Uperfluous Kings

Uperfluous Kings by Alice Meynell

"Superfluous Kings" is a short critical essay by Alice Meynell, taking its title from a line in Shakespeare's *Antony and Cleopatra* describing an age "which had superfluous kings for messengers." Meynell uses this phrase as the pivot for a meditation on Shakespeare's imaginative reverence for royalty and on what will be lost to literature and to readers as monarchy itself fades from the world's political life. She opens by conceding that as actual kings vanish from the stage of history, few will mourn kingship as an institution. But she argues that something else is at stake: not royalty as a fact of the world, but "royalty in the mind of Shakespeare"—a quality of imaginative belief that may not correspond to anything that ever truly existed, yet which Shakespeare rendered utterly convincing. She catalogues its many forms across the plays: Perdita's unconscious, hereditary dignity amid rustic revelry in *The Winter's Tale*; the unrecognized princeliness of Arviragus and Guiderius, Imogen's exiled brothers in *Cymbeline*, who retain their "implicit distinction" even in ignorance of their own birth; Lear's kingliness, most fully expressed not in ceremony but in his loud, indignant, elemental death; and Cleopatra's queenliness, culminating in Antony's dying address to her—"I am dying, Egypt, dying"—which Meynell calls one of the most august farewells in all of literature, and which she ranks even above Lear's famous "every inch a king." On that latter phrase she digresses to recount an anecdote about the Italian tragedian Rossi, who, playing Lear, found no Italian equivalent for "every inch a king" and had to deliver the line in English—proof, for Meynell, that only Shakespeare's language, and perhaps only the English temperament, could sustain this peculiar intensity of veneration for kingship; she suggests the Latin mind lacks the same register of imaginative reverence. The essay's structural pivot is the idea of antithesis. Shakespeare's exalted conception of royalty is necessary, Meynell argues, precisely so that its opposite—downfall, humiliation, servitude, and above all death—can strike with full force. The scornful phrase "superfluous kings," she says, is the most insolent expression Shakespeare's irony could devise, and it only carries its charge because kings must first be imagined as supremely, transcendently significant. She extends this logic to death itself as the ultimate antithesis to royal splendor: not merely the visible humiliation of defeat or "sad stories of the death of kings," but the final, hidden indignity of burial, out of sight of any populace. She quotes admiringly a fragment—not by Shakespeare, but "wonderfully worthy of him" (attributed to Edward Young)—describing "high-born dust / In vaults, thin courts of poor unflattered kings," and asserts that only Shakespeare, or Young, could have written such a line. From here Meynell turns elegiac and prophetic. She asks who could say whether the thesis (Shakespeare's splendor) or the antithesis (his corresponding humiliation and mortality) is the greater achievement, insisting the two cannot be separated or compared—they exist together, inseparably, in English literature. But she fears for their future reception: as kingship recedes from lived experience, these Shakespearean passages risk being demoted from objects of passionate identification to mere items of "literary interest," then "literary curiosity," and finally targets of "new derision," given what she calls the modern wit's appetite for mockery. She drives this anxiety home with a series of conditional predictions: when kings become in fact superfluous, Shakespeare's ironic use of the word "superfluous" will lose its sting; when courts and flattery vanish, Young's "unflattered" will name nothing recognizable; when kings no longer keep "thin courts," the phrase will conjure no ghosts. She closes with an image drawn from religious relic-veneration—the jeweled, gold-enshrined skulls of the Three Kings (Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar) preserved at Cologne Cathedral—suggesting that once the mortality of kings ceases to carry any special sting beyond the common mortality shared by all people, such relics will be leveled, in status, with the unnamed bones of the anonymous shepherds who came to the manger before them. Meynell ends by declaring that Shakespeare's greatest splendor, compassion, terror, and irony—all bound up together in his treatment of royalty—stand "under sentence," doomed by historical change to lose their force for future readers. She explains her choice of epigraph, the "superfluous kings" line rather than a phrase evoking pity or terror directly, on the grounds that irony, as a rhetorical mode, already implies and contains the other emotional registers within itself. The essay is thus less a narrative than a compressed critical argument: an elegy for a mode of feeling—reverence for hereditary majesty—that Meynell sees dying out along with monarchy itself, preserved, perhaps only temporarily, in the amber of Shakespeare's verse.

By Alice Meynell · First published 1922 · Genre: Literary Criticism, Shakespeare Studies, Essay · 1,290 words

First lines

Which had superfluous kings for messengers Not many moons gone by. _Antony and Cleopatra._

As the kings lag, and then pass away from the stage of the world, many men will ask what there is to regret. Assuredly nothing, if not royalty in the mind of Shakespeare. Mankind will in time probably forget or deny that there was ever anything in the life of the world answering to Shakespeare's royalty in Perdita, or to his princeliness in Arviragus and Guiderius, or to his kingliness in Lear, or to his glory in Cleopatra. It may be so, as to the world; there may have been nothing thus answerable. But there was Shakespeare.

What this Textopian page supports

Uperfluous Kings is listed on Textopian as an essay by Alice Meynell, dated 1922 CE.

This source record anchors work identity, reading entry points, and catalog context for checking claims about the work.

Good citation fit

Genres

Tags

poetry · religious poetry · Christianity · Nativity · Three Wise Men · Biblical themes · Christmas · spiritual reflection · devotion · faith · worship · symbolism

More by Alice Meynell