Crises of Self and Succession
This chapter addresses the theatrical reception of the Persian king Cambyses II as portrayed in Herodotus book III. The Achaemenid madman, whose death without issue creates an acute succession crisis, plays a noteworthy part as the ‘star’ of two of the most successful theatre works between 1560 and 1667. The first is Thomas Preston’s The Lamentable Tragedy Mixed Full of Pleasant Mirth Containing the Life of Cambises King of Persia (1560 or 1561, the earliest surviving Elizabethan tragedy). The second is Elkanah Settle’s Restoration drama Cambyses (1667). It is argued that both plays project the conflicted early modern English self and its fractured religious and political psyche and that Settle’s play foreshadows the emergent eighteenth-century ‘She-Tragedy’ and ‘Sentimental Drama’, in which the fantasy of familial domestic harmony, and honourable love, were to become the theatre’s ideological counterpart of the British bourgeois settlement.