The least understandable dash occurs at 4.1.45, before the Wooer’s ‘No Sir not well’, which is followed by another speech prefix for the same character. Like most editors, I simply removed that speech prefix. However, Richard Proudfoot thinks that the dash was meant to indicate an insertion in the manuscript, and that the compositors, misreading it, placed the Wooer’s line in the wrong place. He suggests that it should cue the Second Friend’s ‘Not well?’ (Proudfoot & Rasmussen, xiv–xv) and the Oxford/Norton edition adopts this reading. It seems to me that, if one is going to alter the order of the speeches, the most logical and effective realignment would be the one suggested by W. L. Montgomery and printed in the textual notes to the Oxford Shakespeare (p. 632):

  JAILER

  Well, sir?

  WOOER

  No, sir, not well.

  2 FRIEND

  Not well?

  1 FRIEND

  Not right?

  WOOER

  ’Tis too true; she is mad.

  In this reading, the Wooer, who has been hesitating how best to break the news, picks up the Jailer’s word, ‘well’, and one Friend repeats it while the other deduces his real meaning. Again, I would recommend this to directors but cannot be sure that it is what Fletcher wrote.

  A minor puzzle is the Q stage direction at 2.3.24: ‘Enter .4. Country people, & one with a garlond before them’. The Oxford editors emend this to make one of the four carry the garland himself; the New Cambridge editors omit the final phrase on the theory that the garland-bearer is unnecessary and is not mentioned again. I now think that this direction can be compared to the opening direction of 1.1, which, after the entry of Hymen, specifies ‘a Boy, in a white Robe before singing, and strewing Flowres’. In both cases, I would argue, the use of ‘before’ suggests an afterthought on someone’s part, perhaps marginally inserted either by the author or the scribe. Since the garland is to be won by Arcite, who enters with it in 2.5, I should guess that the garland-bearer was a court servant or official, and that he was meant to make some announcement of the forthcoming games, thus prompting the Countryman’s ‘My masters, I’ll be there, that’s certain’ (2.3.25). An announcement that was intended for reading out loud (perhaps by the Herald whose presence in 1.4 seems rather unnecessary) would have been on a separate sheet (see Stern, 175) and could easily have been lost before the playtext got to the printing house. Or perhaps the direction is a false start (like the entrance of Arcite in 3.5) and it was recognized that it would be simpler to have the Countrymen enter in mid-conversation. A director could, however, use this stage direction to justify some sort of ceremonial procession establishing the importance of the games. It should also be noted that the third Countryman’s ‘Do we all hold against the Maying?’ (2.3.37) is something of a change of subject, since the morris dance is to happen a day after the sports.

  CASTING AND DOUBLING

  Doubling charts are a feature of many Arden 3 editions. I did not provide one because it seemed to me that, with two plots that barely intersect, and so many characters who are specified as appearing only once or twice, there were far too many possible doubles: the three Queens disappear after Act 1; Artesius, Valerius, the Schoolmaster and Countrywomen have only one scene; the Countrymen only two; and the Jailer is apparently the only character from the subplot who ever interacts with any of the main plot characters, though his two Friends probably form part of Theseus’ court. Pirithous, oddly enough, is virtually impossible to double, although he has very few lines until, in 4.2 and 5.3, he has to utter two of the most difficult speeches in Shakespeare. It would theoretically be possible to double Palamon with the Wooer and Arcite with the Doctor, the characters whom the Daughter in 5.2 apparently imagines them to be. But 3.5 is the only scene in which the Schoolmaster and Countrywomen appear, as well as the only one in which the Daughter is part of the same stage world as Theseus’ court (otherwise, she could in fact be doubled with either Emilia or Hippolyta). The Schoolmaster could double as the Doctor or Jailer or even the Wooer, while the five boys who played the women might have been dancers used only in this scene, or they might have been played by the three Queens and the two women who later accompany Emilia to the temple in 5.1 (they probably accompany her most of the time, and one of them has a few lines in 2.2). I once thought that the three Queens were played by men, but am now persuaded that they would have been roles for boy actors, although the definition of ‘boy’ in this period is also somewhat fluid, as boys who played women often had to wait for adult male roles to become available.

  The size of this cast is surprising. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor have noted that, although the speaking roles in the three texts of Hamlet range from twenty-five to thirty-one in number, ‘all three texts can, at a pinch, be acted by a company made up of eight adult actors and three boys or women’ (Thompson and Taylor, 559–60). The opening scene of The Two Noble Kinsmen calls for five boy actors with substantial speaking parts as well as a number of extra women dressed as nymphs and train-bearers. The morris-dance scene (3.5) requires at least seventeen characters, even if one omits Arcite (as I do). The temple scene (5.1), because of the six knights who accompany Palamon and Arcite, brings at least thirteen characters on stage at once. The final scene, as often in Renaissance plays, is also a large one. If Arcite’s three knights are meant to appear again (although there is no direction for them), there might be as many as fifteen characters on stage. And in fact this is probably a bare minimum, since Theseus and Hippolyta would normally be accompanied by attendants.

  Developing a view that I suggested earlier, I would argue that the most logical explanation for this unusual casting pattern is that the play was designed for performance by two companies, who rehearsed most of it separately. The King’s Men provided the actors for Theseus, Hippolyta, Emilia, Pirithous and the three Queens; another company, perhaps Queen Elizabeth’s Men, provided Palamon, Arcite and the characters in the Jailer’s Daughter plot. The table below will show how this worked: I have used roman type for the ‘Theseus group’ and italic for the ‘Kinsmen group’.

  Act 1

  1 Theseus, Hippolyta, Pirithous, Emilia, 3 Queens, boy singer

  2 Palamon, Arcite, Valerius

  3 Pirithous, Hippolyta, Emilia

  4 3 Queens, Theseus, Herald (Palamon and Arcite, silent)

  5 3 Queens

  Act 2

  1 Jailer, Wooer, Daughter (Palamon and Arcite, silent)

  2 Palamon, Arcite, Jailer, Emilia, Woman

  3 Arcite, Countrymen

  4 Daughter

  5 Arcite, Theseus, Hippolya, Pirithous, Emilia

  6 Daughter

  Act 3

  1 Arcite, Palamon

  2 Daughter

  3 Arcite, Palamon

  4 Daughter

  5 Schoolmaster, six men, five women, Daughter, Theseus, Hippolyta, Emilia, Pirithous

  6 Palamon, Arcite, Theseus, Hippolyta, Pirithous, Emilia

  Act 4

  1 Jailer, Friends 1 and 2, Wooer, Brother, Daughter

  2 Emilia, Pirithous, Gentleman, Theseus, Hippolyta, Messenger

  3 Jailer, Wooer, Doctor, Daughter

  Act 5

  1 Theseus, Pirithous, Hippolyta, Palamon, Arcite, six Knights, Emilia

  2 Doctor, Jailer, Wooer, Daughter, Messenger

  3 Theseus, Hippolyta, Pirithous, Emilia, Servant, Arcite

  4 Palamon, three Knights, Jailer, Executioner, Messenger, Pirithous, Theseus, Hippolyta, Emilia, Arcite

  I think this shows clearly that the two casts are kept separate most of the time. This is true even when they seem to share a scene. Palamon and Arcite are visible in 1.4 and 2.1, but do not speak. In 2.2 they interact only with the Jailer, while Emilia and her Woman play their scene in another part of the stage. In 3.5, the morris dancers and the Daughter finish their interaction before the entry of the Theseus group, which has only to watch the dance and comment briefly on it before exiting. The Schoolmaster is left to round off the scene. In 5.1, the entry of the Theseus group is followed by the entry of the Kinsmen group; the Theseus group then exits and the Kinsmen’s two scenes are self-contained, as is the one for Emilia that follows. The only scenes that would require some joint rehearsal are 2.5, where Arcite meets Theseus’s court; 3.6, which finally brings the two groups together; and the final scenes, where, as in 2.5, Arcite has only a few lines to speak to the Theseus group.

  David Bevington has commented that Bartholomew Fair, which he calls Ben Jonson’s most ambitious play, ‘became possible for him through the coming together of an adult and a juvenile company’ (‘Jonson’, cxxvi). As noted above (pp. 78–9), Bartholomew Fair alludes to The Two Noble Kinsmen in a way that suggests that Nathan Field had already played Palamon. Since Field in 1613 was still acting with the Lady Elizabeth’s Men/Queen’s Revels group, it has always been hard to understand how he could have performed in a King’s Men play. A joint production would explain how the play could incorporate so much lavish spectacle and use so many female characters. Both authors appear to have written for both sets of actors, but it is possible that much of the awkwardness that I noted in the structure of The Two Noble Kinsmen (see, especially, pp. 29–31) was the result of a need to enable two casts to rehearse most of their scenes separately. If I am right, this play’s history offers yet another example of collaboration.

  TRANSLATION

  While The Two Noble Kinsmen was excluded from the Shakespeare canon, it was also excluded from most Shakespeare translations, those of François-Victor Hugo into French and Nikolaus Delius into German being exceptions. In recent years, scholars outside the Anglophone world, recognizing that their ‘Complete Works’ are no longer complete, have been turning their attention to this play. In most cases, this was the first time they had to deal with a known collaboration. George Volceanov, making the play’s first Romanian translation, wanted to produce a smoothly homogenous version, but soon became aware how much easier Fletcher was to translate than Shakespeare; more interestingly, he found it hard to convey the difficulty of the latter’s style without seeming to write badly himself (188–9). On the other hand, precisely in order to avoid homogenizing the styles, the translator of the first version to be published in Spain, Ángel-Luis Pujante, collaborated for this project with Salvador Oliva, one taking the Shakespeare scenes and the other the Fletcher ones; they then read and revised each other’s work, which they believe is also what Fletcher and Shakespeare did. A different kind of translation is available in the Bookcaps series, a bilingual edition that juxtaposes the original text with a translation into ‘plain and simple English’ prose.

  PERFORMANCE

  In 1997, I knew that most readers had never seen The Two Noble Kinsmen and probably never would see it. Conscious of the Arden reputation for comprehensiveness, I therefore provided all the information about performance history that I thought anyone could possibly want, and probably more than most people did want. Performance criticism has been rare until recently because so few critics have been able to compare productions. (An exception is Hugh Richmond’s excellent essay, which benefits from his experience of directing the play.) The Two Noble Kinsmen remains the only Shakespeare play (if we ignore Edward III and Sir Thomas More) never to have been filmed or televised, but it has a real presence online: any search engine will bring up a surprising number of reviews, photos and videos, and YouTube offers both excerpts and complete amateur productions. Shakespeare’s Globe keeps an excellent online archive, which includes Jaq Bessell’s detailed account of Tim Carroll’s production and interviews with many of its actors (see References for the URL). Basic video recordings of many professional productions, including those of the RSC and Shakespeare’s Globe, can be viewed by arrangement at those theatres.

  The play is also available as an audio-recording in the Complete Arkangel Shakespeare. This CD, released in 2004, is completely uncut and unaltered except for a couple of inserted names to indicate who is being addressed at the beginning. It can be recommended to anyone who wants to get a sense of the play in performance. The urbane delivery of the prologue by Simon Russell Beale, who also speaks the epilogue, sets the tone for a production that, surprisingly, makes nearly all the text, even the most difficult passages, both intelligible and lively. It is helped by intelligent use of sound effects. Palamon (Jonathan Firth) and Arcite (Nigel Cooke) make their first entrance on horseback, as if directly from the battlefield, while the later discovery of their unconscious bodies is set against the background noise of birds of prey, recalling the words of the queens about their husbands’ fates, to which Theseus could have abandoned them. The music by Dominique Le Gendre, with vocals by Vivien Ellis, and the various sound effects provided for the temple scene, are all appropriate, except that someone unfamiliar with the text would have difficulty identifying the sounds that follow Palamon’s speech as the fluttering doves specified in the stage directions. There are excellent performances from the four young people at the play’s centre. The production establishes a strong sense of the men’s relationship and the easy humour within it, without attempting to make any strong differentiation between them. Emilia (Helen Schlesinger) becomes increasingly serious as she realizes the role she has been trapped into playing. The Wooer (Andrew Wincott) sounds young and convincingly in love with the Daughter (Sarah-Jane Holm), whose madness is pretty and touching. The rather elderly-sounding Theseus (Geoffrey Whitehead) is paired with a charming and gracious Hippolyta (Adjopa Andoh) whose accent suggests her foreignness (though it is, oddly, not shared by her sister), and there is a delightful performance by the Schoolmaster (Geoffrey Beevers). The production brings out the mixture of hysterical grief and practical common sense in the three Queens, the humour in much of the kinsmen’s dialogue, and the curious blend of exaggeration and sincerity when, in 4.2, Emilia tries to talk herself into loving one or the other of them.

  The multiple spellings of the name that I have regularized as Pirithous (the Turner–Tatspaugh, NCS, edition gives a complete list of them) have been used as evidence both of the authorship and of the compositorial make-up of different parts of the play. From the point of view of director and actors, however, the greater problem is that the name also has two different pronunciations. Carroll told the Globe cast that they would have to settle on one pronunciation even if it sometimes meant sacrificing the metre (Bessell, Chronicle, 16). The Arkangel production settles on a three-syllable pronunciation. Many directors go out of their way to find a pronunciation for Arcite’s name that will avoid the wrong sort of laughter. I have usually heard it pronounced either with a hard ‘c’ and two syllables or with a soft ‘c’ and three syllables. On Arkangel, surprisingly, it is pronounced both ‘Arkeetay’ and ‘Arkite’, the latter only when the metre obviously requires it. One curious effect of the three-syllable pronunciation is to make the two men sound more alike: one name, like one man, could easily be substituted for the other.

  Two recent editions of the play – the updated Penguin (2009) with a section on production history by Stanley Wells and Paul Edmondson and the New Cambridge Shakespeare (2012), edited by Robert Kean Turner and Patricia Tatspaugh – contain good accounts of productions that postdate my edition, and Tatspaugh’s appendix (224–6), the most up-to-date so far, lists productions in Canada, France, Italy, the Czech Republic and Japan. These facts allow me to be brief in summarizing the play’s recent history and I have listed my own reviews in the References for those who want to read more detailed accounts.

  Two productions have, interestingly, exploited the Chaucerian connection. In 1988 Gavin Bantock’s Japanese cast performed it at Reitaku University, taking great care to make it as intelligible as possible to a non-anglophone audience. The company contextualized it by first performing a dramatization of part of The Canterbury Tales. Bantock wrote a prologue and interludes, performed in Japanese, in which the ghost of Chaucer helped to advise Shakespeare and Fletcher as they struggled to write the play. (This university production was, to my knowledge, the only one to incorporate the fact of collaboration into the performance itself.) In 2005, similarly, the RSC’s touring company accompanied their production of The Knight’s Tale with a rehearsed reading of the Fletcher–Shakespeare play. Peter Kirwan’s blog gives a brief account of it: http://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/bardathon/2006/07/25/the-two-noble-kinsmen-the-swan-theatre/, and also describes, in more detail, the 2011 production by John East, brought from Bath to Stratford for one token performance during a year that was supposed to see performances of all Shakespeare’s works. See http://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/bardathon/2011/08/07/the-two-noble-kinsmen-just-enough-the-dell-stratforduponavon/. In Canterbury, the Mirthful Oak Theatre Company gave a few outdoor performances in July 2014 at the site of its Chaucer-based visitor attraction (‘Visitors experience the sights, smells and sounds of medieval times as they are immersed within a great literary classic’) next to Canterbury Cathedral.