Ben Jonson’s reaction seems to have been similar to Parrot’s. He had been on the Continent, as tutor to Sir Walter Raleigh’s son, during the events of 1612 and early 1613, but seems to have begun writing Bartholomew Fair shortly after his return in June 1613; some friends heard him read aloud from the scene of the puppets in June or July that year, at which time it was taken primarily as a satire on Inigo Jones (Riggs, 193). In its present, probably revised, form, the play’s final scene may well parody The Two Noble Kinsmen in its ridiculous puppets, Damon and Pythias, who share a single ‘drab’ between them and constantly fight and make up. Jonson may have been interested in the play because of its Chaucerian source: he owned and annotated a copy of the 1602 Chaucer (now at the Folger Shakespeare Library). It has been suggested (Chambers, 3.314) that the ‘two faithful friends o’ the Bankside’ (6: 5.3.9–10) parody not only Palamon and Arcite but also Beaumont and Fletcher and their shared ‘wench’. However, the satire could equally apply to a Shakespeare and Fletcher collaboration, or indeed to the triangulated situation depicted in Shakespeare’s sonnets, first published in 1609. As Clements points out (4–5), the parody extends to the main plot of Jonson’s play: Grace Welborn, stopping the fight between Winwife and Quarlous, points out to them the absurdity of their situation. Echoing Theseus’ words to Emilia, ‘They cannot both enjoy you’ (3.6.274), she declares, ‘If you both love me, as you pretend, your own reason will tell you but one can enjoy me’ (6: 4.3.7–8). Refusing to choose between two men about whom she knows nothing, she devises a comic variation on fate: each of them is to write a name on a piece of paper and she will then ask the next passer-by to choose between them. The successful lover, Winwife, chooses the name Palemon (sic), which he says he is taking ‘out of the play’. There is no doubt that he means The Two Noble Kinsmen; the only other dramatic character proposed is the Palaemon of Daniel’s Oxford play, The Queen’s Arcadia (1610), meaningless in the context of a public performance in 1614. Since Jonson was professedly fond of Fletcher (Jonson, 1.137), the parody need not be taken as anything more than further evidence that the play had aroused interest and, perhaps, controversy.

  Jonson also seems to refer to the play’s Prologue in an epithalamion sent to the Earl of Somerset on his wedding morning in December 1613. In 1614 he contributed commendatory verses to an anonymous poem called The Husband, a sequel and companion-piece to Thomas Overbury’s The Wife. Punning on the two titles, he concluded by assuring The Wife that her Husband was ‘such, as (if my word will waigh) / Shee need not blush vpon the Mariage-Day’ (Jonson, 8.386). The apparent echo of the Prologue’s line 4 may be mere coincidence, but it is possible that, like Parrot, Jonson was particularly struck by the play’s emphasis on sexuality.

  Evidence for the play’s stage history before the closing of the theatres in 1642 is literally fragmentary. A scrap of paper in the Revels Office (reprinted in Bentley, 1) indicates that it was one of a number of plays being considered for performance at court in 1619–20. A Red Bull play dated 1619–23 is called The Two Noble Ladies and the Converted Conjuror. Since the two noble ladies are not its main subject, it is possible that its title was chosen in response to the revival of the Blackfriars play. The occurrence of the names of two hired men (Tucke and Curtis) in stage directions at 4.2.70 and 5.3.0 of the quarto suggests that it had a further revival in 1625–6, the only period at which both these actors belonged to the King’s Men.

  The main influence of these revivals seems to have been felt (as Proudfoot has noted) by Fletcher’s friend and collaborator, Philip Massinger. For instance, one speech of his Believe as You List (1631) closely imitates two passages from Shakespearean scenes (1.3.6–8 and 1.2.7–12):

  though I knowe

  the Ocean of your apprehensions needes not

  the rivolet of my poore cautions…

  wee with ease

  swimme downe the streame, but to oppose the torrent

  is dangerous, and to goe more or lesse

  then wee ar warranted fatall.

  (5.1.161–3, 171–4)

  Massinger became the leading dramatist for the King’s Men after Fletcher’s death in 1625. Since Believe as You List was licensed in 1631, before the printing of The Two Noble Kinsmen, he must either have had access to a manuscript of the play or have remembered the lines from performance. Richard Brome’s The Lovesick Court (not printed until 1659) might derive from the printed text; as Charles Forker has pointed out (161–4), it offers an idealized version of the conflict and provides a happy ending.

  Publication history

  In publishing The Two Noble Kinsmen in 1634, with the title page’s curious stress on the gentility of both authors, John Waterson may have hoped to profit from the growing prestige and popularity of Shakespeare and Fletcher at the Caroline court. It was this prestige that, as I noted above, made the 1647 folio so important in a royalist context. The publisher Humphrey Moseley acquired the rights to the play in 1646, and entered it in the Stationers’ Register as ‘by John Flesher’. As he said later in the preface to the Beaumont and Fletcher folio, it had been his original intention to publish a volume of plays authored by Fletcher alone, and perhaps this entry was intended to prepare the way for the inclusion of The Two Noble Kinsmen in a ‘Fletcher’ volume. Instead, he brought out a folio of Comedies and Tragedies written by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, and left out all plays previously published, including the Kinsmen. Supposedly his motive was to keep down the price and size of the book, but he may have decided that obtaining the copyrights of published works was going to be too expensive.

  It was thus only in the second Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1679 that the play finally appeared, along with seventeen others new to the collection. Though the editors claimed to have received corrections and additions from someone who had seen the plays before the war, there is no evidence of such expert help with this play: it has merely had its spelling and punctuation slightly modernized, with the addition of a Dramatis Personae which omits some characters and incorrectly describes others. For instance, Hippolyta and Emilia are called ‘Sisters to Theseus’ and ‘three [not six] valiant Knights’ are listed immediately after the three queens, as if these characters had been intended to pair off. By now, the so-called ‘Beaumont and Fletcher canon’ included some fifty plays. The 1711 edition, a handsome set of illustrated volumes published by Tonson, used the 1679 folio as its copy text. Even the most obvious misprints (like ‘Clough hee’ in the opening song) remain uncorrected; the list of Dramatis Personae, now divided into male and female characters, is still inaccurate.

  Though Beaumont and Fletcher’s popularity declined after the early years of the Restoration, when they were said to be acted more often than Shakespeare or Jonson (Dryden, 1.69), their continuing importance can be seen from their subsequent editorial history. After the success of Lewis Theobald’s Shakespeare edition of 1734, he advertised for co-editors of a Beaumont and Fletcher edition. Two clergymen, Thomas Seward and Thomas Sympson, responded, and, since Theobald died in 1744, they did most of the editing. Seward had special responsibility for The Two Noble Kinsmen, but exchanged correspondence about it with his colleagues, so all three men are credited with readings in the edition which finally appeared in 1750. Theobald had a copy of the 1634 quarto, but Seward apparently did not receive it until he had spent an inordinate amount of time with the inaccurate 1711 edition, conjecturing readings which eventually turned out to have been in the quarto all along. Instead of keeping quiet about the difficulties of the editorial process, he openly discussed it in his notes in a way that exposed him to the ridicule of later readers. Yet he and his colleagues originated most of the important corrections to the quarto. His attempts at regularizing the metre by abbreviating, eliding and even rewriting the text, though often ridiculed later, merely took up where the 1679 editors had left off. His edition is certainly preferable to that of 1778, vaguely supervised by George Colman the elder, which ridicules Seward even while quoting and borrowing from him at length.

  Real scholarship begins with the nineteenth-century editors. Much of what Henry Weber did in 1812, such as his careful listing of locations for all the scenes, has been equally carefully undone by his successors. But he also provides a fair discussion of the authorship debate, scrupulously printing in full the views even of editors with whom he disagreed, such as George Steevens. Alexander Dyce provided still more material, particularly on the biographies of the authors, in his Beaumont and Fletcher edition (1843); Harold Littledale’s New Shakespere Society edition (1876) offered a survey of recent and contemporary opinion on the authorship question which is unlikely to be superseded. By this time, the play was appearing in collected editions of Shakespeare. Dyce re-edited it for his complete Shakespeare in 1866 and C. F. Tucker Brooke for the Shakespeare Apocrypha of 1908. By 1936, the date of G. L. Kittredge’s popular Complete Works, the play was silently accepted as part of the canon, though it still does not appear in all collections.

  Seward originally wanted his 1750 edition to be an expurgated one but was dissuaded by his publisher (Seward, 1.lvi). However, Charles Knight, the first to include the play in an edition of Shakespeare (c. 1839–41), did so only after cutting it. His footnote to 2.3, where he omitted lines 32–6, explains that Fletcher’s ‘grossnesses’, unlike Shakespeare’s, ‘are the result of impure thoughts, not the accidental reflection of loose manners’. W. W. Skeat (1875), W. J. Rolfe (1883) and W. R. Thayer (1890) also expurgated their texts. Their constant stress on the difference between Shakespeare and his contemporaries can be explained by the fact that they were not so much reading Shakespeare as recalling the expurgated Shakespeare they had seen performed in interpretations that emphasized pathos and nobility.

  Because of uneasiness about the indecency of Beaumont and Fletcher, they were often felt to be more fitly represented by extracts. Charles Lamb’s Specimens of the English Dramatic Poets Who Lived about the Time of Shakespeare, first published in 1808, became the model for most later volumes of this kind. Lamb, who thought that Fletcher and Massinger were ‘the only dramatic poets of that age who are entitled to be considered after Shakespeare’ (Lamb, xii), chose the first scene, from the entrance of the three queens to line 219; Emilia’s speech about her childhood friendship (1.3.49–82); and 2.2.1–110. A change in moral climate is at once apparent from the title page of Leigh Hunt’s 1855 collection, devoted exclusively to Beaumont and Fletcher but excluding ‘whatever is Morally Objectionable in their works’. ‘They were authors destined to survive only in fragments’, he contended (xv). His selections (for the most part, the same as Lamb’s) are captioned like poems to show how they are meant to be taken: 1.1. is called ‘Affliction Must be Served Before Joy’; 1.3 is ‘Girl’s Friendship’; he also gives the prayers to Mars and Diana (but not, of course, the one to Venus), and 5.4 beginning from Pirithous’ entrance. Exactly the same passages were selected by J. S. Fletcher for his anthology in 1887, which even borrowed most of Hunt’s titles, though for 2.2 he invented his own, the unlikely ‘Love’s Reconciliation’. Neither of these scrupulous editors had any qualms about anthologizing passages concerning intense same-sex friendships.

  Adaptation and performance before 1900

  The Prologue to The Two Noble Kinsmen became the basis for an anonymous ‘Prologue to a Reviv’d Play’ printed in Covent Garden Drollery for 1672, which begins, ‘Old Playes like Mistresses, long since enjoy’d / Long after please, whom they before had cloy’d’ (Thorn-Drury, 83). This Prologue can be dated to the early years of the Restoration by its topical reference to the Act of Uniformity (1662). It seems likely, then, that the ‘Reviv’d Play’ was The Rivals, an adaptation of The Two Noble Kinsmen first performed in 1664 and published anonymously, without prologue or epilogue, in 1668. Gerard Langbaine (547) records in 1691 that he had heard it ascribed to Sir William Davenant, playwright and manager of one of the two theatres established at the Restoration, and no one has ever questioned this attribution. Davenant’s theatrical career began in the late 1620s and he may well have seen the play performed. Presumably he thought of it as a success, like the others that he reworked in the same period: Macbeth, The Tempest and a conflation of Measure for Measure and Much Ado About Nothing. The adaptation is important (and is sometimes cited in the notes to this edition) because it shows how the text was understood by someone who may have drawn on recollections of its pre-war staging.

  Davenant obviously knew the classical background to Chaucer’s tale (his equivalent to Pirithous is called Polynices), but he deliberately detached the play both from The Knight’s Tale and from legend, changed the names of all the characters and set it in Arcadia. He was equally free with the plot, obviously sensing that The Two Noble Kinsmen, once its Chaucerian and classical sources are forgotten, has more potential for comedy than for tragedy. Cutting most of Act 1, he begins as the Arcadians return from war against the tyrant Harpacus, proud to have defeated him despite their reputation for loving only ‘Pastoral delights’. The opening scene has verbal echoes of Davenant’s recent adaptation of Macbeth (see Spencer, SQ), but Harpacus, like all stage tyrants of the early Restoration, is also a thinly disguised Cromwell and the Arcadians are idealized royalists. In the greatly reduced cast, Argon (Theseus) is elderly and unmarried, so his sister Heraclia (Emilia) is his only heir. The Jailer is elevated to a Provost (Davenant was probably recalling Measure for Measure) and his daughter acquires a name (Celania). The entertainment in the forest is very much extended; morris dancers appear – here introduced by a ‘country poet’ – and, in another part of the forest, there is ‘a hunt in music’. Celania does not take part in the dance but sings a number of songs, though not those in the original play. Her madness is caused not by sexual frustration but by Heraclia’s thoughtless decision to test her love by saying that she thinks Philander (Palamon) will be put to death – a lie that makes Celania take the decision to free him. Philander, at first afraid to place her and her father in danger by his escape, manages to talk himself into belief in the nobility of his motives, though, unlike Palamon, he shows uneasiness about hers: ‘I hope ‘tis pity, but I fear ‘tis love’ (Act 2). By contrast with Celania, Heraclia is so thoroughly rational that she would rather let both men die than injure either of them by choosing the other. Argon is sure that ‘Affection never hovers betwixt two’ (Act 5), but is unable to discover her hidden preference or to establish either man’s moral superiority to the other. Since all the characters are both honourable and rational, and Celania is not an unsuitable match for Philander, a happy ending can take place as soon as all four lovers decide where honour requires them to direct their affections. Naturally, there is no Wooer and no Doctor; Celania’s maid and the latter’s long-suffering suitor provide comic relief instead.

  Davenant’s version influenced later adaptations. Richard Cumberland’s Palamon and Arcite, or The Noble Kinsmen. Alter’d from Beaumont & Fletcher (see Dircks) may be the same as Love and Valour, or the Two Noble Kinsmen, described as a tragedy, which was produced at Richmond Theatre in 1779, or it may date from later in his career; I incline to think it an early play, as Cumberland wrote two Massinger adaptations at the same period. The surviving MS (British Library Add MS 25,990) looks like a hastily written draft submitted for consideration by a theatre manager. Cumberland, a humanitarian and sentimental dramatist, removed both anti-feminist passages and those (like 1.3.18–25) that made Hippolyta and Emilia seem too ‘Amazonian’. Like Davenant, he raises the social status of the Daughter (here called Celia), but he does not use the change to create a happy ending: Celia’s madness is not cured, and she dies offstage. Despite their grief over Arcite’s death, Emilia and Palamon are happy at the end, as she has had a preference for him from the start. But the play (with neither morris dance nor schoolmaster) is much more unequivocally tragic than its predecessor.

  A more successful adaptation by the actor-dramatist Francis Godolphin Waldron, Love and Madness; or, The Two Noble Kinsmen, was performed at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, in September 1795 (its title may allude to a play called Love and Money, performed at the same theatre in the previous month). Never printed, it survives in manuscript (Larpent no. 1094, in the Huntington Library). Waldron, best known for his completion of Jonson’s Sad Shepherd (1783), reworked the play thoroughly and on the whole skilfully, adding so many songs as to make it virtually a comic opera. The songs have music by Samuel Arnold; their sources range from Davenant himself to Milton’s ‘On a May Morning’. A genuine liking for the play is evident in Waldron’s treatment. His choice of Hermia as the name for the Jailer’s Daughter is only one of several indications that his main inspiration is A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Like Davenant, he begins with Act 2, omitting Hippolyta and Pirithous (Emilia’s part benefits from the addition of some of their lines), and raises Hermia to a social level suitable for Palamon. Since he then needs to make Emilia and Arcite more obviously destined for each other, Waldron redistributes the speeches in the prison scene so that Arcite is the one who sees her first and speaks most passionately about her. He is younger than Palamon, who can thus complain with some justice that ‘You play the child extremely’. It is Palamon, not Arcite, who later has the premonition that ‘I never shall enjoy her’, and it is he who prays to Mars, Arcite to Venus.

  In the final scene an offstage fight, followed by each man gallantly insisting that he does not deserve the prize, is about to culminate in Palamon’s execution when the mad Hermia rushes in. When she invokes the old custom that allows a maid to redeem a man from death on condition that he marry her, Palamon responds with refreshing common sense: