The Bloody Banquet is an early 17th-century play, a revenge tragedy of uncertain date and authorship, attributed on its title page only to "T.D." It has attracted a substantial body of critical and scholarly commentary, chiefly for the challenging authorship problem it presents. It has been attributed to a collaboration between Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton.
Publication
The Bloody Banquet was never entered into the Register of the Stationers Company, but an order from the Lord Chamberlain (then Philip Herbert, 4th Earl of Pembroke), dated 19 August 1639, lists it among forty plays that are the property of William Beeston and can be performed only by his company, Beeston's Boys. It was first published in quarto in the same year, 1639, by Thomas Cotes, with the attribution to "T. D." on its title page.
Sources
The play draws its plot from Pan His Syrinx (1584, 1597) by William Warner. The playwright(s) took elements from four of the seven stories in Warner's volume, to create a revenge tale in which a Tyrant serves up a cannibal banquet, only to be assassinated at the dining table, yielding the "bloody banquet" of the title. The sole extant text of the play is only about 1900 lines in length, roughly 500 lines shorter than the average for plays of its era; discontinuities in the text suggest that it was edited before publication. The drama's date is uncertain, although its general style and tone place it sometime after 1600.
Authorship
Some seventeenth-century sources point to Thomas Dekker as the "T. D." of the title page. Nineteenth-century critic F. G. Fleay identified T. D. as Thomas Drue on the strength of the common initials – but since virtually nothing is known about Drue (the author of only one acknowledged play, The Duchess of Suffolk), the attribution offered little enlightenment, and left the field open for other candidates. Robert Davenport was also suggested as a possibility.
In 1925, E. H. C. Oliphant first linked the name of Thomas Middleton with the play; he argued that The Bloody Banquet was a Dekker/Middleton collaboration. Further research and the use of stylistic analysis has brought about a consensus that the authors were Dekker and Middleton. David Lake, in his 1975 analysis of attribution problems in the Middleton canon, suggested that "The play is a much-revised one, written originally by Middleton with some help from Dekker about 1600–02" — though he acknowledged this as only one possibility. Macdonald Jackson strengthened the case for Middleton two decades later. More recently, Gary Taylor has included it Middleton's Collected Works (2007), and has argued that the play was originally written by Middleton and Dekker in 1608–09, and then adapted in the 1620s. A 21st-century adaptation is available.
Characters
The King of Lydia (the Old King) Tymethes, the King of Lydia's son Lapyrus, the King of Lydia's nephew The King of Lycia Zantippus, the King of Lycia's son Eurymone, the King of Lycia's daughter Armatrites, King of Cilicia (the Tyrant) Zenarchus, the King of Cilia's son Amphridote, the King of Cilia's daughter Thetis, the King of Cilia's queen (the Young Queen) Thetis' maid Mazeres, the King of Cilia's adviser Roxano, Thetis' helper Fidelo & Amorpho, the Lydian King's faithful servants Sertorio & Lodovico, the Lydian King's unfaithful servants The Old Queen of Lydia The Old Queen of Lydia's two little children Chorus The Clown Two Shepherds Four Servants Soldiers
Synopsis
Induction
The play's back story is acted out in pantomime and narrated by the Chorus: After seven long, bloody battles, the King of Lydia and the King of Lycia agreed to a peace treaty. As a pledge of faith, the treaty was sealed by an exchange of hostages. The King of Lydia traded his nephew, Lapyrus, for the King of Lycia's son, Zantippus. Shortly after the exchange, the King of Lycia offered Lapyrus the hand of his beautiful daughter Eurymone if Lapyrus would turn traitor against his uncle. Lapyrus agreed to the deal, married Eurymone, and led an army to attack Lydia. As Lapyrus' army attacked, the King of Lydia sent his son, Tymethes, to enlist the aid of The King of Cilicia. Meanwhile, The Queen of Lydia took her two infant sons and fled to a forest, certain the kingdom would soon come to ruin. Shortly thereafter, the King of Cilicia arrived in Lydia, forced Lapyrus' army to withdraw, and saved the King. As it soon turned out, however, the King of Cilia had treacherous notions of his own...