ABSTRACT
Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, Marston's The Malcontent and Middleton's The Phoenix are often presented as the ultimate expressions of disguised ruler drama. From this perspective, Duke Vincentio, Duke Altofronto and the Prince/Phoenix are archetypal disguised rulers, written specifically for a Jacobean playgoing audience. As playwrights, Shakespeare, Marston and Middleton thus become the principal exponents of very overt political commentary on the nation's new Scottish monarch. This argument results in an occasionalist focus on James's accession as the sole catalyst for subsequent disguised ruler play activity. In Shakespeare's Q1 I Henry IV, the earliest version of the play published in 1598, Poins plots with Prince Hal to trick the roguish Falstaff/Oldcastle as the knight robs travellers at Gadshill. This incidental disguise episode in a Shakespeare 'Chronicle History' is a reenactment of a similar robbery in the anonymous Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth.
