Still, no reading of the play can be satisfactory that does not also take account of its remarkable imaginative unity. Though Paul Bertram has found few to agree with him that The Two Noble Kinsmen is entirely the work of Shakespeare, his account of the play is still one of the best ever written, and one of his main arguments for his view – that the same themes and images can be found in scenes traditionally ascribed to two different authors – is borne out by much subsequent work. Abrams (‘Bourgeois’) and Katrina Bachinger trace the elaborate metaphor of the ship at sea from the play’s Prologue (where the play itself is the ship), to the Daughter’s fantasies of shipwreck, to the point at which Arcite himself, ‘a vessel … that floats but for / The surge that next approaches’ (5.4.83–4), becomes the wreck. Jeanne Roberts, among others, notes how the two plots are linked by the gift-horses (those given by Emilia to Arcite and the one which the Daughter imagines Palamon has given her); she also points to the implicit pun on bridle and bridal (142).

  There are obvious reasons why both horses and the sea recur so often in the language of the play; they are metaphorically interchangeable (Palamon calls their horses ‘proud seas under us’ at 2.2.20) and Neptune was the god of both. The sea, according to Ralph Berry, is always symbolically present in any theatre with a platform stage, where the actor looks out over the heads of the audience as over so many bobbing waves (Berry, 16). Perhaps the actor is also like a charioteer trying to control a team of horses. The association of restless horses with sexual desire and betrayal is often considered specifically Shakespearean: obvious examples occur in Venus and Adonis and The Lover’s Complaint. However, the horse is essential to the plot of The Knight’s Tale, and present also in the imagery of Chaucer’s Anelida and Arcite, where Arcite behaves like a restive horse with Anelida, then is bridled by his new love (Gillam, 394). Like the sea, the horse cannot easily be depicted on stage, though Barry Kyle’s 1986 RSC production made the horse symbolism vividly present in his treatment of the Daughter and in the final scene where, to accompany Pirithous’ narrative, a giant banner depicting a wild horse gradually rose and unfurled behind him.

  Given the importance of the horse for the play’s conclusion, it is hardly surprising that both Shakespeare and Fletcher filled the play with anticipatory references. Horses, however, have such powerful symbolic connotations as to leave the way open for infinite interpretations. If the Prologue in Henry V makes the horse stand for everything the stage cannot show (‘Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them’), the wild horse in 5.4 of The Two Noble Kinsmen may embody everything it must not show. Certainly, bridled and unbridled horses conventionally represent (as in Alciati’s well-known emblem collection) passion controlled or uncontrolled. Boccaccio’s treatment of Arcite owes something to the story of Hippolytus, son of Theseus, who refused to worship Aphrodite and was dragged to his death by his own horses. The allegorical implications of the myth were obvious to the Renaissance and rearing horses (that is, horses standing on their hind legs alone) are frequently depicted in art of the period. The painter Lomazzo recorded two examples of vivid verbal description of horses which he recommended to his readers. One was Ariosto’s account of a horse trying to shake off its rider (Orlando Furioso, Book 2, stanza 7), which Ariosto’s translator, Sir John Harington, glossed by explaining that the horse represented ‘unbridled desire’ (Harington, 15). Lomazzo’s other example is a messenger speech from the Greek romance Clitophon and Leucippe, by Tatius Achilles, describing how a young man is killed by a horse his lover had given him. The romance might have been known to Shakespeare through William Burton’s translation of 1597, dedicated to the Earl of Southampton. A small Holbein painting once belonging to Prince Henry’s collection shows a man being carried away by a wildly galloping horse, with the motto ‘E cosi desio me mena’ [Thus desire leads me] (Strong, 194). There is, then, evidence for an erotic, even a homoerotic, reading of Arcite’s accident. Most critics of the play offer such an interpretation of Pirithous’ narrative in 5.4, often without noting that the narrative is itself an interpretation: Pirithous makes it clear that Arcite’s death results from his superb control of the horse, which can destroy him only by destroying itself.

  The horse is only one of many visual and verbal images in the play. As was suggested above, one possible explanation for its imaginative unity is that both dramatists were influenced both by Beaumont’s masque and by the emblem books which Inigo Jones and others are known to have used as sources for set and costume designs. For instance, the climax of the masque (see Appendices 3 and 4) was the revelation of the knight masquers in a setting dominated by Jupiter’s altar. Waith has made the interesting suggestion that the hind that Emilia offers to Diana (which is not in Chaucer’s tale) is meant to recall the hind that Diana substitutes for Iphigenia when she is about to be sacrificed (Oxf1, 191n.). The audience looking at Emilia in performance (Fig. 12) might not think of the Iphigenia story or of an image from Ovid’s Metamorphoses such as is reproduced here (Fig. 13), but – especially in view of Arcite’s reference to his knights as ‘my sacrifices’ (5.1.34) – it would surely sense that Emilia is taking part in a sacrifice, perhaps being sacrificed herself. Richard Proudfoot has suggested that the altar of 5.1 might become the scaffold of 5.4, thus emphasizing a conflation of religious and secular motives similar to that in Beaumont’s masque, where the knights appear as ‘consecrated persons’. Roberto Calasso’s fascinating synthesis of classical myths, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, points out that the earliest legends make the god ‘copulate and kill himself at the same time’ (106); Calasso finds vestiges of this practice in the story of Iphigenia, who is told that she is to be married, when in fact she is to be sacrificed: ‘the flavor of marriage lingers on in the sacrifice, just as the flavor of the sacrifice lingers on in marriage. A tangible object unites the two events: the crown. One is crowned whether going to the altar as a victim or as a bride’ (107). Perhaps because of the Renaissance interest in recreating classical triumphs and weddings, the dramatists had evidently perceived the importance of crowns and wreaths in the classical world, for the play is full of them, from the wheaten garlands worn by the women in the first scene to the ‘victor’s wreath’ which falls from Arcite’s head just before he is crushed by his horse.

  Garlands are made by intertwining branches of leaves or flowers. The curious twinning/twining pun which twice produces an interpretative crux in The Two Noble Kinsmen has a possible origin both in emblem books and in the weddings of 1613. The classic emblem of friendship, as Peggy Simonds has pointed out (248–68), is also an emblem of marriage: the intertwining vine and elm described by Catullus in an epithalamion, later used by Alciati and many successive emblematists (Fig. 14), and drawn on by Jonson in Hymenaii (1606); many poets must have re-read some of these works as they prepared their own tributes for the 1613 wedding. The two words become as intertwined in the play as the phenomenon they purport to describe; both ‘twining’ and ‘twinning’ are appropriate for the twinning cherries of Hippolyta’s lips in 1.1.178 (presumably Shakespeare’s) and, equally, for the reference in 2.2.64 (presumably Fletcher’s) to the fortunes of Palamon and Arcite being twined together; Emilia compares the objects of Pirithous’ divided attention to twins (1.3.32–3). The Theban legend and Statius’ Thebaid are themselves full of twins and twin-like figures – figures, that is, who (like the children/siblings of Oedipus) threaten the concept of difference. The importance of twins and doubles for Shakespeare’s work has often been noted, sometimes with reference to his having been the father of twins. Joel Fineman recognizes the Theban story as one possible source for the Shakespearean theme of fratricidal rivalry between interchangeable, often parallel, male figures (Hal and Hotspur, Brutus and Cassius, Hamlet and Laertes). For some reason, twins seem to have been theatrically popular in the period of The Two Noble Kinsmen. In January 1612 the King’s Men performed a play by (Richard?) Niccolls, now lost, called The Twins’ Tragedy. In The Duchess of Malfi, a play dominated by images of shadows, mirrors and echoes, the Duchess’s twin brother, Ferdinand, both loves and murders her.

  If a friend is a second self, then all friends are in a sense twins. They are also intertwined in what Hippolyta calls the ‘knot of love’ between Theseus and Pirithous (1.3.41). Emilia speaks of its ‘intertangled roots’ (1.3.59), while the Daughter later hopes that her love for Palamon, which she rightly suspects of being unreciprocated, ‘Will take more root within him’ (2.6.28). These images of binding were made visual in the RSC production through the repeated act of tying strings into knots and the ceremonial binding of women, particularly the queens, in long sashes resembling the Japanese obi. In 4.2 the ceremonial bonds were held by Pirithous and the Messenger, who bound them around Emilia’s wrists as they spoke of the knights who were coming to fight for her love; the effect was to externalize her sense that the tournament was above all a threat to her.

  Such staging provides a twentieth-century equivalent of something that is undoubtedly present in the play, an elaborate patterning of visual and verbal effects. Emrys Jones’s important study of Scenic Form in Shakespeare draws attention to the shapes created by constantly changing stage groupings. The dominant scenic pattern of The Two Noble Kinsmen, established in 1.1, is the interrupted procession, which becomes part of a sequence of interrupted events (see Edwards) and is repeated, verbally, in the frequent parentheses by which speakers interrupt their own words. The interrupted procession in 5.3 is also reminiscent of the shape which Jones (22) analyses in 1.2 of Julius Caesar: a procession arrives and departs, leaving behind someone who, having refused to go and watch an offstage spectacle, now tries to interpret the off-stage sounds. Another important scenic pattern can be related to the morris dance, which has been described (Bachinger) as the unifying symbol for the whole play. It is impossible to tell simply from the text why the absence of a single female dancer should threaten to wreck all the plans Gerald and his pupils have made. If their show had featured some complicated group manoeuvre, such as the mock-beheading and resurrection of the fool which sometimes features in this dance, it would have had an obvious thematic link with the near-beheading of Palamon in the final scene and the sacrificial role of the victor/victim Arcite, a Summer Lord to Emilia’s Queen of the May. But the main dance formation appears to be what Gerald calls ‘trace and turn’ – or the ‘hey’, as Julian Pilling (28) translates it – movement in a circle, with the dancers weaving in and out, perhaps criss-crossing ribbons round a maypole, in the shape of a wreath. This criss-crossing is also the scenic pattern in Act 3, where the kinsmen and the Daughter, in alternating scenes, keep missing each other. Cicely’s failure to turn up for the dance is probably nothing but a way of justifying the Daughter’s inclusion. But the substitution is part of a pattern that runs throughout the play: Pirithous takes Theseus’ place in the first scene; the Daughter takes Cicely’s place in the dance; the Wooer takes Palamon’s place (or his own rightful place) in the Daughter’s bed; and Palamon finally takes Arcite’s place as Emilia’s husband.

  Linguistic and visual patterns can be decoded in the various ways I have been indicating, but it is possible that they exist for their own sake. Marco Mincoff has suggested that by 1613 there were two currents in English literary style. One, which he associates primarily with Jonson, but of which he also claims Fletcher as an example, is based on a ‘classical ideal of lucidity and correctness, a style that scarcely ever startles or reveals by flashes, and whose effects, when it seeks for brilliance, are made by more oratorical means’. The other, which he identifies with Donne, the later Shakespeare, and Webster’s tragedies, is difficult and ‘metaphysical’ (Mincoff, 104). The Two Noble Kinsmen is unusual in having several images that seem to derive from Donne: in particular, that of the ‘dove’s motion, when the head’s plucked off’ (1.1.98) may, Proudfoot thinks, have been inspired by his Second Anniversary, which opens with some striking lines on the twitching of a severed head and body. The two Anniversaries (1611 and 1612) were the first of Donne’s poems to be published. Webster’s borrowings from them in The Duchess of Malfi, and perhaps Fletcher’s in his verses on The Honest Man’s Fortune (see Appendix 1), may have brought them to Shakespeare’s attention, though of course he may already have known other Donne poems in manuscript. It is possible that the essence of the difficult style was, as in Donne, the pleasure of difficulty itself. Stephen Orgel has argued that one need not necessarily explain the obscurity of Renaissance language: ‘the age often found in incomprehensibility a positive virtue’ (436). The linguistic labyrinth may be one from which no exit is possible.

  Thus there need be no explanation for the play’s abrupt reversals, both comic and tragic: for instance, the kinsmen’s confident prophecy, just before they see Emilia, that nothing will ever destroy their friendship, or the literal reversal that freezes Arcite with his legs ‘higher than his head’ (5.4.78), like a grotesque baroque statue, just before his horse falls backward on him. At the equally unlikely end of Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (1611–12), the villain D’Amville accidently strikes himself with the executioner’s axe while attempting to behead someone else. He sees the hand of providence in his fate and is at once converted from his atheism. Arcite learns no such lesson – in a play with a non-Christian setting, he probably could not – yet the length and grotesqueness of Pirithous’ description of Arcite’s accident draws attention to its freakish, arbitrary nature, and, for Theseus at least, to the helplessness of human beings in the face of divine power.

  It is probably a coincidence that Pirithous’ first line in 1.3 – ‘No further’ – should be the equivalent of the motto Non plus ultra that Hercules is supposed to have set up alongside his famous pillars at the Straits of Gibraltar, with the message that human beings should not exceed their limits. If the god Hercules leaves Antony (AC, 4.3), he has long since left the world of The Two Noble Kinsmen, as Theseus, his former comrade, frequently recognizes. But the later play, almost equally full of reminiscences of Hercules, is also full of images of boundaries: the Second Queen’s initial reminder to Hippolyta that Theseus has saved her from ‘o’erflowing’ her proper ‘bound’, Palamon’s reflection that fate ‘hath bounded our last minute’ (1.2.103), Arcite’s reference to ‘The heavenly limiter’ (5.1.30), and the Daughter’s question, ‘How far is’t now to th’end o’th’ world, my masters?’ (5.2.72). One of the first creators of boundaries, according to Plutarch, was Theseus himself, who set up a pillar marking the founding of Athens as a city-state (see Gillies, 8, 190 n. 12).

  No less conscious of boundaries, the authors and actors themselves, through the Prologue, express anxiety about the ‘deep water’ (25) in which they are trying to swim. As Theseus and the others feel towards Hercules, so they represent themselves as feeling towards Chaucer: ‘it were an endless thing / And too ambitious to aspire to him’ (22–3). But they are quoting him even at that moment: Chaucer, saying farewell to his Troilus and Criseyde, told his ‘litel myn tragedye’ to avoid competing with its predecessors and only ‘kis the steppes where as thou seest pace / Virgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan, and Stace’ (Chaucer, Riv, 5.1786, 1791–2). The mention of Stace (Statius) recalls that the Thebaid itself ends by disclaiming any intention of rivalling the divine Aeneid, wishing only to ‘longe sequere et vestigia semper adora’ [follow afar and ever venerate its footsteps] (Statius, 12.817).

  Indeed, the allusions to and near-quotations of earlier works may, as in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, remind one of the survival of voices from the past. The authors of The Two Noble Kinsmen borrow from their own earlier works, often in contexts that question the values embodied there, and make their own characters highly self-conscious about how they will be remembered. Gerald’s inflated opinion of his entertainment for Theseus is shown in his quotation from the end of Ovid’s Metamorphoses: in Golding’s translation, it reads, ‘Now have I brought a woork too end which neither Joves feerce wrath, / Nor sword, nor fyre, nor freating age with all the force it hath / Are able too abolish quyght’ (Ovid, 15.984–6). Horace made the same claim in Ode 3.30.1, ‘Exegi monumentum aere perennius’ [I have erected a monument more lasting than bronze], to which Shakespeare several times alludes in the Sonnets (pub. 1609). Webster ended his preface to The White Devil (1612) with words that he evidently took as his motto, Martial’s grand statement about books (Epigrams 10.2.12): ‘non norunt, Haec monumenta mori’ [these are monuments that do not know how to die]. It says something about the mood of The Two Noble Kinsmen that its monument should be a pillar, symbol of limitation, and that the only reference to lasting fame should come from the pedant Gerald, wandering in from another age to quote an author not yet born. It is Theseus, the setter-up of pillars, who ends the play by warning against too much disputing with the gods, ‘That are above our question’. No wonder the Epilogue has to remind the spectators that what thay have witnessed is only ‘a tale’.

  TEXT

  The textual notes in this edition explain, in abbreviated form, the difference between the edited text and the one on which it is based (the ‘basic text’). In order to decide how much justification there is for emendation or addition to a basic text, an editor has to assess its reliability. What sort of manuscript lies behind it? How was it prepared for the press? How did the compositors set up the type? How thoroughly was it proofread?

  As is clear from the play’s publication history, the 1634 quarto of The Two Noble Kinsmen is the only possible basic text. Two openings from it are reproduced as Fig. 15 and 16: pp. 14–15 (C3v–C4) and 46–7 (G3v–G4) respectively. (Fig. 15 shows part of 1.3 and 1.4, generally thought to be Shakespeare’s; 3.5 and 3.6 (here ‘Scaena 7’) in Figure 16 are attributed to Fletcher.) The figures in parentheses are the ‘signatures’ added at the printing house. For a quarto volume, each printed sheet was folded twice to make a gathering of four leaves (eight pages). This procedure allowed a number of pages to be printed simultaneously, but it was obviously essential that the type for each page should be correctly placed on the sheet – hence the ‘catch-word’ at the end of each page, which allowed for quick checking. The signature indicates both the gathering (usually by a letter) and the page of the gathering, numbered on one side only. Since only the first three pages of a quarto gathering were normally ‘signed’, neither of the openings illustrated here contains a signature.