Performed before queen Elizabeth I in 1584 George Peele’s Arraignment of Paris is very much a play of its time. It was its intention to amuse, entertain and beguile the classically educated audience of courtiers that surrounded the queen. The fact that it reads so well today is in my opinion the result of Peele’s excellent writing in verse and prose and his ability to deliver a play that for the most part the reader can imagine being performed. It has songs, dances, witty repartee and rhetorical arguments that keep on the right side of providing entertainment. If the reader is looking for character development, psychological insights or a dramatic storyline then he will not find it here, but this was not the aim of the author, he was concerned with delighting his audience with this masque like production, he was looking at delivering a spectacle.

George Peele (1556-1596) was one of a number of university educated men making their living primarily by their pen in Elizabethan England. Peele was a translator, poet, songwriter and dramatist and The Arraignment of Paris is his earliest attributed play. Along with other playwrights at the time: Greene, Nashe, and Marlowe he had a reputation for riotous living, but this should not detract from his skill as a wordsmith. The play is a court entertainment: a pastoral that includes mythical Roman Gods; it draws down from the knowledge base of its audience, who would be comfortable with the subject matter. Peele plays with genres here by making the mythological figure of Paris appear in a pastoral setting as a shepherd singer, but first Three Roman goddesses; Pallas representing wisdom, Juno representing majesty and Venus representing love, descend to earth and are welcomed with gifts. Paris and his lover Oenone walk in the pastoral paradise, sit under a tree and tell stories and sing and play together. The three goddesses also tell stories but are interrupted by a strange storm and from a lightning strike a golden apple descends to earth and a note saying that it belongs to the fairest. They each claim the apple but cannot decide who shall have it and so they agree that the next person they meet should be the judge. Enter the shepherd swain Paris; Juno promises Paris riches and a golden tree magically arises, Pallas shows the power of martial arts with a procession of armoured men, but Venus the goddess of love promises Paris success in love and shows him Helen surrounded by four cupids and Helen sings to Paris. Paris gives the golden apple to Venus.

A change of scene in act III but still very much in a pastoral setting, indeed Peele cleverly refers to Edmund Spenser’s Shepherds Calendar published five years earlier by introducing characters from that play: Colin, Hobbinol, Diggon, and Thenot who play and sing about constancy in love. The jilted Oenone appears to sing a lovers complaint and the God Mercury arrives to sing a duet which soon becomes a singing competition; a staple of pastoral poems dating back to Virgil. Mercury says that he will report Paris’ wrongdoing to Jove the father of the gods, meanwhile there is a funeral procession featuring Colin’s hearse. Mercury summons Paris and the goddesses to appear on trial before Jove and Paris with a flash of fore sight says:

“The angry heavens, for this fatal jar
name me the instrument of dire and deadly war”

Paris appears before the Gods and presents his case argued on logical rhetoric. A central theme to the play is the definition and moral validity of beauty and in Paris’ eloquent defence in front of the tribunal he says he should not be blamed because he was bewitched by the beauty of the goddess Venus. It is a well thought out and structured argument and provides a climax to the action of the play. In the second longest speech of the play Apollo’s diplomacy saves the day. Paris is acquitted, but there is still the problem of who should have the golden apple. Jove says that as the apple appeared near to Diana’s bower, she the goddess of chastity should decide. Diana refers to the nymph Eliza and speaks in glowing terms of the rule of Elizabeth of the kingdom of the English. In this final act Peele has high-jacked his own play to turn it into a panegyric to Queen Elizabeth who is presented with the golden apple. It must have produced a not unexpected moment of drama when the play was performed in front of the Queen. In view of all the pageantry that had gone before it would have been the icing on the cake.

It is a play that largely avoids the long speeches that were a feature of the morality influenced plays of the then recent past. It was written and played as a spectacle with plenty of images to delight the audience, who would be expected to appreciate the pastoral setting, the mythological figures, the logical arguments and of course Paris role in the Trojan Wars. The play features rhyming verse, blank verse and snatches of prose and while the modern reader may not be able to envisage the scene before the queen and all the pageantry, song and dance, he can enjoy Peele’s poetry. I enjoyed reading this play which I think is one of the better examples of the spectacles presented for the queen and so 4 stars ( )