“The King His Play”: Charles II, Christina of Sweden, and Dryden’s Secret Love, or The Maiden Queen Candy Schille Today only a few specialists may know of John Dryden’s Secret Love, or the Maiden Queen (1667), but during the Restoration it pleased readers and playgoers mightily.1 Samuel Pepys sat through it four times during its first season, twice during its second, and twice again during its third; he thought it “one of the best plays I ever saw.” Between March 1667 and January 1668 King Charles II watched it five times, twice at court (Loftis, “Commentary” 331), and, Dryden proudly tells us in his Preface, “grac’d it with the Title of His Play” (115). It was first printed in 1688, with two editions the following year and three more before 1700 (Loftis, “Textual Notes” 420). For modern scholars, the interest of the play has been primarily in the comic plot—in its importance to the genesis of the “gay couple” and tragicomic patterns.2 Nell Gwynn, playing Florimell, caught Charles II’s eye, and by 1669, she had supplanted his long-time favorite, Barbara Castlemaigne, the “uncrowned queen of England”(Novak 381–82; Fraser 102). My focus here, however, is not on the comic but rather the serious plot of the tragicomedy and how a play about a “Maiden Queen” might have drawn the recently restored king to claim the play as his own. I will argue that this play, concerned with a monarch lacking an (legitimate, in Charles’s case) heir, provides for a peaceful resolution to a looming succession crisis, yet still keeps issues of fitness to rule—issues, that is, of “title” and/or “merit”—very much alive. In this, more broadly, Secret Love is an early example of Dryden’s habit of qualification even in plays that purport to underwrite an orthodoxy or promote a profitable party line. In effect, his dramatic [End Page 41] works usually (and I believe intentionally) evidence a sort of internal deconstructive impulse. Secret Love offers a particularly cogent handling of the issues of monarchical responsibility and prerogative. In brief, the unnamed virgin queen of the title loves a commoner, Philocles, whom she has promoted as her court favorite, but she has jealously guarded her right to rule independently of a husband. Philocles loves another woman of royal blood, but loves as much, or more, the idea of becoming king. Ultimately the queen’s struggle between her desire to marry beneath her and her desire to maintain her primacy as ruler results in a baroque settlement in which she will live unmarried and the crown will in time devolve upon the commoner’s head. In part, the play is an early expression of anxieties about succession, anxieties that would later deepen as Charles II remained without legitimate offspring to inherit the throne. Two of the most recent and most substantive handlings of the contemporary issues at stake have emphasized another aspect of the cultural work that Secret Love may have been intended to do: that is, not merely to express, but also to allay anxieties caused by the recent restoration—and the potential abuses--of monarchical power. Though he mentions Secret Love only briefly, Duane Coltharp has argued that in general Dryden “attempt[s] to appropriate revolutionary energies for royal uses” (417).3 Among these “revolutionary energies” is sexual desire, which becomes an “imperative of generational succession” (423).Stephen P. Flores, dealing specifically with Secret Love, makes explicit what Coltharp’s argument only permits: a broad analogy between the play’s passionate, absolutist queen and Charles II. In Flores’ reading, what audiences may have perceived as contemporary threats to political stability are contained by their embodiment in a woman; assumptions and traditions concerning gender allow these threats to be diffused or dismissed (180–88). Although Flores’ and Coltharp’s readings strongly suggest that Dryden’s ending produces in audiences some sort of affective repose friendly to royal interests, the resolution, such as it is, to Secret Love is manifestly unsettled and unsettling. None of the characters’ private desires are satisfied, and the immediate public solution to the succession crisis ensures neither the successive legitimacy nor the personal...