King is suddenly smitten by love (III, 1, 70-115) and rebels against its power, he does not even know that the object of his devotion is his supposed sister. When he is informed that the conquering beauty is Panthea, he revolts, crying "'t is false as Hell!" And when the twain are enmeshed in the strands of circumstance they cease not to recognize the liberating possibility of self-denial. In his struggle against what seems to him incestuous love, though the King does not conquer, he, still, not for a moment loses the consciousness of what is right. His deepest despair is that he is "not come so high as killing" himself rather than succumb to worse temptation; and his last word before the tragic knot is cut is of loathing for "such a strange and unbelieved affection as good men cannot think on." And when Panthea feeling the "sin growing upon her blood," learns the irony of high resolve throttled by infirmity, it is still her soul, unstrangled, that cries to him whom she thinks her brother, "Fly, sir, for God's sake!"