Our market. ’Tis in vain, I see, to stay ye:

  10 Have at the worst can come then! Now, what say ye?

  And yet mistake me not: I am not bold;

  We have no such cause. If the tale we have told

  (For ’tis no other) any way content ye –

  For to that honest purpose it was meant ye –

  15 We have our end; and ye shall have ere long,

  I dare say, many a better, to prolong

  Your old loves to us. We, and all our might,

  Rest at your service. Gentlemen, goodnight!

  Flourish. [Exit.]

  FINIS

  APPENDICES

  Source material for The Two Noble Kinsmen can be found in G. Harold Metz’s Sources of Four Plays Attributed to Shakespeare, which reprints Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale and brief extracts from Beaumont’s The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn, Sidney’s The Arcadia, Plutarch’s The Life of Theseus and Sidney’s The Lady of May. These appendices do not attempt to duplicate his valuable and easily accessible collection. Instead, the first two provide supplementary material on John Fletcher, still a little-known figure, while the others focus on problems of production. The verses in Appendix 1 may be part of the context in which The Two Noble Kinsmen was written. The frontispiece to the 1647 Beaumont and Fletcher Folio (Appendix 2) is an important factor in the creation of Fletcher’s posthumous reputation as Beaumont’s other self. The Beaumont masque (Appendix 3) is printed in full because, as will be clear from my Introduction and from Appendix 4, I do not think its influence is confined to the morris dance episode. The remaining appendices provide information and conjecture which, although perhaps more detailed than most readers will want, might be of interest to anyone thinking of staging the play.

  APPENDIX 1

  John Fletcher, ‘Upon An Honest Man’s Fortune’

  This is a modernized text of the verses printed in the 1647 Folio of Beaumont and Fletcher’s Comedies and Tragedies, immediately after The Honest Man’s Fortune. They do not directly comment on the play or performance, and the use of the indefinite article in the title may be significant. However, the unusual placement of the poem suggests that the Folio editors must have known some tradition linking it with the play. The manuscripts give a variety of titles, the most appropriate of which is ‘Against Astrologers’; a commonplace book belonging to the Skipwith family (members of the Huntingdon circle) describes them simply as ‘Verses by Jack: Fletcher’ (Beal, 1: 1.80–1).

  You that can look through heaven and tell the stars,

  Observe their kind conjunctions and their wars,

  Find out new lights and give them where you please –

  To those men honours, pleasures; to those ease;

  5 You that are God’s surveyors and can show

  How far and when and why the wind doth blow,

  Know all the charges of the dreadful thunder,

  And when it will shoot over or fall under:

  Tell me, by all your art I conjure ye –

  10 Yes, and by truth – what shall become of me?

  Find out my star, if each one, as you say,

  Have his peculiar angel and his way;

  Observe my fate; next fall into your dreams,

  Sweep clean your houses, and new line your schemes,

  15 Then say your worst: or have I none at all?

  Or is it burnt out lately? Or did fall?

  Or am I poor, not able, no full flame?

  My star, like me, unworthy of a name?

  Is it, your art can only work on those

  20 That deal with dangers, dignities, and clothes,

  With love or new opinions? You all lie:

  A fish wife hath a fate, and so have I,

  But far above your finding. He that gives

  Out of his providence to all that lives,

  25 And no man knows his treasure, no, not you;

  He that made Egypt blind, from whence you grew

  Scabby and lousy, that the world might see

  Your calculations are as blind as ye;

  He that made all the stars you daily read,

  30 And from thence filch a knowledge how to feed,

  Hath hid this from you; your conjectures all

  Are drunken things, not how but when they fall.

  Man is his own star, and the soul that can

  Render an honest and a perfect man

  35 Commands all light, all influence, all fate;

  Nothing to him falls early or too late.

  Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,

  Our fatal shadows that walk by us still,

  And when the stars are labouring, we believe

  40 It is not that they govern, but they grieve

  For stubborn ignorance; all things that are

  Made for our general uses are at war,

  Even we among our selves, and from the strife

  Your first unlike opinions got a life.

  45 O man, thou image of thy maker’s good,

  What canst thou fear, when breathed into thy blood

  His spirit is, that built thee? What dull sense

  Makes thee suspect, in need, that providence?

  Who made the morning, and who placed the light

  50 Guide to thy labours? Who called up the night

  And bid her fall upon thee like sweet showers

  In hollow murmurs, to lock up thy powers?

  Who gave thee knowledge? Who so trusted thee,

  To let thee grow so near himself, the tree?

  55 Must he then be distrusted? Shall his frame

  Discourse with him, why thus and thus I am?

  He made the angels thine, thy fellows all,

  Nay, even thy servants, when devotions call.

  Oh, canst thou be so stupid then, so dim,

  60 To seek a saving influence, and lose him?

  Can stars protect thee? Or can poverty,

  Which is the light to Heaven, put out his eye?

  He is my star, in him all truth I find,

  All influence, all fate, and when my mind

  65 Is furnished with his fullness, my poor story

  Shall outlive all their age, and all their glory.

  The hand of danger cannot fall amiss

  When I know what, and in whose power, it is.

  Nor want, the curse of man, shall make me groan;

  70 A holy hermit is a mind alone.

  Doth not experience teach us all we can

  To work ourselves into a glorious man?

  Love’s but an exhalation, to best eyes,

  The matter spent; and then the fool’s fire dies.

  75 Were I in love, and could that bright star bring

  Increase to wealth, honour, and every thing,

  Were she as perfect good as we can aim –

  The first was so, and yet she lost the game.

  My mistress then be knowledge and fair truth:

  80 So I enjoy all beauty and all youth,

  And though to time her lights and laws she lends,

  She knows no age that to corruption bends.

  Friends’ promises may lead me to believe,

  But he that is his own friend knows to live.

  85 Affliction, when I know it, is but this:

  A deep allay whereby man tougher is

  To bear the hammer, and, the deeper still,

  We still arise more image of his will;

  Sickness, an humorous cloud ’twixt us and light,

  90 And death, at longest, but another night.

  Man is his own star, and that soul that can

  Be honest is the only perfect man.

  APPENDIX 2

  The portrait-frontispiece of John Fletcher, 1647

  For the 1647 Folio of Beaumont and Fletcher’s Comedies and Tragedies, the publisher Humphrey Moseley commissioned William Marshall, a well-known engraver of emblematic portraits, to provide an image of Fletcher that would make up for the lack of any available portrait of his collaborator Francis Beaumont. Marshall’s engraving is based on an anonymous portrait of Fletcher, now in the National Portrait Gallery, London, but the emblematic trappings are his own. The idea of making Fletcher’s bust arise from the twin peaks of Parnassus, thus implying that his own talent was infused with that of his deceased friend (see p. 65 for the idea of one soul in two bodies) may have been suggested by Sir John Berkenhead, whose verses appear under the portrait. The banner above it, supported by Comedy and Tragedy, identifies Fletcher as Poetarum ingeniosissimus Joannes Fletcherus, Anglus, Episcopi Lond [iniensis] Fili[us].

  Felicis aevi ac Praesulis Natus; comes

  Beaumontio; sic, quippe Parnassus, biceps;

  Fletcherus unam in Pyramida furcas agens.

  Struxit chorum plus simplicem vates duplex;

  5 Plus duplicem solus: nec ullum transtulit;

  Nec transferendus: Dramatum aeterni sales,

  Anglo Theatro, Orbi, Sibi, superstites.

  Fletchere, facies absq3 vultu pingitur:

  Quantus! vel umbram circuit nemo tuam.

  Berkenhead was a well-known propagandist who edited the official royalist journal, Mercurius Aulicus, until the defeat of Charles I in 1645. His verses (made extremely difficult by their forced metaphysical wit) seem never to have been translated: this version is slightly adapted from that of Richard Proudfoot, and Roland Mayer of the classics department of King’s College, London.

  The Most Ingenious of Poets, John Fletcher,

  Englishman, Son of the Bishop of London

  Son of a happy age and father, friend to Beaumont and thus a two-headed Parnassus, Fletcher forces the two to join in a single monument. As the double author wrought a chorus that seemed of one piece, the single author doubled it. He imitated no one, nor is he to be imitated. Eternal wit of the plays, surviving the English stage, the Globe, Wit itself. Fletcher, your features are depicted here, but not your spirit – so great, that no one can compass even your shadow.

  The notes are mostly by Roland Mayer, with additions by Richard Proudfoot and me. They are keyed to the line numbers of the Latin original. Berkenhead also contributed, in English, one of the large number of commendatory poems prefixed to the 1647 folio. ‘JB’ refers to this poem, which, as Mayer points out, is the best gloss on the Latin.

  APPENDIX 3

  Francis Beaumont, The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn

  Reproduced from the edition of Philip Edwards, in A Book of Masques, ed. S. Wells and T. J. B. Spencer, Cambridge University Press, 1967, pp. 131–42. The masque was first printed in an undated quarto (c. 1613); a shorter, possibly earlier, manuscript seems the basis for the version in the 1647 Beaumont and Fletcher Folio. Edwards, like other modern editors, prints the Q text. His notes and collations are not reproduced here; however, two points should be noted. First, ‘country sports’ (line 225) is ‘clownish sports’ in F. Second, lines 227–35 may suggest that the She-Fool presents the dance, but Bowers argues that ‘ushering them in’ should appear on a line by itself after the list of performers, making it clear that the Pedant, like Gerald in The Kinsmen, is the presenter.

  [DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  Mercury

  Iris

  Four Naiads

  Five Hyades

  Four Cupids

  Statues The first anti-masque

  " "

  " "

  " "

  A Pedant

  A May Lord

  A May Lady

  A Servingman

  A Chambermaid

  A Country Clown or Shepherd

  A Country Wench The second anti-masque

  " "

  " "

  " "

  " "

  " "

  " "

  An Host

  An Hostess

  A He-Baboon

  A She-Baboon

  A He-Fool

  A She-Fool The second anti-masque

  " "

  " "

  " "

  " "

  " "

  Fifteen Olympian Knights; the masquers

  Chorus of Twelve Priests of Jupiter]

  THE MASQUE

  OF THE INNER TEMPLE AND GRAY’S INN,

  GRAY’S INN AND THE INNER TEMPLE:

  presented before his Majesty, the Queen’s Majesty,

  the Prince, Count Palatine and the Lady Elizabeth their

  Highnesses, in the Banqueting House at Whitehall

  on Saturday the twentieth day of February, 1613

  * * *

  To the worthy Sir Francis Bacon, his Majesty’s Solicitor-General, and the grave and learned Bench of the anciently allied houses of Gray’s Inn and the Inner Temple, the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn.

  Ye that spared no time nor travail in the setting forth, ordering, and 5 furnishing of this masque, being the first fruits of honour in this kind which these two societies have offered to his Majesty, will not think much now to look back upon the effects of your own care and work; for that whereof the success was then doubtful, is now happily performed and graciously accepted. And that which you were then to 10 think of in straits of time, you may now peruse at leisure. And you Sir Francis Bacon especially, as you did then by your countenance and loving affection advance it, so let your good word grace it and defend it, which is able to add value to the greatest and least matters.

  This Masque was appointed to have been presented the Shrove Tuesday 15 before, at which time the masquers, with their attendants and divers others, gallant young gentlemen of both houses, as their convoy, set forth from Winchester House, which was the rendezvous, towards the Court, about seven of the clock at night.

  This voyage by water was performed in great triumph. The 20 gentlemen masquers being placed by themselves in the King’s royal barge with the rich furniture of state, and adorned with a great number of lights placed in such order as might make best show.

  They were attended with a multitude of barges and galleys, with all variety of loud music, and several peals of ordnance. And led by two admirals.

  Of this show his Majesty was graciously pleased to take view, with the Prince, the Count Palatine and the Lady Elizabeth their Highnesses, at the windows of his privy gallery upon the water, till their landing, which was at the privy stairs; where they were most honourably 30 received by the Lord Chamberlain, and so conducted to the vestry.

  The hall was by that time filled with company of very good fashion, but yet so as a very great number of principal ladies and other noble persons were not yet come in, whereby it was foreseen that the room would be so scanted as might have been inconvenient. And thereupon 35 his Majesty was most graciously pleased, with the consent of the gentlemen masquers, to put off the night until Saturday following, with this special favour and privilege, that there should be no let as to the outward ceremony of magnificence until that time.

  At the day that it was presented, there was a choice room reserved 40 for the gentlemen of both their houses, who coming in troop about seven of the clock, received that special honour and noble favour, as to be brought to their places by the Right Honourable the Earl of Northampton, Lord Privy Seal.

  The Device or Argument of the Masque

  45 Jupiter and Juno, willing to do honour to the marriage of the two famous rivers Thamesis and Rhene, employ their messengers severally, Mercury and Iris, for that purpose. They meet and contend: then Mercury for his part brings forth an anti-masque all of spirits or divine natures: but yet not of one kind or livery (because that had been so 50 much in use heretofore) but as it were in consort like to broken music. And preserving the propriety of the device (for that rivers in nature are maintained either by springs from beneath, or showers from above), he raiseth four of the Naiads out of the fountains, and bringeth down five of the Hyades out of the clouds to dance. Hereupon Iris scoffs at 55 Mercury for that he had devised a dance but of one sex, which could have no life: but Mercury, who was provided for that exception, and in token that the match should be blessed both with love and riches, calleth forth out of the groves four Cupids, and brings down from Jupiter’s altar four Statues of gold and silver, to dance with the Nymphs 60 and Stars: in which dance, the Cupids being blind, and the Statues having but half life put into them, and retaining still somewhat of their old nature, giveth fit occasion to new and strange varieties both in the music and paces. This was the first anti-masque.

  Then Iris for her part, in scorn of this high-flying device, and in token 65 that the match shall likewise be blessed with the love of the common people, calls to Flora her confederate (for that the months of flowers are likewise the months of sweet showers and rainbows) to bring in a May-dance, or rural dance, consisting likewise not of any suited persons, but of a confusion or commixture of all such persons as are natural and 70 proper for country sports. This is the second anti-masque.

  Then Mercury and Iris, after this vying one upon the other, seem to leave their contention: and Mercury, by the consent of Iris, brings down the Olympian Knights, intimating that Jupiter, having after a long discontinuance revived the Olympian games, and summoned 75 thereunto from all parts the liveliest and activest persons that were, had enjoined them, before they fell to their games, to do honour to these nuptials. The Olympian games portend to the match celebrity, victory, and felicity. This was the main masque.

  The fabric was a mountain with two descents, and severed with two 80 traverses.

  At the entrance of the King

  The first traverse was drawn, and the lower descent of the mountain discovered; which was the pendant of a hill to life, with divers boscages and grovets upon the steep or hanging grounds thereof, and at the foot 85 of the hill, four delicate fountains running with water and bordered with sedges and water-flowers.

  Iris first appeared, and, presently after, Mercury, striving to overtake her.

  Iris apparelled in a robe of discoloured taffeta figured in variable 90 colours, like the rainbow, a cloudy wreath on her head, and tresses.

  Mercury in doublet and hose of white taffeta, a white hat, wings on his shoulders and feet, his caduceus in his hand, speaking to Iris as followeth.