methought she appeared like the fair nymph

  That feeds the lake with waters, or as Iris

  Newly dropped down from heaven.

  (4.1.86–8)

  The company may also have acquired at least some of the clothes from the main masque. The expenses borne by the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn took months to recover (see Edwards’ introduction to Beaumont, 128) and Gray’s Inn ordered the masquers to bring back their costumes ‘whereby some profitt might be made’ (Orbison, 8). If the Inn hoped to sell them elsewhere, the players were the most obvious buyers. Some details of the play suggest that the authors may have written in the knowledge that specific costumes were available. In 5.1, Palamon tells his knights, ‘Our stars must glister with new fire or be / Today extinct’ (5.1.69–70). At the beginning of 5.3,when Emilia refuses to be present at the tournament, Theseus tries to change her mind:

  THESEUS. You must be there:

  This trial is as ’twere i’th’ night, and you

  The only star to shine.

  EMILIA I am extinct.

  (5.3.18–20)

  The references to stars burning brighter or going out are obviously appropriate to the situations of the characters and bind Palamon and Emilia together through their language long before they are bound together by the plot. But there may be another reason for the image. The stage direction for the entry of the masquers in Beaumont’s masque describes their costumes as

  Arming doublets of carnation satin, embroidered with blazing stars of silver plate, with powderings of smaller stars betwixt…

  (296–7)

  The Olympian knights of the masque are in some ways counterparts of the knights in the play. If Palamon and his knights wore the same costumes, Palamon’s line becomes a witty allusion to the stars on their doublets. Inigo Jones’s design for a knight with an impresa shield (Fig. 19), undated but ascribed by Orgel and Strong to this period, shows the kind of work in which Burbage and Shakespeare had been involved both in Pericles and in their commission for the Earl of Rutland. It may give some idea of the decorative function the knights were intended to have in the play. The prospect of being able to use the masque costumes might have encouraged the authors to include characters who, otherwise, are not really necessary. Fletcher and Shakespeare might even, at some point, have considered the possibility of dramatizing the final tournament (as the fight at the barriers, a similar courtly event, was dramatized in Act 5 of Webster’s White Devil). It seems odd to reduce Chaucer’s two hundred knights to six if the fight was always expected to take place off stage in any case.

  The masque settings are less likely to have been re-used in the theatre, since they depended on complex and expensive machinery for scene changes, and The Two Noble Kinsmen can be performed equally effectively with or without elaborate scenery. However, it may be significant that the masque’s two main settings, the temple and the woods, are also those required by the play. Taylor suggests that the whole of Act 3 was meant to have a woodland setting (Taylor & Jowett, 42), and the ‘boscage’, as it is called in the Beaumont masque, might have reappeared in the two final scenes of Act 5. Bawcutt (12) suggests that a temple may have been visible both at the beginning of the play and in 5.1, though the quarto stage direction ‘Exeunt towards the Temple’ (1.1.218) is not conclusive evidence of the fact. The temple scene may have resembled the final tableau of Beaumont’s masque: ‘Jupiter’s altar, gilt, with three great tapers upon golden candle-sticks burning upon it: and the four Statues, two of gold and two of silver, as supporters, and Jupiter’s Priests in white robes about it’ (290–3). 5.1 would thus be the play’s equivalent to Beaumont’s main masque, with the morris dance, as Waith says (Oxf1, 32–3), serving as the equivalent of its antimasque.

  A curious feature of the morris dance in The Two Noble Kinsmen is the role of the Schoolmaster, Gerald, the general factotum who ‘does all, ye know’ (2.3.43). This character belongs to a subcategory of the comic type known as the pedant. He is usually compared with Rhombus in Sidney’s The Lady of May (1578–9) and Holofernes in Love’s Labour’s Lost, but the organizer of country-house entertainments is often depicted as a minor comic hanger-on who enjoys the sound of his own voice. Campion’s Entertainment for Queen Anne at Caversham House in April 1613 includes among its presenters a gardener who, in ‘antic fashion’, makes a doggerel speech offering gifts to the guest of honour, and Jonson’s Entertainment for Charles I’s visit to Welbeck, performed in May 1633, features a ‘Schoolemaster of Mansfield’ who introduces country sports and re-uses the phrase about the fat in the fire (cf. TNK 3.5.40) already used by Sidney (Jonson, 7.193–6). When the Jailer’s Daughter first encounters Gerald, she reads his palm and announces that he is a tinker. Later, in her madness, she refers to a ‘fantastical’ character that she calls ‘Giraldo, Emilia’s Schoolmaster’ (4.3.13), who is supposed to have written a song. Is this the same person as Gerald? If the latter is supposed to be known personally to the court (Theseus calls him ‘dear Domine’ at 3.5.134 (RP)), this fact makes the morris-dance episode, and particularly Emilia’s kind words for it, more intelligible. A remote possibility, given that the morris dance in 3.5 would be recognized as belonging to a court entertainment, is that the King’s Men were making fun of the pretensions of some court figure with an Italian name. As it happens, there were several possible targets. Two are musicians – Alfonso Ferrabosco, who composed songs for all of Jonson’s masques before 1611, and Giovanni Coperario, who, as everyone must have known, was in fact the Englishman John Cooper. Ferrabosco seems to have quarrelled with Jonson following their collaboration on the masque Love Freed from Ignorance and Folly in February 1611 (Chan, 272n.), which might have provided a motive for Fletcher to satirize him. But Gerald, with his mysterious ‘machine’ (3.5.112), might also be a satire on Constantino de’ Servi, a visiting architect who had worked for the Medici. Campion, whose masque for the Somerset wedding in December 1613 de’ Servi designed, described him as being ‘too much of himself’ – i.e., too full of himself – and the Italian was blamed for its failure: in particular, his cloud machine creaked as it came down and its ropes were inartistically visible (Strong, 96). Court performances generally managed to generate ill will among all parties involved, as is clear from Jonson’s satires on his collaborator Inigo Jones. The morris-dance episode may give us a dim echo of some other real-life quarrel.

  APPENDIX 5

  The morris

  (a) Country sports

  The success of Beaumont’s country-dance antimasque probably had something to do with the phenomenon that Leah Marcus has called ‘the politics of mirth’: the encouragement of traditional pastimes by the Jacobean court. While this encouragement was no doubt a way of defusing popular unrest and counteracting puritanism, the events themselves were genuinely well-liked. In May–June 1613 Queen Anne made a progress to Bath and Bristol, and it was reported that she had been particularly delighted not only with the aristocratic entertainments offered her but also with the ‘country sports’ (Chamberlain, 1.147).

  The most famous sports were the Cotswold Games. Michael Drayton described them in Polyolbion, and in the year of its publication (1612) they took on a new lustre when Captain Robert Dover, a member of Gray’s Inn, began to preside over them (Whitfield, 13–14). Since Beaumont’s masque was partly sponsored by Gray’s Inn, his linking of a main masque of Olympic games with an antimasque of rural May games would have been highly topical. Support for Dover’s games, and insistence on their antiquarian value, became commonplace among both courtiers and literary men. An anniversary volume, Annalia Dubrensia (1636), contained verses from Jonson, Drayton, Heywood and many others. Many of them compared Dover to Hercules and Theseus, supposedly the respective originators of the Olympian and Pithian games (see Whitfield, 115–16, 150).

  (b) The dance

  The illustrated map to the section of Drayton’s poem dealing with the Cotswolds (Fig. 20) shows a group of country dancers whose banner reads ‘Heigh for Cotswold’, the standard cry of dancers loyal to their local team (compare the Second Countryman’s ‘hey for the weavers’ (2.3.51)). The nature of the dance in the play can only be glimpsed from Beaumont’s statement (240–3) that much of the delight of the antimasque came from the variety of individual performances within the dance structure. The participants include figures associated with the traditional morris, as well as others who appear to have been fashionable in seventeenth-century shows: the Bavian, or baboon, is a variation on the ape or monkey; the comic Host reappears, and sings, in The Lover’s Progress (1623); and a comic Chamberlain dances with a pair of apes in Shirley’s Cupid and Death (1652). It is surprising that no hobby-horse is mentioned either in Beaumont’s masque or in the play, since it was normally regarded as indispensable to the morris (see especially 4.1 of Fletcher’s Women Pleased (1618)). Probably the Bavian was his replacement: both roles involve animal impersonation and wild, indecent gestures (Fig. 21).

  Julian Pilling, who has examined the scene from the point of view of a dance historian, notes several possible types of morris dance. In one with six dancers, a Maid Marian and a fool, the dancers, all dressed differently, compete for the favour of a lady in the centre of a ring (Pilling, 26). In another type they are in pairs, with both men and women taking part and perhaps dancing round a maypole (28). As noted above (pp. 120–121) either kind of dance could be made thematically relevant to the play. Pilling thinks that the Schoolmaster and Pirithous’ lines (3.5.142–3, 150) imply the presence of a painted maypole on stage. The maypole, of course, had a phallic significance, and the morris itself was seen by its opponents – for instance, Philip Stubbes, in his Anatomy of Abuses (1583) – as an occasion for licentious behaviour. The recent productions that have had the resources to perform the dance fully have made the most of its sexual implications.

  Stubbes gives a smug account of how dancers were once taken for madmen, ‘for who seing them leap, skip & trip like Goates & hindes, if hee never saw them before, would not think them either mad, or els possest with some furie?’ (O1v–O2). A fashion for ‘mad’ dancing developed; in France at the same period, the mad dance ‘cultivated an “official’‘ grotesque style’ (Franko, Dance, 95). In England, the apparently absurd idea of involving the mad Daughter in an aristocratic entertainment would recall Jonson’s Love Freed from Ignorance and Folly (1611), where the performers were ‘she-fools’, and Campion’s masque, where Mania (personifying madness) introduces a dance of ‘franticks’.

  (c) The rebus

  There is no indication of how the performers created the rebus on ‘morris’. Gerald asks Theseus to look first at a ‘mighty “Moor” of mickle weight’ (Morr in the quarto spelling) and then at ‘Is’, which, ‘being glued together, / Makes “Morris”?’ (3.5.117–19) – aptly enough, since morris was often derived (wrongly) from moorish. Bawcutt, annotating this passage, suggests that ‘possibly the Schoolmaster held up two emblematic pictures, or there may even have been two characters on stage, one dressed as a Moor and one as Winter’ – that is, ‘ice’. Perhaps a Moor actually appears: a real actor in costume, an artificial figure (even a doll), or, as Leech’s note suggests, the word Morr on a board. The phrase ‘of mickle weight’ might mean that Gerald is lifting a heavy object – perhaps something like the shield carried in Pericles which represents ‘a black Ethiop reaching at the sun’ (2.2.20). How the two parts of this rebus were ‘joined together’ is not explained. In some modern productions (Berkeley, RSC) the villagers march on, each carrying one of the letters that spell out ‘morris’. But the Schoolmaster has already told the dancers to ‘Break comely out’ before Theseus (3.5.20), which seems to mean that he wants their entrance, in costume, to have a surprise effect.

  I think it most likely that the mighty Moor was one of the artificial giants, stuffed with brown paper and tow, who used to head the procession at the annual Midsummer Watch, while his bearers let off fireworks to clear the way (Robertson & Gordon, xvii). The Midsummer Watch, in the early sixteenth century, often included morris dancers. Most of its pageantry was later transferred to the Lord Mayor’s Show, where the Moors were usually replaced by wild men, but the giants, brought out and re-used year after year, were well remembered. Fletcher could have read of midsummer customs in Stow’s Survey of London of 1603 (1.101–3; quoted in Robertson and Gordon, xvi–xvii), which mentions both giants and morris dancers. Since the pageants often had labels attached to them to make their meaning clearer, perhaps the Schoolmaster simply attached a label saying ‘Is’ to the giant Moor. Or perhaps it made some sort of hissing sound, or perhaps is, an alternative spelling for ice, indicates some other kind of pageant. Rebuses are quite common in the period; Jonson’s Alchemist contains a particularly absurd one (Jonson 5: 2.6.19–24) and Lord Mayor’s Shows liked to play on the name of the incoming mayor.

  APPENDIX 6

  The music

  The songs that open and close Act 1 were probably written especially for the play. ‘Roses, their sharp spines being gone’ is similar to others used in wedding masques: for example, Campion’s song for the marriage of Lord Hay in 1607, which also accompanies the strewing of flowers: ‘Earth hath no princelier flowers / Than roses white and roses red (Campion, p. 215). The song has been popular outside its original context; it was used in a 1901 Twelfth Night at Her Majesty’s Theatre and in two later productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Gooch & Thatcher, 5.1963–4). The absence of songs for the fifth act is surprising in a play concerned so much with balance, but elaborate musical effects are specified for the temple scene (5.1) and solemn music probably accompanied the final exit of all the characters in 5.4. The cornets mentioned in many stage directions were the most frequently used stage instruments (Austern, 172–3), capable of both brass and wind sounds. The sixteenth-century cornet had finger-holes instead of valves (Sider, 401); it could mimic hunting horns, but also play chamber music and dances (403). It seems generally thought that trumpets distinguish royalty from the minor dignitaries announced by cornets (404). In The Two Noble Kinsmen trumpets are specified only in 5.3, where Emilia hears them from off stage. The intention must have been to make this scene, in decibels at least, the play’s climax.

  Given the apparent connection between The Two Noble Kinsmen and Beaumont’s masque, it would be interesting to know whether the company used any music from the latter in the play. Unfortunately, the masque description does not identify a composer. Some surviving music of the period, attributed in manuscript to Giovanni Coperario and given the general title of ‘Gray’s Inn’, has subtitles which might associate it with Beaumont’s masque: ‘the Maypole’, ‘the two merry maids’, ‘the morris’. It would be attractive to think that these tunes were actually used in the morris­dance scene, but, although Andrew Sabol (573, 577–8, 583) accepts this attribution, most other music historians have been sceptical about it. Philip Edwards draws attention to an anonymous piece in the same manuscript, called ‘Sir Francis Bacon’s Masque I’, which seems a still more plausible attribution; Bacon was the prime mover of this particular masque, which is why Beaumont dedicated his descriptive pamphlet to him.

  The morris was usually accompanied with singing (Olson, 425), and Beaumont’s masque description seems to distinguish between ‘the music’ (237) and ‘the dance’ (240). A wedding song and dance in a similar scene of Massinger’s Guardian (c. 1633) are clearly separate events. So it is possible that the direction at 3.5.135 of The Two Noble Kinsmen once included a song as well as a dance; this might explain why the compositor has set Gerald’s final doggerel (3.5.136–45) as if it were a song.

  In the text of the play as it survives, however, all the songs after Act 1 belong to the Jailer’s Daughter. Only fragments are quoted in the text, sometimes followed by ‘&.’, which probably means that she was meant to sing more than one verse. They are popular songs and belong to an English rather than a classical setting. The first (3.4.19), is based on ‘Childe Waters’, where the heroine offers to follow her lover as a page and he tells her,

  Then you must cutt your gowne of green

  An inche above your knee,

  Soe must you doe your yellow loekes

  Another inch above your eye.

  (Sargent & Kittredge, 122)

  Thematically, it resembles the ballads of ‘Young Beichan’ and the ‘Fair Flower of Northumberland’, in which a young woman sets a prisoner free out of love for him: in the first (as in ‘Child Waters’) he eventually marries her, while in the second he betrays and abandons her.

  At 3.5.60 the Daughter’s choice of ‘The George Alow’ seems vaguely relevant to her obsession with ships at sea in 3.4. A ballad called ‘The second parte of the Sailor’s onely Delight: Shewing the brave fight between George-Aloe, the Sweepe­stakes and certain French­men at Sea’ was registered with the Stationers’ Company in 1611 (Rollins, 955). As the surviving words do not coincide exactly with the Daughter’s, Rollins thinks she may have sung the (lost) first part, but in fact some of the surviving ballad is similar to the lines quoted in the play:

  ‘O hail, O hail, you lusty gallants,

  With hey, with ho, for and a nony no,

  From whence is your good ship, and whether is she bound’

  And along the course of Barbary.

  (Sargent & Kittredge, 610–11)

  ‘There was three fools’ (3.5.68) has no obvious relation to the scene except in so far as the Daughter enjoys calling everyone else a fool. It is a variation on ‘There were three jolly Welshmen’ or ‘There were three men of Gotham’. A broadside (Choice of Inuentions, Or Seuerall sorts of the figure of three) published in 1632, and said to go to the tune of ‘Rock the Cradle, Sweet John’, has survived as a nursery rhyme (Opie & Opie, 421–3). In the broadside, the words corresponding to the Daughter’s are: