Mixing Genres in George Peele’s David and Bethsabe

Summary

Rather than asking, What kind of thing is this text? we should be asking something like, What kind of world is brought into being here—what thematic topoi, with what modal inflection, from what situation of address, and structured by what formal categories? Who represents this world to whom, under what circumstances and to what ends?

—John Frow

Genres are not to be mixed.

I will not mix genres.

I repeat: genres are not to be mixed. I will not mix them.

—Jacques Derrida

I want to advance three interconnected claims: 1) George Peele’s play about David is intentional about mixing genres, despite its reputation for disregarding conventional genres altogether; 2) most writers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries make David an example that can be used for various personal and political ends; 3) by mixing genres, Peele’s play on David complicates the process of making David an example. All of this matters because Peele’s play has been undervalued and the period’s use of David too simply understood. The implications are dramatic, poetic, religious, and political.

Peele’s David and Bethsabe—the full title is The Love of David and Faire Bethsabe, with the Tragedie of Absolon—stages events from David’s adultery with Bethsabe (Bathsheba) through the death of his rebellious son Absalom. The play was entered into the Stationers Register in 1594, and a quarto of the play was printed in London in 1599. The plot of the play fairly faithfully follows the Hebrew Bible’s second book of Samuel, chapters 11 through 19, but critics have often found the play confusing and incoherent. The main cause of confusion seems to be what kind of play to call it. It has been called a “history play” (Weil), a “biblical drama” (Connolly), a “divine play” (Campbell), a “biblical chronicle history” (Brawley, Ashley), a “biblical tragedy” (Roston), and a “divine comedy” (Ewbank). Granted, it’s not unusual for Elizabethan plays to work in more than one genre at once. Philip Sidney in his Defense of Poesy complains of “mongrell Tragicomedie[s]”—plays that are “neither right tragedies, nor right comedies, mingling kings and clowns.” And Polonius in Hamlet promotes the players as “the best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical-historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragicalcomical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited.