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To the modern reader [says Professor Saintsbury] Gorboduc is scarcely inviting, but that is not a condition of its attractiveness to its own contemporaries. [It] is of the most painful regularity; and the scrupulosity with which each of the rival princes is provided with a counsellor and a parasite to himself, and the other parts are allotted with similar fairness, reaches such a point that it is rather surprising that Gorboduc was not provided with two queens—a good and a bad. But even these faults are perhaps less trying to the modern reader than the inchoate and unpolished condition of the metre in the choruses, and indeed in the blank verse dialogue. Here and there there are signs of the stateliness and poetical imagery of the Induction, but for the most part the decasyllables stop dead at their close and begin afresh at their beginning with a staccato movement and a dull monotony of cadence which is inexpressibly tedious.

Professor Saintsbury rightly points out that the dullness of Gorboduc to our ideas is not a criterion of the effect it produced on readers of its own day. Sir Philip Sidney, for example, while excepting it from the particular charges he brings against all other English tragedies and comedies, and granting that “it is full of stately speeches and well-sounding phrases, climbing to the height of Seneca his style, and as full of notable morality, which it doth most delightfully teach, and so obtain the very end of poesy,” finds fault with it in an unexpected quarter, namely, that it fails in two unities, of time and place, so that the modern criticism of its “painful regularity” was far from occurring to a mind intent upon a yet more rigorous form.