"A King and No King helped establish tragicomedy as the seventeenth century's favored dramatic genre, and Beaumont and Fletcher as leading playwrights of the day. Accompanying this fully annotated edition, an introduction explores the play's sources, both literary and dramatic, and offers a thorough reconsideration of its relation to its social and political context, and contemporary issues of royal absolutism, good governance, and the political role of the aristocracy. In addition, the introduction provides the fullest available account of the play's stage history, tracing the shifts in cultural mores that eroded its popularity and ultimately consigned it to the study rather than the stage.