PRINTING AND PUBLICATION HISTORY

  Yet The Two Noble Kinsmen, the only acknowledged Shakespeare collaboration, has attracted less attention than other works now thought also to be collaborative. Much more excitement has surrounded the revival of non-Folio works in which Shakespeare probably had only a small part, if any – Edward III, Sir Thomas More, Arden of Faversham and A Yorkshire Tragedy – and even the lost Fletcher–Shakespeare collaboration, Cardenio. Nor has the play attracted the interest of the Shakespeare–Peele Titus Andronicus, the probable Shakespeare–Middleton Timon of Athens, the possible Middleton revisions to Measure for Measure and Macbeth, the Shakespeare–Wilkins Pericles, and the Shakespeare–Fletcher Henry VIII. One reason may be that, with one exception, these plays are in the 1623 Folio and thus have a long history of being studied and performed as Shakespeare’s. The exception is Pericles, which, like The Two Noble Kinsmen, was omitted from the second Shakespeare Folio of 1632. Both plays were printed in quarto a few years later by Thomas Cotes, though for different publishers, and G. R. Proudfoot and Eric Rasmussen suggest that these volumes may have been intended as supplements. By contrast with the highly successful Pericles, first published in 1609 and already in its sixth reprint in 1635, the 1634 edition of TNK was its first, and it was brought out by a publisher, John Waterson, who seems to have been a business failure. Zachary Lesser, who has studied his career, argues that his inability to maintain the success of his father’s publishing house (perhaps because customers did not associate the Waterson name with play quartos) was one reason for the neglect of the play in the seventeenth century. Lesser notes, however (178), that Humphrey Moseley, who took over some of Waterson’s titles, still had unsold copies of the first edition in 1660. Proudfoot and Rasmussen discovered sixty-two surviving copies of this quarto (vii), which suggests that Waterson had overestimated the likely demand for the work. Waterston’s rather small body of publications suggests that he was probably a royalist; Moseley himself was famous for royalist publications. The word ‘noble’ had political significance after the House of Lords was abolished in 1649, and again after its reinstatement in 1660. The play’s title, its association with Moseley and its constant stress on the importance of rank, birth and kinship, may explain why Davenant chose to adapt the play so soon after the Restoration, changing the title to The Rivals so as to reflect the romantic plot.

  Pericles, which had been ascribed in 1609 to ‘William Shakespeare’ alone, was published in the supplement to the third Shakespeare Folio in 1664, whereas The Two Noble Kinsmen got its second edition only in the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio of 1679. Given the explicit naming of both Shakespeare and Fletcher on the 1634 title page, I can only suggest that the long association of Fletcher with Beaumont and hence with collaboration made it seem more appropriate to assign a collaborative play to a volume ascribed to those two authors. Their exclusion from the Folio continues to have an effect on attitudes to the plays. For instance, the Folio-based RSC Complete Works, edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, prints them in small type and double columns, implicitly relegated to inferior status.

  COLLABORATION AND CRITICISM

  The new interest in collaboration has affected criticism of The Two Noble Kinsmen. The topics discussed remain much the same – the play’s relation to its Chaucerian source and its Jacobean context; same-sex friendship, rivalry and eroticism; and madness, especially in relation to gender issues – but they are now more likely to be interpreted as sites of contention between Shakespeare and Fletcher. There is still basic agreement about the attribution of many of the scenes. Everyone gives Shakespeare the whole of Act 1, the prose scene that opens Act 2, and most of Act 5, the exceptions being, possibly, the first seventeen lines of scene 1 and, more certainly, 5.2, which ends the story of the Jailer’s Daughter. On the other hand, no one thinks him responsible for the scene in which the young men first see Emilia or for the one in which they reminisce about previous women in their lives. There still remains, however, considerable disagreement over how far the two writers collaborated on the subplot. It is often said to be entirely Fletcher’s, once Shakespeare has introduced the characters in 2.1, but some scholars give Shakespeare the Daughter’s soliloquy in 3.2 and the first scene with the Doctor in 4.3, mainly because the latter is written in prose, which Fletcher almost never uses. The introduction to The Two Noble Kinsmen in Bate and Rasmussen’s edition takes the view that the Daughter’s scenes are ‘written by Fletcher in the style of Shakespeare’ (2356); if right, this would offer fascinating evidence of what Fletcher considered to be Shakespeare’s style. One set of computerized authorship tests (by Lowe and Matthews in 1995) apparently corroborates the usual views about Acts 1, 2 and 5, but shows ‘Fletcher writing much of Act III but with significant Shakespeare input and Shakespeare writing Act IV, though with significant Fletcher involvement’ (458). Their work confirms what I have already written about the complexity of the way in which the play was probably put together. While this does not make authorship studies irrelevant, it does show why they are so difficult.

  Scholars (e.g., Neely, Dawson, Peterson, Walworth) have usefully placed the Jailer’s Daughter in contexts such as early modern attitudes to mental illness and female physiology and what might be called the Ophelia tradition of representing female madness. Her relation to the rest of the play has also become clearer, though, as critics do not always believe the Jailer’s optimistic account of her recovery and forthcoming marriage, their readings of this relationship tend to diverge. Thus, Joan Hartwig sees the end of her story as happy and also as a parody of the main plot, showing ‘that love of a particular person is not so important as the fancy suggests. Life has a higher value than the romantic dedication to love, for which Arcite and Palamon have given all’ (189). For others, her madness is ‘something like the play’s unconscious’ (Bruster, 294), or a mirror of the kinsmen’s increasingly desperate obsession with Emilia (Herman, 12–16).

  The play’s same-sex relationships, however, tend to dominate discussion. As against the earlier emphasis on idealized friendship, many critics feel that the play depicts the failure of Palamon and Arcite to live up to this ideal (Stewart) or rejects the ideal altogether (Herman). For critics drawing on the work of René Girard and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the plot is almost a textbook example of homosocial bonding through male rivalry over a woman (Hedrick, Sinfield), though for others (Abrams, Mallette) the kinsmen’s relationship is one of unacknowledged homoerotic feeling. Helen Cooper feels that the dramatists differed profoundly over Emilia’s character, ‘with Shakespeare steering her toward preserving the “virgin’s faith” of her mind whatever the plot may impose on her, and Fletcher promoting a change of heart to a more conventional image of nuptial womanhood’ (’Jacobean’, 200). Others see Fletcher as the more radical writer. Alan Sinfield, comparing the play with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, mischievously suggests that its ideal solution would be a ménage à trois and he points out that a model for this already exists: if Chaucer is the father of the play (which is equated in the prologue with a bride), this means that Shakespeare and Fletcher must be the husbands – but, unlike their characters, ‘they can engage themselves with the same love object (the same play) without falling into violent dispute’ (77). Lili Mesterházy, who compares Fletcher’s Tamer Tamed with its predecessor, Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, notes that Fletcher mobilizes women against men in much the same way as in The Kinsmen, where their combined pressure, with the backing of Pirithous, is able to make Theseus, more than once, change his mind.

  One consequence of the search for alternatives to political and sexual norms, associated with queer theory, has been an increasingly negative response to Theseus, the man who imposes rules – and marriage – on others. His willingness to let himself be persuaded by arguments from women has been taken both as a sign of his maturity (e.g., Libby, Mahon) and as despicable weakness. Laurie Shannon, who sees him as a tyrant and Emilia as the one voice of reason in the play, finds her conversation with her waiting woman in 2.2 important not only because it indicates the possibility of a lesbian relationship but also because such a relationship would cut across the class lines that are so important to the other characters (675–6). Jody Greene, viewing the play in the context of the parallel universe of Antigone, suggests that Emilia’s love for Flavina, like Antigone’s for her brother, offers a tantalizingly brief glimpse of a relationship outside the (male) world of tyranny and conflict (408–11). I have noted the parallels between the story of the Jailer’s Daughter and that of Ariadne, who is the prototype of several Beaumont and Fletcher characters. Nicole de Wall adds that this allusion to one of Theseus’s victims offers an alternative to the ‘master narrative’: Theseus’ emphasis on stoical acceptance of things as they are.

  Though most readers of the play recognize an implicit parallel between the two noble kinsmen and the two ‘memorable worthies’ of the title page, Masten’s Textual Intercourse takes it further by suggesting a link, sometimes metaphorical and sometimes literal, between literary and sexual collaboration, particularly with regard to Beaumont and Fletcher. Those following his approach have, of course, paid particular attention to the sexual analogies in the play’s prologue. John Jowett, while he recognizes that the Beaumont–Fletcher relationship was depicted nostalgically by later writers, sees neither the Shakespeare–Fletcher relationship nor the same-sex relationships in the play as examples of male–male bonding: ‘If the text reflects the collaboration of its writing, it does so in such a way as to depict a world in which neither love nor friendship will find secure fulfillment’ (114).

  The prologue’s references to Chaucer have also been examined, in the context of early modern attitudes to the medieval period, for evidence of what Harold Bloom famously called ‘the anxiety of influence’ and Misha Teramura has called ‘the anxiety of auctoritas’. Cooper sees the play as consistently in dialogue with its source, which it makes more rather than less disturbing. Both Kathryn L. Lynch (84) and Jeffrey Knapp (141–2) focus on Theseus’ rather incongruous comparison of the two combatants to two competing nightingales and suggest that it reflects the dramatists’ sense of their own situation with relation both to Chaucer and to each other. Fletcher was thirty-three and already an experienced dramatist; Charles Cathcart finds convincing evidence of his involvement in the literary scene (and admiration for Chaucer) as early as 1600. Yet critics tend to see him as a pupil at the feet of an old master. Knapp suggests that Shakespeare, rather like Jonson with his poetic ‘sons of Ben’, began with the intention of making Fletcher his heir (138), but found himself unable to relinquish his status as leading dramatist. For Gordon McMullan and David Matthews, the effect of the Prologue is quite different: ‘The extended metaphor becomes so overblown that the effect is humorous; we know, as of course we are supposed to know, that Shakespeare and Fletcher are not really cowering under Chaucer’s long shadow’ (1).

  Here, as so often with this play, the question of tone is what divides readers. If the play is to be given a psychological and biographical reading, it seems important to know how seriously one is meant to take it. Both G. R. Proudfoot and Philip Finkelpearl, for example, think that it was put together rather hastily when the court celebrations of 1613 created a demand for new plays. Finkelpearl believes that Beaumont’s illness prevented him from further collaboration with Fletcher, thus forcing the King’s Men to call on their retired dramatist for some last-minute help. But the mere fact that a play may have been written quickly and (as I shall suggest in a moment) in difficult circumstances does not necessarily prevent it from dealing with serious issues. Finkelpearl, in a sensitive reading of the play’s contradictory messages – e.g., the two kinsmen evoke ‘the full spectrum from admiration of their purity of commitment to revulsion at their exhibitionistic machismo’ (191) – actually sees the collaboration as adding to the play’s richness with its ‘divergent but overlapping artistic impulses from dissimilar artists’ (197).

  LANGUAGE AND TEXT

  Most discussions of the two styles praise Shakespeare extravagantly by contrast with Fletcher, precisely because of the often grotesque individuality of his writing, so it is rather refreshing to find Frank Kermode describing the play’s story as ‘light in texture and sometimes rather silly’, and the Shakespearean style as ‘more obscure and mysterious than the occasion seems to require’; he wonders if the dramatist no longer cared whether or not his audience could understand him (308, 310). Peter Swaab, in his new introduction to N. W. Bawcutt’s Penguin edition, says that the Shakespearean sections contain ‘some of the least known great dramatic poetry in the language’ (xxv) but adds later that its collaborative nature probably does damage its overall effect, even though many of the play’s anomalies can be reconciled through performance (xlv– xlvi).

  Good analyses of the style of the two authors can be found in the two new introductory essays in two of the editions of The Two Noble Kinsmen that have followed mine, Peter Swaab for the Penguin (ed. N. W. Bawcutt, revised 2009) and Patricia Tatspaugh for the New Cambridge Shakespeare (ed. Turner and Tatspaugh). While it is easy to see the fault-lines where collaboration may be responsible for inconsistencies, it is harder to notice the many ways in which it succeeds. Even in the early Titus Andronicus, as Vickers (161) points out, references to Ovid’s Philomel story occur in scenes attributed to both dramatists and must have been part of their joint conception. In The Two Noble Kinsmen, the same can be said of the recurrent imagery of the sea and of horses. Shannon notes that the Fletcherian conversation between Emilia and her attendant in 2.2 reverts to the ‘flowers and dress, blossoms and patterns’ also found in the Shakespearean account of her relationship with Flavina (675); Douglas Bruster suggests that the Jailer’s Daughter is imagined as speaking in a rural northern idiom (291), which ‘appears to transcend the peculiarities of authorial style’ (278). (His argument depends on accepting 4.3 as a Shakespeare scene.) Naseeb Shaheen finds very few biblical parallels in either author, compared to those in Henry VIII; in other words, both were trying to avoid importing anachronisms into a classical setting. There is also remarkable consistency in some linguistic features of the play, particularly in the use of ‘thou’ and ‘you’ to establish Arcite as the less passionate of the kinsmen. Penelope Freedman’s study of this usage makes a point relevant to the tone of the subplot’s conclusion: although ‘mad’ characters like Malvolio and the patients in Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling are often addressed patronizingly as ‘thou’, the Wooer in his Palamon disguise addresses her with the respectful ‘you’ (107–8). Both dramatists were following general linguistic practice, but must also have shared a sense of the tone of the play and its social levels.

  I have been impressed by three essays that have implications for the text. Despite the vivid and grotesque description in Pirithous’ messenger speech (5.4.73–82), a surprising number of commentators still say that Arcite dies as a result of a fall from his horse. In fact, the main point of that speech is, as MacDonald P. Jackson notes, that ‘Arcite’s immaculate “seat in horsemanship” contributes to his death’ when the horse, unable to throw him, finally does a kind of somersault and falls on top of his rider (607). I was therefore convinced by his argument for reading ‘seat’ rather than ‘feat’ at 2.5.13 and have adopted it into this edition. Two other suggestions ought to be mentioned here. Charles Edelman argues that the stage direction ‘A battle struck within’ (p. 15 of the Quarto, 1.4.01 in this edition) is essentially a direction for music: probably trumpet calls or rather cornets imitating trumpet calls, sounding first a charge and then a retreat, followed by a flourish as the victorious Theseus enters. This seems to me a neat way of dealing with a moment that otherwise would require complicated offstage noises, and I would recommend it to a director. Peter Stallybrass, in a brilliant essay, argues for the reading ‘sex individual’ by showing that the word, derived from theological analysis of the concept of Trinity as three-in-one, could mean both ‘indivisible’ and ‘separate’. Similarly, he objects to other emendations of the text (such as ‘on’ to ‘one’) on the grounds that the two spellings, and hence the two meanings, were interchangeable. My reason for retaining ‘dividual’ is that, since the word has the same meaning, or double meaning, in either form, it seems better to choose the one that scans better and is easier to say. In performance, of course, the actor would make clear which of two meanings was to be preferred.

  The quarto punctuation includes four long dashes that suggest something odd in the text. One of them, at 5.3.89, appears simply to mark the point at which Emilia breaks off her soliloquy to express surprise at an offstage shout, but as this is only one of several moments at which this happens it is not clear why such a mark should be used here and nowhere else. More strikingly, the Schoolmaster’s speech introducing the morris dance contains dashes after the two words, or syllables, Morr and Is. No one appears to have come up with a fully convincing explanation of this passage, but John Fry of the Dublin City Morris Dancers has suggested (privately) that Gerald’s ‘mighty “Moor” of mickle weight’ represents ‘the interplay of three/four synonyms for “great”; namely “mighty” (English), “Morr” (i.e., “mór” = Scots/Irish Gaelic), “mickle” (now lowland Scots) and, possibly, “weight” (English again)’. Though I am rather dubious about this theory, I am including it, because, if Fletcher was in fact using unusual vocabulary here, the dashes might reflect the compositors’ difficulty in reading his manuscript rather than, as I and most editors have been assuming, some kind of stage business at this point.