The two noble kinsmen, p.6
The Two Noble Kinsmen, page 6
One should also consider an alternative explanation for some of the play’s inconsistencies, particularly in Act 4. Gary Taylor and McDonald P. Jackson suggest that the anomalous stage direction in 4.3.39, which tells the Daughter to exit without marking a reentry for her, might result from the cutting in the theatre of the lines which follow, since they are directed against lecherous courtiers, a subject on which the Master of the Revels was ‘particularly sensitive’ at this period (TxC, 559). A further possibility is that the relationship of Theseus and Pirithous, which seems an important part of the play in Act 1 but is never developed after this point, was sacrificed when it was perceived as a potential reference to James I and his favourite Robert Carr, who became Earl of Somerset in 1613. Favourites were a touchy subject in general. In 1608 the child actors of the Blackfriars had provoked the King to a short-lived ban on all theatrical performances in London by depicting him ‘with all his favourites’ (Clare, 139–40). The 1609 quarto of Pericles, another work in which censorship has been suspected (TxC, 559), is at its most garbled at the points where it deals with Helicanus, whom Pericles deputizes to act for him in his absence, and his confidant Escanes, who arouses the jealousy of the other courtiers (Per 2.4.17–20). Cuts in the role of Pirithous might have been made, if not in 1613, then at a later date – either for a 1619–20 revival or for one in 1625 – given the unpopularity of Carr’s successor, the Duke of Buckingham. It has been suggested (by W. Griffin, quoted in Clare, 200) that this unpopularity explains the disappearance in the 1623 Shakespeare folio of an exchange, found in all the earlier quartos, where Richard III tells an earlier Duke of Buckingham, ‘I am not in the giving vein today’ (R3 4.2.116).
This stress on the contingent element in the collaborative process may give the impression that I see The Two Noble Kinsmen as a confused and contradictory work. But anyone with experience of the theatre will know that contingency is an inevitable part of the process by which a script becomes a play. The actors and audience of a television series perceive it as a coherent whole despite the inconsistencies that result from its being written over a long period of time and by several different authors. Actors and audiences of this play, similarly, have little difficulty in ignoring its apparent contradictions. To take only one of the examples mentioned above, actors who wish to make Emilia’s relationship with the disguised Arcite more consistent can either play her more warmly in 2.5 or suggest that he is deluded in 3.1. That is why, having ‘deconstructed’ the play in this section, I have chosen not to do so in the text or the notes, which, as far as possible, will refrain from identifying the assumed author of each scene.
THE DATE
The combination of a number of facts, none of them absolutely conclusive on its own, makes it possible to arrive at a fairly precise dating of The Two Noble Kinsmen. One is the relationship (first pointed out by Littledale) between the morris dance in 3.5 and the second antimasque dance from Beaumont’s Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn (Appendix 3), which has the same mixture of characters described in the Schoolmaster’s speech in 3.5.121–32. Performed as part of the celebrations of the wedding of James I’s daughter Elizabeth and Frederick, Prince Palatine, on 20 February 1613, this dance was encored by its distinguished audience. Beaumont’s published description of the masque says that its novelty was one reason for its success, so it cannot have been seen already on the public stage. The other limiting factor is the reference to the name of Palamon ‘out of the play’ in Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (6: 4.3.70), the first performance of which took place on 31 October 1614. Between these two dates came another event that would certainly have affected any production by the King’s Men: the burning of the Globe Theatre on 29 June 1613. The reference to ‘our losses’ in the last line of the play’s Prologue is generally taken – rightly, I think – to mean this fire. It is true that, as has often been pointed out, the Prologue need not date from the first performances of the play, and the King’s Men suffered other ‘losses’ throughout the period (Shakespeare died in 1616, Burbage in 1619, Fletcher in 1625). But the light tone of the Prologue is more appropriate to a discussion of money worries, which by convention are comic to everyone except the person who has them; the Epilogue goes on to claim that a hiss will ‘kill our market’.
It may be possible to narrow the period still further. John Webster’s preface to The White Devil (1612) complains that his play was presented ‘in so dull a time of Winter’ that it lacked ‘a full and vnderstanding Auditory’. The Prologue of The Two Noble Kinsmen also refers to ‘dull time’ (31); perhaps, like The White Devil, it was premiered in winter.
CONTEXTS: PUBLIC
Nuptials and funerals
The winter of 1612–13 had been a period in which, as at the end of The Two Noble Kinsmen, a funeral was quickly followed by a marriage. The wedding of James I’s daughter Elizabeth had originally been planned for Epiphany, the end of the Christmas season, in 1613. Her bridegroom, Prince Frederick of Heidelberg, arrived from Germany in October 1612 and made his triumphal entry into the English court on 18 October. The popular Prince of Wales, Henry, became seriously ill shortly thereafter and his death on 6 November plunged the court into mourning. James I’s initial reaction was to announce that the marriage would be deferred until May (CSPV, 452, 458). But he was soon being urged to hasten it. Frederick wanted to return to his own country and its pressing political affairs; James’s own followers were conscious of the expense of entertaining their large retinue of visitors. Despite all these pleas, James publicly insisted (perhaps actually recalling Hamlet) that ‘mourning should be mourning, and marriage rejoicings rejoicings’ (CSPV, 474). In private, however, he himself had written to his ambassador in France as early as 14 December, proposing to replace Henry with his younger brother Charles in the ongoing negotiations for a marriage between the prince and a French princess (Akrigg, Letters, 328–30). At the end of January the Venetian ambassador reported that the king had agreed to Frederick’s request for a wedding on the last Sunday before Lent, St Valentine’s Day. Elizabeth was still wearing black on the day of her betrothal (Nichols, 513) and, though the court went out of mourning for the wedding itself, a portrait now in the National Portrait Gallery in London shows her with knots of black ribbon on her dress in memory of her brother. The numerous epithalamia made for the occasion rarely failed to rhyme nuptials with funerals.
It is likely that in their official capacity as King’s Men, the shareholders not only marched in the funeral procession of the Prince of Wales in 1612 but attended the ceremonies surrounding the wedding of his sister in 1613. After both Richard Proudfoot (1970) and Muriel Bradbrook (1971) had suggested a connection between the end of the play and the events of 1612–13, books on Prince Henry by Henry Williamson (1978) and Roy Strong (1986) aroused considerable interest in his possible role as inspiration for The Two Noble Kinsmen. Glynne Wickham’s controversial attempt to identify Emilia with Princess Elizabeth, torn between her love for her dead brother Henry Frederick (Arcite) and her fiancé Frederick Henry (Palamon), is far too schematic, but many scholars have felt that there must be some relation between the play and these public events. J. R. Mulryne suggests that the play’s subject-matter and imagery reflect the prince’s known interests in horses, armour and sailing. Others have queried whether Fletcher and Shakespeare would necessarily have admired the young man’s military ambitions. It has been argued that the dramatists were depicting the tension between the pacifist policy advocated by James I and the militant Protestantism represented by Prince Henry (Carney, 106–8), or even offering a critique of the military values espoused by the prince (Hadorn, 55). There may be some significance in their choice of title, since the two earlier plays based on Chaucer’s poem had been called Palamon and Arcite; the choice of the unusual title The Two Noble Kinsmen may have been intended to recall the short-lived friendship and brotherhood of the young English and German princes. ‘How like a golden dream you met and parted,’ wrote Campion in his Songs of Mourning for the prince (124).
If the royal funeral helps to account for the dark tone of the play’s ending, the royal wedding might seem an appropriate context for its first scene. But the jaunty opening of the Prologue – ‘New plays and maidenheads are near akin’ – and its comparison of a good play, which can be enjoyed more than once and still seem new, with a wife who still looks like a virgin even after her wedding night, would have been more appropriate to another wedding that took place later in 1613. On 25 September of that year, Frances Howard, Countess of Essex, was granted an annulment after a panel of two midwives and four matrons examined her and pronounced her still a virgin. When, on 26 December, she married James’s favourite, the Earl of Somerset, she wore her hair flowing as a sign of virginity. The widespread derision that greeted the annulment decision (see Lindley, 109–15) may explain the sceptical tone of the Doctor’s admission that, at eighteen, the Jailer’s Daughter ‘may be’ a virgin; Frances Howard was nineteen at this time.
Militant Protestantism
The image of the three queens who interrupt the wedding procession is theatrically striking; it may also have had a political resonance. Suffering countries are often depicted as women and countries with no lawful ruler as widows, as, for instance, in John Bale’s King Johan, where England is ‘a widow’. A common image for the United Provinces of the Spanish Netherlands was that of Belgia and her daughters: a famous and much-imitated engraving, first published in 1569 and reworked well into the seventeenth century, showed these allegorical figures kneeling and pleading with an enthroned Duke of Alva, the figurehead of oppressive Spanish Catholicism (Tanis & Horst, 51). The widowed Belgia reappears in Book 5 of Spenser’s Faerie Queene (10.7), and Heywood’s poem on the marriage of Princess Elizabeth in 1613 revived this image when he praised Frederick for his efforts on behalf of ‘Faire Belgia, and her seventeene daughters’, each of whom ‘in former times hath beene / A beauteous Lady, and a flourishing Queene’ (Heywood, C4v).
If militant Protestantism of this kind found expression even in celebratory verses on the 1613 wedding, this was partly because of the sense that the reformed religion was under threat. The assassination of Henry IV of France in 1610 at the hands of a Catholic fanatic had been much lamented by Protestants; the death in 1612 of his namesake, Henry Prince of Wales, was a second blow to the cause. It is significant that John Donne, himself a convert from Catholicism, responded to the Prince’s death with a poem beginning, ‘Look to me, Faith; and look to my Faith, GOD’. Similarly, in 1.2 of the play, there may be a deeper meaning in Palamon and Arcite’s fear of losing their faith and Palamon’s insistence that they can be saved by faith (see note on 1.2.46) even in the corrupt court of Creon.
Jokes inspired by the semi-forbidden subject of religious controversy, like Sir Toby’s drunken ‘Give me faith say I’ (TN 1.5.129), are not unusual in Shakespeare. Behind the apparently gratuitous references in The Two Noble Kinsmen may be the recent resurgence of that controversy, this time in the light of the new challenge from Arminianism – a Protestant movement considered by some to be as threatening as Catholicism itself. The views of Jacob Arminius had been known to, and even accepted by, some Cambridge scholars as early as the late 1590s (Tyacke, 29–38), but his books first became widely available in 1610, the year of the Remonstrance and Counter-Remonstrance in the Netherlands. They attempt to modify some of the harsher tenets of Calvinism, particularly its insistence that God had predestined the salvation and damnation of human beings before their birth and that they themselves were powerless to alter their fate. James I took a stand against the new doctrine as early as 1611, when he intervened to prevent the appointment of an Arminian as professor of theology at Leiden. In 1613 the visit to England of a well-known Arminian scholar, Hugo Grotius, had some success in modifying English attitudes (Harrison, 167–203). However, Nicholas Tyacke has shown that official belief, as reflected in sermons preached at Paul’s Cross, ‘the most public pulpit in the land’, was consistently Calvinist until 1628, with twenty-seven sermons of James’s reign giving the Calvinist view of predestination (253). Both the Huntingdon circle and their most admired literary model, Spenser, were associated with militant, though non-Puritan, Protestantism. Fletcher was clearly not as intransigent as his father, who had tried to convert the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots just before her execution, but he would later collaborate with Massinger in two topical plays dealing with the Netherlands: The Jeweller of Amsterdam, or, the Hague (c. 1616–19) and Sir John van Olden Barnevelt (1619). The first of these (which also involved Nathan Field) is lost, but the second is definitely anti-Arminian, though it appears to have become even more so as the result of official censorship. Since the authors of The Two Noble Kinsmen are generally careful to avoid obvious religious anachronisms (Naseeb Shaheen finds fewer biblical references than in any other play of the Shakespeare canon), the influence of this period of religious questioning can only be indirect. In any case, such concerns are already present in the source. Chaucer himself is claimed by the Protestant martyrologist John Foxe as an early sympathizer (2.639) and Thomas Speght’s 1602 edition, in the headnote to Troilus and Criseyde, draws attention to the fact that ‘Chaucer liberally treateth of the divine purveiaunce’ (Speght, 143v).
If The Two Noble Kinsmen was revived in 1619–20 the call to arms in 1.1 might well have resonated still more than in 1613, since there now seemed a strong possibility that the country might go to war on behalf of Elizabeth and Frederick, whose acceptance of the crown of Bohemia had precipitated what would later be called the Thirty Years’ War. Though thwarted by James I’s non-interventionist policies, the prospect of a European war was still very much in the air early in Charles I’s reign when the play was next being considered for performance. The opening marriage procession would have been as appropriate for 1625–6 as for 1613, since 1625 was the year of James I’s death and Charles I’s marriage with Henrietta Maria of France. By the time of the play’s publication in 1634 Elizabeth was herself a widowed queen, Frederick having died in 1631.
CONTEXTS: LITERARY
The Theban story before Chaucer
The history of Thebes is mythical. Its walls rose to the sound of music; its people sprang up from the ground when its founder Cadmus sowed the teeth of a dragon. The dragon-offspring immediately began killing each other, and fratricide and incest continued to dominate Theban history to the point where it became an archetype of the evil city. The story of Oedipus, which combines virtually all the great tragic themes, was the gods’ revenge on the whole house of Cadmus. When Oedipus went into exile, his sons Eteocles and Polynices agreed to share the rule of the kingdom by turns. At the end of the first year, seized by the lust for power, Eteocles refused to give up the throne. Polynices made war on him, at the head of an army from Argos. At the siege of Thebes, he and all his allies were killed, as was Eteocles. Oedipus’ brother Creon succeeded.
All three of the great Greek dramatists wrote plays on the Theban story, usually in order to contrast Creon’s tyranny with the enlightened Athenian civilization embodied, as often in Greek drama, in the figure of Theseus. The structure of Euripides’ Suppliants, in particular, is remarkably close to Act 1 of The Two Noble Kinsmen. A chorus of women, supported by Theseus’ mother Aethra, plead with Theseus to intercede for them with Creon. He at first refuses, then gives in to his mother’s persuasions. A debate between Theseus and Creon’s herald follows, corresponding to the defiance that has apparently taken place between the first and second scenes of The Two Noble Kinsmen, and after the Chorus has called on the gods for help a messenger enters to relate the victory over Thebes. In the final scene, the women lament their husbands; then their sons enter in procession carrying the urns with their fathers’ ashes.
Euripides’ Phoenissae, which deals with the mutual defiance of the brothers before the attack on Thebes, was, as Emrys Jones points out, one of his most popular plays in the Renaissance (Jones, Origins, 92). Seneca adapted it and The Suppliants, with other Greek plays, to make an even better known Latin tragedy, adding an episode which, although apparently unfinished, had a powerful influence on the Renaissance imagination: Jocasta, mother of the warring brothers, kneels to them and begs them to spare their country. Coriolanus is the most striking development of this motif. The most influential classical retelling of the legend was Statius’ epic, the Thebaid, which develops both the rivalry between the brothers and the relationship between the exiled Polynices and the exiled Tydeus, who fight at their first meeting and then become sworn friends. (This friendship becomes still more important in the medieval version called the Roman de Thèbes.) Statius’ gruesome depiction of war, and his evident compassion for the sufferings of the weak, gave rise to a belief (expressed by Dante in Purgatorio 22.90) that he had been a secret Christian. Chaucer mentions him in the same breath as Virgil, Ovid, Homer and Lucan (Troilus and Criseyde, 5.1792).
Boccaccio’s Teseida, probably completed in the late 1340s, turned the Thebaid into romance by transforming the war of two brothers over a city into the fight of two cousins over a woman. The great war epics of the past had made cities and women interchangeable – Helen causes the fall of Troy; Lavinia will eventually give her name to the first city built by Aeneas. Just as Statius had imitated Virgil, so (it has been argued) Boccaccio followed his example in an episode-by-episode imitation of Statius (Anderson, 50). Both Palemone and Arcita recognize that they are reliving the story of Eteocles and Polynices (see, for instance, Teseida, 5.13). Arcita’s exile and wanderings, which follow his release from prison, make him a counterpart of the exiled Polynices. When Polynices is thrown from his chariot during a competition halfway through the poem, Statius exclaims that if Polynices had indeed died at this point he would have been remembered as a hero, not a traitor to his country (108–12). As David Anderson points out, this ‘alternate ending’ may have suggested the fate of Arcita in Boccaccio’s poem (72, 107).
