Is it in man to spurn such proffer’d beauty,

  And rush instead, i’th’ arms of griesly death?

  No! ’tis too much!?…

  Forgive me, bright Emilia!

  For the sake of completeness, it may be worth noting that a few lines of The Two Noble Kinsmen appear, rather incongruously, in Edward the Black Prince, or, She Never Told Her Love, produced at Drury Lane in 1828 (British Library Add MS 42,889). Frederic Reynolds adapted the plots of several Jacobean plays, particularly Philaster and Bonduca, to create this anti-French historical farrago. The hero, played by William Charles Macready, goes temporarily mad when he thinks his page and mistress are betraying him, and his soliloquy includes a few words recognizably belonging to the Jailer’s Daughter. That Reynolds used no more of the play is curious; perhaps he was recalling the lines rather than transcribing them. Despite Macready and his co-star Ellen Tree, the play was unsuccessful and a reviewer in the Examiner (3 Feb. 1828, 67–8) objected to ‘this eternal attempt to raise the irrecoverably defunct’. No further stagings are recorded during the rest of the century. The editor of Punch, Shirley Brookes, did however turn the plot into a story for The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1869, carefully removing (though rather archly hinting at) the features that might make it unsuitable for family reading.

  Twentieth-century productions

  The Two Noble Kinsmen used to have no performance history at all. Now, however, full accounts are available in readily accessible sources: Metz (‘TNK’), Richmond, Hamlin and Waith (Oxf1). I shall therefore deal briefly with productions already discussed by others, concentrating mainly on those not previously mentioned and those I myself have been able to see.

  It is in production, above all, that the problem of the play’s conflicting generic codes becomes most apparent. Most early revivals seem to have emphasized its pretty, fairy-tale qualities, presenting it as homage to Chaucer and a celebration of merrie England. The 1928 Old Vic production, with its medieval setting, was described (favourably on the whole) as ‘an experiment in prettiness’ (Birrell), or ‘a fragrant, wholly unreal romance of chivalry’ (S.R.L.). This revival had a strong cast – Ernest Milton and Eric Portman as Palamon and Arcite, Jean Forbes-Robertson as the Jailer’s Daughter. Even so, reviewers assumed that such laughs as it got, particularly in the scenes between Palamon and Arcite, must be unintentional or the result of deliberate burlesque. Fifty years of amateur productions followed, all of them apparently in agreement with the idea of prettiness. In 1949 John Masefield, who had been asked to recommend a poetic play for amateurs who wanted to tour England with a production suitable for an all-male cast, recommended The Two Noble Kinsmen and wrote a letter of advice, stressing the need for visual beauty: ‘Make your setting a gay flower garden … Use music wherever you can’ (Masefield, 190).

  The two earliest American productions, at least so their directors believed, were at Antioch and Harvard in 1955 (see Metz, ‘TNK’, 65). In Britain, the BBC Radio production of 1956 (Tony Britton and Douglas Wilmer as the kinsmen, Marjorie Westbury as the Jailer’s Daughter) may have encouraged renewed interest in the late 1950s. Two open-air productions were praised, again, for their beauty. In June 1957, Nevill Coghill and Ed Taylor, in Merton College Gardens, Oxford, directed a number of actors who, like the Palamon and Arcite performers of 1566, later became well known in other professions. A 1959 Reading University Drama Society production was remembered for the dance, the maypole ribbons, the torches after dark, the red rose on Diana’s altar, and the swans that appeared on the river at the end (Gibbs, Regan, The Times). To provide even more spectacle, the tournament was staged in the distance as Emilia waited directly in front of the audience. However, most reviewers liked the comic parts best and felt that the play did not really start to work until the prison scene – a comment made of nearly every revival (see Richmond, 182). There was modest enthusiasm for the ‘picturesque natural setting’ of the production by the drama department at the University of Bristol (Ford), and for the brick stable of Saltram House, Plymouth, where the Interluders of Hertford achieved considerable success by making the two kinsmen look like Laurel and Hardy (Cottis). As with the 1928 production, reviewers were certain that the main plot had no intentional humour in it.

  The 1970s interest in sexual and theatrical experimentation resulted in a new response to the play. Mervyn Willis directed it (York Theatre Royal 1973, Regent’s Park 1974) in a spacious, timeless setting with visual emphasis on white and verbal emphasis on innocence. The white balloons mentioned in most reviews (the ‘sign’ given by Venus after Palamon’s prayer) were an appropriate image for the lightness and fragility of the kinsmen’s youthful idealism, which I remember as the most touching feature of the production. The morris dance was cut – it would have been hard to fit into this context – and the unrealistic setting, with its touches of orientalism, hinted at some kind of philosophy of detachment.

  Dance and ritual, as Waith notes (Oxf1, 36–7), were the dominant features of this and of several other productions of the period, such as the one at the Los Angeles Globe Playhouse (1979), which won awards for director Walter Scholz and for Suzanne Peters as the Jailer’s Daughter. In the same year two other productions explored the dark side of the play’s sexuality. The all-male Cherub Theatre version by Andrew Visnevski (Edinburgh Festival and Young Vic, London) was very different from John Masefield’s imaginary all-male troupe. In black leather and chains, with cod-pieces for the men and the Amazons’ sex designated by red and white circles painted round their nipples, the characters alternated ‘spasms of fighting and kissing’ (Lee). The model was not A Midsummer Night’s Dream but Hamlet, both in the madness of the Jailer’s Daughter and in the temple scene, where Arcite hesitated over whether to kill Palamon while the latter was praying to Venus (J.E.H.). Reviewers responded favourably to this bitter, violent production, though they tended to assume that it was offering a subversive reading of the text rather than responding to its potential: ‘The actors form pictures of the brutality of passion onstage, while the bobbing pentameters tell of the idealism, the romantic folly, and the love of fair Emilia’ (Hardy). Still more tragic in tone was the modern-dress French version, Les Deux Nobles Cousins (translated by Véronique Réaud), performed in 1979 by the Centre Dramatique de Courneuve. Heavily cut, it compressed the Daughter’s madness into one scene combining 3.5 and 4.3 and turned the Wooer’s speech about her attempted suicide into an account of her death (her body was carried on as he spoke). The production, as director Pierre Constant explained in the annual report of the French Shakespeare Society, treated the play as a conflict between homosexual and heterosexual love, a search for the absolute that takes place mainly in the Dionysiac woods. The ending is tragic for the Daughter and Emilia because society forces people to choose between possible kinds of love, whereas harmony might result if a triangular, bi-sexual relationship could be made to work (Constant, 30).

  Probably the most successful attempt at making the play interesting to a non-specialist theatre audience was Julian Lopez-Morillas’ production for the Berkeley Shakespeare Festival in the summer of 1985. It was performed in repertory with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with significant cross-casting: the same Theseus and Hippolyta appeared in both plays; Hermia and Lysander were Emilia and Arcite, with Helena (Nancy Carlin) reappearing as the Jailer’s Daughter. In a particularly interesting cameo, the role of the Doctor was taken by Dakin Matthews, who had previously played Oberon; here, too (Fig. 4), he worked love-magic as a blind, eccentric, but occasionally wise quack (the ‘blind priest’ to whom the Daughter tauntingly refers at 5.2.78), his tattered clothes hung with bottles and pouches containing mysterious potions. The medieval costumes were functional rather than romantic. User-friendly devices included cutting, ingenious but simple staging, and the frequent enlivening of mainly verbal scenes with complementary or supplementary action. In the difficult 1.2, Palamon and Arcite held the audience’s attention by fighting as they talked; when Emilia was comparing the portraits, each of the two men was visible to the audience; and the tournament was staged in slow-motion dumbshow while she spoke her agonized monologue. The director stressed the youth of the four lovers, and the tone of the first part of the play was mainly comic. As the chivalric code closed its trap on the characters, it became apparent that all the conventions, however silly, were going to lead to someone’s death. Only the Daughter’s story balanced the tragedy with an essentially positive ending. Very young for her age, this Daughter confided her soliloquies to a rag doll (Fig. 5) and her madness was part of the trauma of growing up, from which emerged the ‘ruefully humorous pathos’ that Hugh Richmond considers to be the play’s distinguishing tone (Richmond, 183).

  The 1986 Royal Shakespeare Theatre production by Barry Kyle attempted to recreate the sense of a warrior society (largely Japanese in its imagery) with elaborate rituals of love and war. Like all RSC productions, it was extensively reviewed; a full range of opinions can be seen in The London Theatre Record for 1986 and, when the play transferred to the Mermaid in London, for 1987. Though some found the stylization confusing, I agree with Roger Warren (83–4) that Kyle had thought intelligently about the play and faced most of its issues, matching the difficult Shakespearean speeches with highly stylized costumes and delivery, while also doing justice to the more naturalistic subplot and the less stylized parts of the main plot. These two plots were strongly linked through imagery that made the most of the sexual ritual of the morris and the references to horses: in 3.5, the Jailer’s Daughter rode in upon a phallic maypole that spewed out long, white silk ribbons (referred to in rehearsal as the ‘ejaculation’ (RSC, ‘Promptbook’)) and was later seen in a bridle which served as her straitjacket (Fig. 6). Paul Barry’s version at the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival was also staged in 1986; Waith (Oxf1) objected to the heavy cutting (the play began with 1.4), and some of the conflation of roles, but found that the Daughter’s scenes and the young men’s arming of each other worked admirably.

  The amateur production given (in English) in April 1986 as part of the 350th anniversary celebrations of the University of Utrecht was original enough to be an exception to my general rule of discussing only professional interpretations. The director, Wijbrand Shaap, framed the play as the dream or fantasy of a twentieth-century youth who becomes Palamon – in a Renaissance Italian tunic which he finds embarrassingly short – while a tourist poster of Hercules, advertising Thebes, comes to life to become Arcite. Since the play was interpreted as a parody of Chaucer, it embraced rather than suppressed the potential comedy, sometimes going for frankly silly laughs such as the Wooer’s stammering on the letter ‘P’ in his account of the Daughter’s obsession with Palamon. Pirithous’ over-enthusiastic responses to men and manliness turned 4.2 into a competition in upstaging, with Theseus almost acting out the descriptions in his effort to visualize them; the Messenger was a woman, clearly infatuated with the knights she described. In the final scene Palamon’s grief at ‘loss of dear love’ (5.4.112) was taken seriously, but the audience was invited to laugh at the abruptness of the transition from tragedy to comedy, at the dropping of the lights as soon as Arcite died, and at Theseus’ casual decision to mourn for him ‘a day or two’. But there were also effective quiet moments like Emilia’s ‘Is this winning?’ (5.3.138), and Palamon’s ‘What / Hath waked us from our dream?’ (5.4.47–8). At the end Theseus spoke, in Dutch, the opening lines of A Midsummer Night’s Dream; the Daughter had also babbled some of Ophelia’s lines as part of her mad scene. It seemed to me that the production was suggesting a dream-like, sometimes absurd, relation between the play and its sources. I know of only one other production in a non-English-speaking country. In 1988 the play (partly rewritten by the director, the poet Gavin Bantock) was performed in English by the Lear Society of Reitaku University in Tokyo.

  Of the three professional American versions in 1993–4, two were fringe productions with limited resources; nevertheless each found ways of illuminating at least part of the story. Rather than attempt to create a unified concept, Beth F. Milles directed it (for Falstaff Productions, New York, October 1993) to emphasize the sharp tonal contrasts between characters and scenes. The three queens were heavily stylized: they sometimes spoke antiphonally, sang in chorus in 1.5 and reappeared at the beginning of 5.1 with a small fire, looking like the witches in Macbeth. Act 2 began on a more casual note with the Jailer and Wooer fishing from one side of the upper stage level while, on the other, Arcite and Palamon were being chained to the ceiling and floor by their hands and feet; Palamon’s opening ‘How do you, noble cousin?’ (2.2.1) was inevitably comic. When the Daughter went mad, an onstage guitarist accompanied her singing. She was present during some of the scenes involving other characters and her singing could be heard behind the combat between Palamon and Arcite in 3.6, as if to parallel her insanity with theirs. Emilia sang too, opening the second half of the performance with Sonnet 47 (‘Betwixt mine eye and heart a league is took’). The Doctor, first seen as a shadow on the wall, was a mock-sinister figure, arrogant and mystifying. His powers, whatever they were, were not needed, since in 5.2 the production adopted a familiar romantic-comedy cliché: the Wooer, removing his glasses, turned from Clark Kent into Superman; he and the Daughter were already kissing by the end and needed no further encouragement from the Doctor. Heavy cutting and the lack of spectacle in 5.1 meant that the offstage events of 5.3 and 5.4 seemed even more abrupt than in the original play. The arbitrariness of the final changes of fortune seemed to be the point, but the absurdity was not, as at Utrecht, treated comically.

  Eleanor Holdridge’s studio production for the Red Heel Company in Philadelphia (November 1993) had so small a cast that much of the play had to be cut or reshaped, but what was left had a unified, lyrical tone, often with music in the background. A fountain dominated the stage. The cast began by dancing around it in dappled light; people washed their faces in it; and the Daughter looked into it when she imagined the shipwreck. Hippolyta and Emilia were costumed as Amazons, while Palamon and Arcite looked like figures in manuscript illuminations. The production gave Emilia and Hippolyta a close relationship (especially since it was Hippolyta who accompanied Emilia into the garden in 2.2). The Jailer’s Daughter, an apologetically giggling blonde with flowers in her hair, was alarming in her madness, touching in 5.2, and mad (still) at the end. The extensive doubling, which sometimes made it difficult to know whether an actor was appearing in a new role or a new facet of a previous one, was exploited to create a sense of the play’s ritualistic quality.

  The 1994 Oregon Shakespeare Festival production at Ashland, directed by Nagle Jackson, looked at first sight like a return to the medieval fairy-tale tradition: there was a lot of pageantry, including a remarkably authentic morris dance complete with hobby horse, and the women’s dresses had deliberately impractical long trains and long scalloped sleeves. It was impossible to imagine either Emilia or Hippolyta as an Amazon, nor was either character given the kind of feminist reading that struck reviewers of the RSC production; in fact, the actress playing Emilia (Robin Goodrin Nordli) thought of her character as a ‘failed Amazon’. As in many productions, Act 1 had difficulty holding the audience, but in Act 2 the Daughter’s obvious infatuation, the tongue-tied Wooer’s helpless attempts at making conversation with her (Fig. 7), and the subsequent extravagances of the kinsmen’s friendship evoked the romantic-comedy conventions with which the audience felt more comfortable. But these conventions were constantly undermined. The almost operatic singing of Corliss Preston as the Daughter made her songs into extra-dramatic display pieces; she became frighteningly, not prettily, mad, threatening Gerald and the countrymen with the knife she had brought in order to file off Palamon’s fetters. As at the RSC, Ashland connected the Daughter’s experience of the morris with her later obsession about Palamon’s sexual potency, emphasizing the sexuality of the dancers (especially the suggestively costumed Bavian) and their cavortings on their way home at the beginning of 4.1. The Daughter fell asleep on stage between 3.2 and 3.4; at the end of 3.3, she awoke with a cry and Palamon, though he faintly heard it, did not go back to investigate. His reference to her as ‘A right good creature’ (5.4.34) was spoken aside, as if he had intuited something about ‘the road not taken’ in his wanderings through the woods. Spectators during the interval frequently speculated how the play would end; they never guessed right, and were never happy with the ending, which jarred with expectations created by the fairy-tale beauty of the staging.

  Particularly effective in this production was the delicate balancing of the audience’s sympathy between Palamon and Arcite. This relationship is probably what most distinguishes one production from another. At Berkeley and the RSC the two men were strongly contrasted (Figs 8 and 9). Lopez-Morillas took the view that each lover prayed to the god who represented the qualities he most needed: thus, the courtly Arcite asked Mars for help while the wiry, aggressive Palamon prayed to Venus. At the RSC the casting of a black actor as Arcite recalled the film cliché where the non-white hero dies heroically just in time to evade an awkward plot complication. In both these productions the spectators’ sympathy on the whole was with Arcite; they were alienated by Palamon’s paranoid suspicions in 2.2 and 3.3, as well as by his insistence that Theseus should execute Arcite first. By contrast, New York made Arcite essentially unromantic, and in Philadelphia he was a slow but formidable giant, who delivered his prayer to Mars sword in hand; when Palamon threw down his weapon at the beginning of his prayer to Venus, openly renouncing all expectation of winning by force, audience sympathy shifted to him. At Ashland, the men’s youth, their naive charm, and the resemblance created by their hairstyles (Fig. 10) emphasized the problem of deciding between them. Their first scene, heavily cut, gained momentum by showing them about to escape from the corruptions of Thebes – Arcite eager to go, Palamon more inclined to discuss the issue – until news of the impending war forced them to remain. The scene in which they drink to ‘the wenches we have known’ (3.3) was played, effectively, as a comic competition in aggression, with each man trying to prove the other unworthy of Emilia. Only in the temple scene did the balance clearly shift toward Palamon, as Arcite took on the frightening qualities of the god he worshipped. His shouted prayer to Mars contrasted with Palamon’s gentle, appealing address to Venus (helped, admittedly, by careful cutting). Yet the playing of 5.3 restored the balance. Emilia was totally exhausted and despairing by the time the royal party entered from the field; Arcite, though the victor, was physically and emotionally drained, and the couple could not bring themselves to follow Theseus’ urging and join hands (Fig. 11). Then Emilia realized that Arcite was indeed a ‘miserable prince’ (5.3.142), that the impending death of Palamon must mean to him what Flavina’s death had meant to her, and she voluntarily took his hand. The fact that a loving relationship had briefly seemed a possibility made Arcite’s death more touching. His ‘ ’Tis done!’ (5.4.94), after she had kissed him, was an exclamation of triumph, reminding one that his initial ambition had been to ‘love her as a woman’ (2.2.165).