The modern distrust of authority figures has in some ways made Theseus more interesting, if more difficult to play, than the authorial spokesman that he was once taken to be. In the last scene, particularly, some productions have shown him trying, as a ruler, to explain events which, as a human being, he finds deeply disturbing. Some have also found interesting subtextual possibilities in his relationship with Hippolyta, whose background as a defeated and subdued Amazon is so strongly emphasized by the queens in 1.1 and so frustratingly undeveloped in the rest of the play. Building on textual hints of increasing strain between Emilia and her brother-in-law, Philadelphia and Ashland suggested a triangular relationship among the three and a sense of isolation on Emilia’s part as her sister became more closely identified with Theseus. The RSC production seemed to take the view that ‘the play’s deepest conflict is not between the kinsmen, but between Theseus, as patriarchal ruler of Athens, and Emilia as representative of “The powers of all women”?’ (Abrams, 74).

  It is the roles of Emilia and the Jailer’s Daughter that attract the most attention in modern performances. Emilia’s declared inability to choose is now more understandable than when Tucker Brooke, in 1908, quoted with approval Furnivall’s famous comparison of Emilia to ‘a silly lady’s maid or shop girl, not knowing her own mind, up and down like a bucket in a well’ (Brooke, xliii n.). At Berkeley, for instance, incredulous laughter was directed not at her but at Theseus’ insistence that she should ‘Make choice’ between two men she did not know. Her speech with the men’s portraits was played, at Ashland, as a desperate and unhappy attempt to do what everyone expected of her by talking herself into love. In many productions, her responses to the male celebration of fighting – ‘Must these men die too?’ (4.2.112) and ‘Is this winning?’ (5.3.138) – have been among the most memorable moments. Because so many of her speeches are soliloquies and she interacts so little with other characters (never speaking directly to either kinsman except briefly to the disguised Arcite in 2.5), her role is a difficult one, depending heavily on context and subtext.

  By contrast, the Daughter is probably the easiest character for a twentieth-century audience to understand: a reviewer of a 1968 production thought it ‘remarkable to see the seventeenth-century theatre suggesting, even in jest, that orgasm is good for you’ (Cottis). Many productions now stress the relationship between the two women by similarities of costume or blocking, and they are often strongly contrasted physically, to the point of seeming archetypes of sensuality and chastity (see, for example, Figs 7 and 11). At the end of the RSC production the final image left with the audience was not that of the kinsmen but of Emilia and the Daughter, face to face for the first time in the play: both in bridal veils, both stunned and bereaved. At Ashland, the rest of the court left the stage – cued by Theseus’ uneasy ‘Let’s go off’ (5.4.136) – as they heard the Daughter’s offstage singing; only Palamon and Emilia remained as she entered, still mad, in her dirty wedding dress. For a moment the two women looked at each other, touching each other’s faces; then Palamon gently led Emilia away as the Daughter walked upstage, still singing the song that had begun the play.

  As Sandra Clark has noted, with regard to the entire Beaumont and Fletcher corpus, ‘in plays where there is no living tradition of performance the gaps where meanings are to be supplied in the theatre can never be truly filled’ (Clark, 154). There are many such gaps in The Two Noble Kinsmen. Some roles (for example the Wooer) are not so much under-written as unwritten, leaving almost everything for the actor to do. For a modern audience, more at home with the visual and subtextual than with the verbal, such a character can be genuinely effective in performance. The same is true of the other major roles – more so, I would argue, than the young lovers in The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest – and even the minor parts of the Jailer, Schoolmaster, Doctor and the apparently colourless friends of the Jailer. (Ashland made a nice contrast between First Friend’s unctuous tone – ‘That truly noble Prince Pirithous’ (4.1.13) – and Second Friend’s more direct language.) Moreover, though the play’s resemblance to a masque should not be exaggerated, one should also remember that, like a masque, it makes only part of its effect through words. As with the sheep-shearing feast in The Winter’s Tale and the wedding masque in The Tempest, an important part of any production of The Two Noble Kinsmen must be the finding of visual and musical equivalents for its most spectacular effects: the opening and closing ceremonies of Act 1, the morris dance, the solemn and perhaps deliberately barbaric ritual of the temple scene, and whatever was intended to accompany Theseus’ bleak closing lines.

  Interpretation

  Before this century much of the criticism of The Two Noble Kinsmen was confined to editions of the play, and earlier editors found little difficulty in accepting some elements that have bothered later ones. Seward, for instance, noted the harshness of Theseus’ rule that not only the loser but his knights must die and wondered what ‘gallant Idiots’ would volunteer in the circumstances. But, he decided, ‘Mankind were mad after Knight-Errantry; and the reader must catch a little of the Spirit himself, or he’ll lose a great Part of the Beauties of this Play …’. Some of these ‘Beauties’, he felt, were moral – for instance, the fact that Palamon’s comment on Creon’s apparent ability to defy divine justice (1.2.79–83) is not only phrased in terms that recall the previous scene (‘Widows’ cries / Descend again into their throats’) but immediately followed by the news that Theseus and his army are at hand. He regrets, however, that poetic justice is not more clearly followed in the fates of Palamon and Arcite: if the authors had made more of the oath of sworn brotherhood that Chaucer mentions, Arcite would have been more guilty and Palamon’s success more obviously justified. Though Seward invokes historical context, his approach does not require esoteric knowledge, since romance was still a familiar convention. His main appeal is to shared moral values and he assumes that these are what give the play its abiding interest.

  The dominance of the authorship question in the nineteenth century, though it led to some close analysis of the writing, had otherwise a dire effect on criticism: whether the play had any interest outside its own historical context was seen as depending only on Shakespeare’s presence in it. At a time when almost no one had the opportunity to acquire familiarity with The Two Noble Kinsmen by editing, performing or seeing it, it inevitably seemed an abstract and shadowy work. Recent activity in all these areas has made a difference. The revival of interest in the play is due to the very qualities that once led to its disparagement: its remote and artificial story, its highly charged sexuality, and the difficult language of the non-Fletcherian scenes. The very remoteness of the story, for example, has lent itself to the approach used at both the RSC and Ashland, where the audience is invited to observe the pressure of an alien social code on the lives of individual characters. Some critics have found the play to be a critique of chivalry (Rose) or of the Jacobean court which, by selling honours like knighthoods, made supposedly spiritual values available for discussion in material terms (Abrams, ‘Bourgeois’). Clifford Leech suggests that ‘The contradictions implicit in Shakespeare are made explicit in Fletcher’ (Leech, Plays, 148). In an age that enjoys recognizing contradictions, this Fletcherian quality is a merit.

  As for the language which, if it is Shakespeare’s, must be his last surviving writing for the stage, it has consistently polarized critical opinion. De Quincey’s view that the speeches in 1.1 ‘would have been the most gorgeous rhetoric, had they not happened to be something far better’ (49 n.) is typical of the most enthusiastic tributes, but typical also in its lack of precision about what the ‘something far better’ might be. Contradicting De Quincey, one writer argues that the style of 1.1 is inappropriately inflated for the issues being debated in it; it serves only to create expectations that are bathetically unfulfilled (Magnusson, 384). It has also been claimed that the bathos is a deliberate subversion (by both dramatists) of the characters’ pretensions (Lief & Radel). This dispute as to whether the play depicts or deflates heroism recalls the ongoing critical debate over Troilus and Cressida, a work to which it has been compared by both Edwards and Rose. A similar uneasiness has sometimes been felt about the language of the late romances in general. Russ McDonald has described the style of The Tempest in terms that could also be applied to The Two Noble Kinsmen: ‘On the one hand, the repeated sounds or phrases in a brief and complicated text offer a kind of aural comfort: specifically, they create a richness of texture that seems to promise profundity. On the other, the text never fulfils the expectations of clarity which the discovery of such patterns engenders’ (McDonald, 24). Similarly, the style of Cymbeline, with its unusual number of parentheses, has been compared to that of Henry James in his last works (Houston, 200–5). Though some of these parentheses may be the result of the play’s having been transcribed by a scribe, Ralph Crane, with a particular fondness for them, the return to more ‘normal’ sentence structure in The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest (also thought to be Crane transcripts) suggests that the complexity is the result of a conscious choice (Houston, 205).

  Comparing Shakespeare to Henry James is not inappropriate. In each case there is debate about the extent to which the style is in the author’s control. The parenthetical language may be seen as the self-indulgence of an ageing author; it may, however, have been created for a purpose. In Shakespeare’s case, at least, it often seems to be used to express what R. A. Foakes considers the particular contribution of Beaumont and Fletcher, their sense of the ‘powerful sexual drives that lie just below the surface of courtly appearances’ (Foakes, 84). For instance, much of the most striking language in 1.1 is given to the queens, as in the insistent plea to Hippolyta:

  But touch the ground for us no longer time

  Than a dove’s motion, when the head’s plucked off.

  Tell him, if he i’th’ blood-sized field lay swollen,

  Showing the sun his teeth, grinning at the moon,

  What you would do.

  (1.1.97–101)

  The shock results from the word order (as Magnusson notes, ‘the dove’s flutter becomes its death throes’ (378)) and from the fact that, in both parts of the sentence, the parenthetical element dominates the main subject–verb construction. The speech is also shocking because it intrudes on the private feelings of Hippolyta and Theseus, and the queens’ subsequent speeches intrude still further, imagining Hippolyta on her wedding night, when ‘Her twinning cherries shall their sweetness fall / Upon thy taste-full lips’ (1.1.178–9).

  Hippolyta’s reply, addressed to Theseus, is equally difficult, but for different reasons:

  Though much unlike

  You should be so transported, as much sorry

  I should be such a suitor, yet I think,

  Did I not by th’abstaining of my joy,

  Which breeds a deeper longing, cure their surfeit

  That craves a present med’cine, I should pluck

  All ladies’ scandal on me. Therefore?…

  (1.1.186–92)

  The final word (along with the earlier ‘Though’, ‘as’ and ‘yet’) gives the illusion of clarity. By contrast, the omission of the pronouns that go with ‘unlike’ and ‘sorry’, and the vague referents of ‘so’ and ‘such’, make the actual meaning difficult to arrive at. The difficulty may result from a clash between the speaker’s need to make a suitable public statement and her private embarrassment both about the subject-matter and about the queens’ behaviour.

  One might compare 1.2 of The Winter’s Tale, where Leontes and Hermione are equally over-insistent as they urge Polixenes to prolong what already seems to have been too long a visit at the court of Sicily. In each case, the language is embarrassing, and it dramatizes embarrassment. In the earlier play, the language eventually finds its outlet in the plot, since Hermione’s overcharged, laboriously flirtatious appeal leads directly to her husband’s suspicion that she is committing adultery with his friend. In The Two Noble Kinsmen the sensual language used by the queens about both Hippolyta and Emilia has consequences only in Hippolyta’s later reminder to Theseus of ‘all the chaste nights I have ever pleased you’ (3.6.200), to which he replies – whether embarassed or amused – ‘These are strange conjurings.’ By contrast, Palamon’s prayer to Venus dwells on his ability to keep quiet about sexual secrets, an important virtue in courtly love. Apart from a few expressions of desire in 2.2, and perhaps in Arcite’s soliloquy at the start of Act 3, the play differentiates the naive sensuality of the Jailer’s Daughter and the men’s recollection of their previous sexual exploits from the self-conscious purity of their rivalry for Emilia. The best moments, in both authors, are those in which what is being said is clearly not the whole of the meaning – as when Fletcher depicts the kinsmen attempting to behave with artificial jollity (3.3) or, in the arming scene (3.6), to suppress the affection that is awakened in them by old memories. Indeed, the abrupt end of 3.3 results from Palamon’s angry interpretation (right or wrong, we never know) of some lines of Arcite which, in themselves, mean almost nothing:

  There was a time

  When young men went a-hunting, and a wood,

  And a broad beech; and thereby hangs a tale –

  Hey ho.

  (3.3.39–42)

  It has been suggested that the subplot acts as an outlet for the reticence shown in the main plot. For instance, Emilia’s quiet refusal of Theseus’ urging her towards Arcite at the end of 2.5 is immediately followed by the Daughter’s exuberant ‘Let all the dukes and all the devils roar …!’ (2.6.1) – ‘as though she has become the secret voice of Emilia’s resentment’ (Abrams, ‘Bourgeois’, 159).

  The notion of the play as offering a ‘secret’ subtext has inspired many recent readings. Bruce Smith describes Palamon’s and Arcite’s desire to escape Thebes as ‘a flight from sexual experience’ (70); Abrams sees Arcite’s love for Emilia in 2.2 as arising out of the desire ‘to spite Palamon’ (74) and the end of Emilia’s conversation with her woman in 2.2 as a ‘flirtation which ends in the women going to bed together’ (70). Drawing on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Bate describes Emilia’s relation with Flavina, so strongly associated with flowers, as a variation of the Adonis story: ‘In Emilia’s image, the paired flowers become two phoenixes – a wonderful contradiction of the bird’s defining uniqueness – and thus proclaim the perfection of same-sex love’ (Bate, 265). A reviewer of a modern-dress revival in 1970 saw Emilia in 1.3 as ‘going through a mild lesbian phase’ – one, however, which soon gives way to ‘the virile attractions of the captives’ (Curtis). Edwards and Waith (‘Sh and F’), while not going this far, do find that the play not only makes single-sex friendship more attractive than love but represents it nostalgically, as an edenic state that is never adequately replaced by married love.

  Some accounts are more critical of the young people, pointing out their immature and narcissistic behaviour (Abrams, Rose) or accusing Emilia of choosing the roles of child and victim in order to evade responsibility (Hillman). Certainly, the kinsmen’s conversation in prison, as they sigh for the sons they will never have – sons whose chief function will be to admire and imitate their glorious fathers – recalls one definition of narcissism: ‘What we love is the young and beautiful image of ourselves: the love object that actually is an object’ (MacCary, 29). Without being psychologists, the audience at Ashland at once got the joke when Palamon’s and Arcite’s complacent comments on their friendship were followed by Emilia’s ‘What flower is this?’ and the reply, ‘ ’Tis called Narcissus, madam’ (2.2.119). Audience expectation at this point is that their immature and self-satisfied friendship – and Emilia’s equally trivial concerns – are about to be replaced by something better.

  It is, however, questionable whether what follows is in fact better. Catherine Belsey recognizes this problem, even while rejecting the homoerotic interpretation: ‘The men’s explicit preferences are heterosexual. The whole plot depends on this … they admire each other greatly for their former heterosexual conquests.’ At the same time, she notes that their attempt to distinguish between ‘love’ and ‘desire’, in 2.2.159, has collapsed by the time Palamon speaks his anguished lines to the dead Arcite (5.4.109–12), in which the words ‘desire’ and ‘love’ are applied both to heterosexual love and to homosocial friendship (Belsey, 52–3). Theseus and Hippolyta may be meant to represent the ideal – a close marital relationship that is not incompatible with close single-sex friendship (on the husband’s part at least). But they, and Pirithous still more, are kept too far in the background to provide a true alternative. Perhaps the impossibility of resolution is built into the structure: ‘the audience, like Emilia, is in an impossible position and cannot choose’ (Hickman, 145).