The two noble kinsmen, p.1
The Two Noble Kinsmen, page 1
T H E A R D E N S H A K E S P E A R E
ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL edited by G.K. Hunter*
ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA edited by John Wilders
AS YOU LIKE IT edited by Juliet Dusinberre
THE COMEDY OF ERRORS edited by R.A. Foakes*
CORIOLANUS edited by Peter Holland
CYMBELINE edited by J.M. Nosworthy*
DOUBLE FALSEHOOD edited by Brean Hammond
HAMLET edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor
JULIUS CAESAR edited by David Daniell
KING HENRY IV PART 1 edited by David Scott Kastan
KING HENRY IV PART 2 edited by A.R. Humphreys*
KING HENRY V edited by T.W. Craik
KING HENRY VI PART 1 edited by Edward Burns
KING HENRY VI PART 2 edited by Ronald Knowles
KING HENRY VI PART 3 edited by John D. Cox and Eric Rasmussen
KING HENRY VIII edited by Gordon McMullan
KING JOHN edited by E.A.J. Honigmann*
KING LEAR edited by R.A. Foakes
KING RICHARD II edited by Charles Forker
KING RICHARD III edited by James R. Siemon
LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST edited by H.R. Woudhuysen
MACBETH edited by Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason
MEASURE FOR MEASURE edited by J.W. Lever*
THE MERCHANT OF VENICE edited by John Drakakis
THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR edited by Giorgio Melchiori
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM edited by Harold F. Brooks*
MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING edited by Claire McEachern
OTHELLO edited by E.A.J. Honigmann
PERICLES edited by Suzanne Gossett
SHAKESPEARE’S POEMS edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones and H.R. Woudhuysen
ROMEO AND JULIET edited by René Weis
SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones
THE TAMING OF THE SHREW edited by Barbara Hodgdon
THE TEMPEST, Revised edited by Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan
TIMON OF ATHENS edited by Anthony B. Dawson and Gretchen E. Minton
TITUS ANDRONICUS edited by Jonathan Bate
TROILUS AND CRESSIDA edited by David Bevington
TWELFTH NIGHT edited by Keir Elam
THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA edited by William C. Carroll
THE TWO NOBLE KINSMEN, Revised edited by Lois Potter
THE WINTER’S TALE edited by John Pitcher
* Second series
The Editor
Lois Potter is Ned B. Allen Professor Emerita of the University of Delaware and Visiting Professor at King’s College, London. She has also taught at the Universities of Aberdeen and Leicester and been a visiting professor at Paris III/Sorbonne Nouvelle and Tsuda College, Tokyo. Her publications include A Preface to Milton (1971, 2nd ed. 1986), performance histories of Twelfth Night (1985) and Othello (2002), and a study of English Civil War literature, Secret Rites and Secret Writing (1989). She edited two volumes (I and IV) of the Revels History of Drama in English (1981, 1984), and contributed to volumes II and IV, also editing two essay collections on Shakespeare and two on Robin Hood. Her most recent publication is The Life of William Shakespeare (2012). She frequently reviews theatrical productions.
I should like to dedicate this edition to my own noble kinsmen: my brother, G. R. Potter, and his daughters Lauren and Alayne.
CONTENTS
General editors’ preface
Preface
INTRODUCTION
The genre: tragicomedy
The collaborators
The authorship question
Collaboration and censorship
The date
Contexts: public
Contexts: literary
Contexts: theatrical
The play’s afterlife
Text
ADDITIONS AND RECONSIDERATIONS
THE TWO NOBLE KINSMEN
[PROLOGUE]
[1.1]
[1.2]
[1.3]
[1.4]
[1.5]
[2.1]
[2.2]
[2.3]
[2.4]
[2.5]
[2.6]
[3.1]
[3.2]
[3.3]
[3.4]
[3.5]
[3.6]
[4.1]
[4.3]
[5.1]
[5.2]
[5.3]
[5.4]
[EPILOGUE]
Appendices
1. John Fletcher, ‘Upon An Honest Man’s Fortune’
2. The portrait – frontispiece of John Fletcher, 1647
3. Francis Beaumont, The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn
4. Beaumont’s 1613 Masque and The Two Noble Kinsmen
5. The morris
6. The music
Abbreviations and references
Commentary Notes and Textual Notes
GENERAL EDITORS’ PREFACE
The earliest volume in the first Arden series, Edward Dowden’s Hamlet, was published in 1899. Since then the Arden Shakespeare has been widely acknowledged as the pre-eminent Shakespeare edition, valued by scholars, students, actors and ‘the great variety of readers’ alike for its clearly presented and reliable texts, its full annotation and its richly informative introductions.
In the third Arden series we seek to maintain these well-established qualities and general characteristics, preserving our predecessors’ commitment to presenting the play as it has been shaped in history. Each volume necessarily has its own particular emphasis which reflects the unique possibilities and problems posed by the work in question, and the series as a whole seeks to maintain the highest standards of scholarship, combined with attractive and accessible presentation.
Newly edited from the original documents, texts are presented in fully modernized form, with a textual apparatus that records all substantial divergences from those early printings. The notes and introductions focus on the conditions and possibilities of meaning that editors, critics and performers (on stage and screen) have discovered in the play. While building upon the rich history of scholarly activity that has long shaped our understanding of Shakespeare’s works, this third series of the Arden Shakespeare is enlivened by a new generation’s encounter with Shakespeare.
THE TEXT
On each page of the play itself, readers will find a passage of text supported by commentary and textual notes. Act and scene divisions (seldom present in the early editions and often the product of eighteenth-century or later scholarship) have been retained for ease of reference, but have been given less prominence than in previous series. Editorial indications of location of the action have been removed to the textual notes or commentary.
In the text itself, elided forms in the early texts are spelt out in full in verse lines wherever they indicate a usual late twentieth-century pronunciation that requires no special indication and wherever they occur in prose (except where they indicate non-standard pronunciation). In verse speeches, marks of elision are retained where they are necessary guides to the scansion and pronunciation of the line. Final -ed in past tense and participial forms of verbs is always printed as -ed, without accent, never as -’d, but wherever the required pronunciation diverges from modern usage a note in the commentary draws attention to the fact. Where the final -ed should be given syllabic value contrary to modern usage, e.g.
Doth Silvia know that I am banished?
(TGV 3.1.214)
the note will take the form
214 banished banishèd
Conventional lineation of divided verse lines shared by two or more speakers has been reconsidered and sometimes rearranged. Except for the familiar Exit and Exeunt, Latin forms in stage directions and speech prefixes have been translated into English and the original Latin forms recorded in the textual notes.
COMMENTARY AND TEXTUAL NOTES
Notes in the commentary, for which a major source will be the Oxford English Dictionary, offer glossarial and other explication of verbal difficulties; they may also include discussion of points of interpretation and, in relevant cases, substantial extracts from Shakespeare’s source material. Editors will not usually offer glossarial notes for words adequately defined in the latest edition of The Concise Oxford Dictionary or Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, but in cases of doubt they will include notes. Attention, however, will be drawn to places where more than one likely interpretation can be proposed and to significant verbal and syntactic complexity. Notes preceded by * discuss editorial emendations or variant readings.
Headnotes to acts or scenes discuss, where appropriate, questions of scene location, the play’s treatment of source materials, and major difficulties of staging. The list of roles (so headed to emphasize the play’s status as a text for performance) is also considered in the commentary notes. These may include comment on plausible patterns of casting with the resources of an Elizabethan or Jacobean acting company and also on any variation in the description of roles in their speech prefixes in the early editions.
The textual notes are designed to let readers know when the edited text diverges from the early edition(s) or manuscript sources on which it is based. Wherever this happens the note will record the rejected reading of the early edition(s) or manuscript, in original spelling, and the source of the reading adopted in this edition. Other forms from the early edition(s) or manuscript recorded in these notes will include some spellings of particular interest or significance and ori
Conventions used in these textual notes include the following. The solidus / is used, in notes quoting verse or discussing verse lining, to indicate line endings. Distinctive spellings of the base text follow the square bracket without indication of source and are enclosed in italic brackets. Names enclosed in italic brackets indicate originators of conjectural emendations when these did not originate in an edition of the text, or when the named edition records a conjecture not accepted into its text. Stage directions (SDs) are referred to by the number of the line within or immediately after which they are placed. Line numbers with a decimal point relate to centred entry SDs not falling within a verse line and to SDs more than one line long, with the number after the point indicating the line within the SD: e.g. 78.4 refers to the fourth line of the SD following line 78. Lines of SDs at the start of a scene are numbered 0.1, 0.2, etc. Where only a line number precedes a square bracket, e.g. 128], the note relates to the whole line; where SD is added to the number, it relates to the whole of a SD within or immediately following the line. Speech prefixes (SPs) follow similar conventions, 203 SP] referring to the speaker’s name for line 203. Where a SP reference takes the form e.g. 38+ SP, it relates to all subsequent speeches assigned to that speaker in the scene in question.
Where, as with King Henry V, one of the early editions is a so-called ‘bad quarto’ (that is, a text either heavily adapted, or reconstructed from memory, or both), the divergences from the present edition are too great to be recorded in full in the notes. In these cases, with the exception of Hamlet, which prints an edited text of the quarto of 1603, the editions will include a reduced photographic facsimile of the ‘bad quarto’ in an appendix.
INTRODUCTION
Both the introduction and the commentary are designed to present the plays as texts for performance, and make appropriate reference to stage, film and television versions, as well as introducing the reader to the range of critical approaches to the plays. They discuss the history of the reception of the texts within the theatre and scholarship and beyond, investigating the interdependency of the literary text and the surrounding ‘cultural text’ both at the time of the original production of Shakespeare’s works and during their long and rich afterlife.
PREFACE
There are advantages to editing a non-canonical work by a canonical author. Directors and critics of The Two Noble Kinsmen, like those who edit it, tend to be enthusiasts: not only do they produce work of generally high quality, they are eager to discuss it and generous in communicating their ideas. So I have been indebted to many people during my preparation of this edition, probably even more than those whose names appear below.
When I first began to edit this play, I assumed, with some regret, that it would have almost no performance history. In fact, it turned out to have more than I had imagined and it had even more by the time I had finished. I have benefited enormously from talking to those who have been involved with the play in the theatre: Henk Gras sent me a video of the Utrecht production and supplemented it with his explanatory notes; Hugh Richmond let me see the video of his UC Berkeley production and has been consistently helpful in many ways. Julian Lopez-Morillas supplied me with much useful information about his 1985 production of the play for the Berkeley Shakespeare Festival and helped me get photographs of it. I am especially grateful to Nagle Jackson for permission to attend rehearsals of his Oregon Shakespeare Festival production in the summer of 1994, to those members of his cast who talked with me about their experience of acting in the play, to Hilary Tate and the offices of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival for facilitating my work there, and to Daniel Stephens, the production’s choreographer, for some interesting material on the morris dance. For information on other productions, I am indebted to Edward Burns (who directed the play at the University of Liverpool), François Laroque (who told me about the one at Courneuve), Peter Meredith (who sent me a programme of one at Oxford), William Taylor and Masako Maekawa (who supplied me with information about a Japanese production of the play).
Though I have tried to make this a theatrically orientated edition, I also wanted it to be an old-fashioned scholarly one, erring on the side of completeness, even pedantry, rather than omission. For making it possible for me to give this kind of treatment to a play normally seen as almost two-dimensional, I am grateful to the Folger and Huntington Libraries, especially to Georgianna Ziegler and Jean Miller at the Folger Shakespeare Library, to Niky Rathbone at the Birmingham Shakespeare Library, and to all those institutions and individuals who have given me permission to reproduce illustrations. Others who have kindly shown me published and unpublished material, or just talked or written to me about the play and its context, are Noel Blincoe, Roy T. Erickson, Barbara Everett, Jay Halio, Jonathan Hope, James Knowles, Gordon McMullan, Barbara Mowat, Jeanne A. Roberts, Eric Sams, Grant Smith, Eugene Waith and Paul Werstine.
Some have done even more: Richard Abrams and T. W. Craik have commented extensively on parts of the typescript (the occasional appearance of their initials in the commentary can indicate only part of my indebtedness to them). Professor Naseeb Shaheen sent me the invaluable list of biblical references in The Two Noble Kinsmen that will appear in his forthcoming volume on biblical references in Shakespeare’s final plays, to be published by the University of Delaware Press.
Little of the introduction, in its final form, is based on previous lectures or publications, but I have been fortunate in having many opportunities to talk about the play: at conferences on ‘The Politics of Tragicomedy’ (Jonathan Hope and Gordon McMullan, Wadham College, Oxford, in 1989); ‘The Show Within’ (François Laroque, Montpellier, 1990); and ‘Shakespeare’s Last Plays’ (Hugh Richmond and Alan Armstrong, University of Southern Oregon, 1994); and in other talks at the Stratford Summer School (1986); the Folger Shakespeare Library (1990); the Graduate Renaissance Seminar (Oxford, 1991); Charles University, Prague (1994); and the Harvard Seminar in Literary and Cultural Studies (1994). Teaching a seminar on ‘Drama in Context: 1613 as a Test Case’ at the Folger Shakespeare Library (1990) provided the opportunity to explore and discuss the play’s background with an excellent group. An exchange visit to Paris III/Sorbonne Nouvelle in 1995 gave me not only the time to finish work on this edition but the opportunity to participate in ongoing research projects on courtesy (Dominique Goy-Blanquet and Jacques d’Arras, of the University of Amiens and Paris VII) and friendship (Richard Marienstras of Paris VII).
I owe particular thanks to my excellent research assistants at the University of Delaware, Pamela Vasile, Mark Netzloff and Rebecca Jaroff, who saw the project through from the earliest stages (Ms Vasile) to the checking of references (Mr – now Dr – Netzloff did much to improve its accuracy and clarity of detail) and the proofreading and indexing (in which Ms Jaroff’s meticulous and intelligent work was beyond praise).
The suggestions of the two Arden general editors most concerned with this project have been unfailingly excellent. Richard Proudfoot very kindly made available his own extensive materials collected for a projected edition of Shakespeare Apocrypha, a category to which the play is no longer considered to belong. Their value will be apparent from the frequent occurrence of his initials in my notes. Ann Thompson’s initials should occur more often than they do, since many of my notes were written in response to her penetrating questions, which ensured that no idea or phrase went unexamined.
Alison Kelly’s copy-editing was exemplary. The Routledge proofreader, Roger Fallon, saved me from several errors. Like all Arden editors, I owe a great debt to Jane Armstrong. I am also grateful to Penny Wheeler and Belinda Dearbergh of Routledge and to Jessica Hodge of Nelson.
