Chaucer and Boccaccio

  Chaucer may have read the Teseida on one of his journeys to Italy in the 1370s. He must have known it well, as he made extensive use of it in other works before finally retelling its central story. In particular, he returned several times to the descriptions of the temples of Mars and Venus, and his unfinished Anelida and Arcite (before 1380) makes Creon’s Thebes the setting for a story of a forsaken woman. R. A. Pratt (604–5) may be right in saying that Chaucer would never have given the name Arcite to a character who wins and then abandons a woman if he had intended at that stage to write a poem with a hero of the same name, but, once Chaucer’s works had been collected into a single volume, readers might have been influenced by the existence of what Speght’s 1602 text calls the tale ‘Of Queene Annelida, and false Arcite’. In The Two Noble Kinsmen, Palamon insists on the word ‘false’ in connection with Arcite, and Arcite acknowledges his falseness in his final speech.

  Chaucer’s most extended tribute to Boccaccio’s poem survives as The Knight’s Tale, usually thought to date from the mid–1380s (Fig. 1). It is about one-third the length of the Teseida. By contrast with Boccaccio, Chaucer seems to have wanted to remove the links with classical literature. Theseus’ defeat of Hippolyta, which occupies the first book of Boccaccio’s poem, is dealt with in one line. There is no mention of Oedipus, Eteocles or Polynices, and the mourning women exist simply to inspire Theseus’ campaign. Neither Palamon nor Arcite is concerned with Juno’s wrath. Emilia is much less interesting, much more purely symbolic, than in Boccaccio.

  Moreover, Chaucer alters the balance between the two heroes. Boccaccio, who is thought to have portrayed himself as Arcita, not only makes him the first to see Emilia but gives him three times as many lines as Palemone and an extremely protracted and moving death (Pratt, 603). Chaucer makes Palamon the first to see Emilia, and has him insist on a prior commitment of sworn brotherhood that Arcite is betraying. Whereas both young men in Boccaccio are full of reverence towards the childlike Emilia, Chaucer discriminates between them: Palamon takes her for a goddess, whereas Arcite desires her as a woman.

  The reduction of scale extends to the handling of space, though not of time (in both versions, the events take about ten years). Boccaccio’s Teseo makes the site of Arcita’s funeral pyre the grove in which he had sung his love songs to Emilia, and Palemone commemorates him by building a temple to Juno on the same site; Chaucer locates the tournament lists there as well and places the oratories to Mars, Venus and Diana in the tournament amphitheatre itself. The sense of crowding parallels the construction of the plot, which seems designed to create as many dilemmas as possible: which young man ‘hath the worse’ – Palamon, who is in prison but able to see Emilia, or Arcite, who is free but banished? Who deserves Emilia more – the man who prays for victory or the one who prays to have her? Much criticism of the Tale, like subsequent criticism and performance of the play, has done little more than take sides in these debates.

  The main plot and its sources

  Like Pericles, but unlike any other Shakespeare play, The Two Noble Kinsmen openly acknowledges its chief source at the start. Its debt to The Knight’s Tale is made clear both in the Prologue and in the Epilogue’s reference to the play as a ‘tale’. Though the Prologue gives no indication that Chaucer was indebted to others for his story, the dramatists would certainly have known the Thebaid, if only because of John Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes, a retelling of Statius, which was first added to Chaucer’s Works in Stowe’s edition of 1561 and reprinted by Speght in his 1598 edition (revised in 1602).

  They might also have known Boccaccio’s poem, though it had been forgotten in England by the end of the seventeenth century, when Dryden could only speculate on the possibility of an Italian source for The Knight’s Tale. Francis Thynne’s Animadversions on Speght’s Chaucer (1599) states correctly that The Knight’s Tale was taken ‘out of the Thesayde of Bocas’ (Kinsley, 4.2061). There were two sixteenth-century French translations of the Teseida, both of which attributed it correctly. At least one of these, a condensed prose version of 1597 by someone known on the title page only as le Sieur D.C.C., might have been known to one or both of the dramatists. Though Melchiori thinks that Shakespeare knew only Chaucer’s version (6.xlviii), there are times when the dramatists seem closer to the Teseida than to The Knight’s Tale. The opening scene, where the request of the three queens creates a conflict of love and duty not present in Chaucer, could have been inspired by Teseida 2.2–5, where Teseo, on his honeymoon, sees a vision of his friend Peritoo, who urges him to return to his duties in Athens. Palamon’s brief ubi sunt passage in the play’s prison scene (2.2.6–8) echoes both Arcita’s three-stanza lament over the ruins of Thebes (Teseida, 4.14–16) and the death speech in which he lists the worldly pleasures that he leaves behind him: ‘Omè, dove lascio io i cari amici? / Dove le feste e il sommo diletto? / Ove i cavalli, omai fatti mendici / del lor signore?’ [Ah me, where do I leave my dear friends? Where the feastings and the supreme delight? Where the horses, impoverished now, without their lord?] (10.108). The three prayers to the gods in 5.1 occur in the sequence of the Teseida, whereas in the Tale it is Palamon who speaks first, followed by Emilia, then Arcite. (Perhaps, however, as Ann Thompson suggests (199), the order is that of Chaucer’s descriptions of the three temples, which lie behind much of the language of the prayers.) Arcite’s death, in The Knight’s Tale, results from his being pitched forward when his horse stumbles; in the Teseida, as in The Two Noble Kinsmen, the horse comes over backward on top of him. The French translator, like the dramatists, omits the classical Fury sent by Boccaccio and Chaucer, making Arcite’s horse go wild for no apparent reason.

  If Boccaccio’s portrayal of the kinsmen was weighted towards Arcite, and Chaucer’s towards Palamon, the dramatists seem to have attempted to differentiate them yet retain a balance of sympathy. The character distinction does not begin until 2.2, but thereafter both Shakespeare and Fletcher seem to envisage them in terms of the conventional but effective contrast between a calm man (Arcite) and a passionate one (Palamon). This later becomes a contrast between the influences of Mars and Venus, comparable to what one finds within Othello or the Antony of Antony and Cleopatra. Emilia’s role, inevitably, needed more extensive reworking, since Chaucer makes her speak only once, in her prayer to Diana. It may, then, be only coincidence that she sometimes sounds like Boccaccio’s heroine, who also laments the effects of her beauty (8.97), fears that future ages will curse her for all the unnecessary deaths in the tournament (8.100) and says that she is incapable of choosing between the two men (8.104–5). The French translation, ‘ne sçaurois-ie iamais faire de choix ny d’election’ [I could never make either choice or election] (Theseyde, 115v) is slightly closer to Emilia’s ‘I / Am guiltless of election’ (5.1.153–4) than Boccaccio’s ‘io non so qual di lor m’eleggesse’ [I do not know which one of them I would choose] (8.105). In both Boccaccio and Chaucer, she is present at the tournament; but Chaucer depicts her from the outside, presenting her affection toward the winner as typical female opportunism, whereas Boccaccio analyses her feelings in sympathetic detail. Her varied reactions to the cries of the supporters of the two contestants (8.107) may have made the dramatists decide to depict the offstage events of 5.3 through her eyes. Boccaccio’s Emilia sees herself as a fatal influence because, while still a child, she was engaged to a cousin of Theseus, who died young (10.69); perhaps this is the origin of the childhood friendship with Flavina, described in 1.3 of the play.

  It is usually assumed that the most famous Chaucerian dramatization, Richard Edwards’ Palamon and Arcite, could not have influenced the Jacobean dramatists because it was never printed: Edwards died within a month of its highly successful premiere, which he directed himself at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1566, before an audience that included Elizabeth I. The queen spoke enthusiastically of the actors and gave presents of money to the boys who played Hippolyta and Emilia. Fortunately, because of the queen’s presence, several eye-witnesses left detailed accounts. These show that the play featured a very large cast, a hunting scene, a tournament, and a funeral pyre for Arcite (Durand, 511; Elliott, 221, 224). Since its one surviving fragment, a song that Emilia sings after the death of Arcite, can be found in a seventeenth-century manuscript (Rollins, ‘Note’, 205), it is possible that more of the play, or at least its music, was still known in 1613; some of the original cast had been in their early teens in 1566 and had every reason to remember the occasion. One of Edwards’ incidents, as described by a spectator, may explain a small puzzle in the final scene of The Two Noble Kinsmen. When Palamon is called down from the scaffold by Pirithous, he asks bemusedly, ‘Can that be, / When Venus, I have said, is false?’ (5.4.44–5). He has said nothing of the sort, unless off stage. But in Edwards’s play Palamon, after his defeat, does reproach Venus, ‘saying that he had served her from infancy and now she had neither desire nor power to help him’ (Durand, 511). Perhaps, as R. M. Clements suggests (72), Fletcher and Shakespeare were also thinking of Edwards’s one surviving play, Damon and Pithias (1565). As Pithias, who has remained as hostage for his friend Damon, is about to die in his place, Damon rushes in and pushes the sword aside, calling, ‘Stay, stay, stay, for the kinges aduantage stay’ (Edwards, Damon, 2028–9). The breathless entry, first of the Messenger, then of Pirithous, and their repeated cries of ‘Hold’ (5.4.40–1), may recall this dramatic moment.

  The play’s subplot may also have been influenced by the Teseida. In The Knight’s Tale Palamon’s escape from prison is explained by the simple statement (1467–74) that, with a friend’s help, he drugged his jailer. In the Teseida, he pretends to be ill, sends his servant for a friendly doctor, and then, after the supposed consultation, leaves prison with the doctor, disguised as his own servant. Perhaps this combination of a doctor and changing clothes lies behind the bizarre events of The Two Noble Kinsmen, 5.2.

  The Jailer’s Daughter

  The dramatists’ decision to complicate the Chaucerian story with a subplot may have resulted as much from their difficulty in turning Chaucer’s Emilia into a central figure of the play as from the necessity of filling in the gaps in a story that requires so many lapses of time. Though the subplot has no obvious source, the woman who falls in love with her father’s prisoner is a thoroughly traditional character. Mopsa in Sidney’s Arcadia is a comic version of the type (see Thompson, ‘Jailers’ ’). Indeed, Miranda in The Tempest is a Jailer’s Daughter in relation to Ferdinand in 3.1; although her disobedience consists only in letting Ferdinand know her name, she has been seen as part of a line that goes back at least to Medea (Black, 30). A still closer parallel occurs in the complex legend of Theseus, which contains within it many of the motifs that are dispersed among the other characters of the play. Chaucer’s The Legend of Good Women combines his story with material from that of Palamon and Arcite: Ariadne and Phaedra overhear Theseus complaining in prison, and not only help him overcome the Minotaur but, with the help of his jailer (a character new to this version), enable him to escape with them. The story of Theseus’ subsequent abandonment of Ariadne, who had helped him find his way in and out of the labyrinth, had many literary versions. In Catullus’ poem on the nuptials of Peleus and Thetis, the coverlet of the marriage bed is described (rather ominously) as woven with the story of Ariadne, whose lament is given at length. Her lament also inspired what was probably the most popular of all Ovid’s Heroides: imaginary letters from women to their absent lovers, which became models for Renaissance poems of complaint. Like the Jailer’s Daughter, Ovid’s Ariadne finds herself alone, on an island, with the ship of her lover vanishing in the distance. Cold, desperate, afraid of being devoured by wolves (81–4), unable to return to the kingdom where she betrayed her father for love of Theseus, she pleads, ‘turn about your ship, reverse your sail, glide swiftly back to me!’ (149–51).

  Although Monteverdi’s opera Arianna, first produced in Mantua in 1608, was the most famous Renaissance interpretation of Ariadne’s story, Julia, in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, had already described herself as having played the part of ‘Ariadne passioning / For Theseus’ perjury and unkind flight’ (4.4.167–8) – and she is playing it even as she speaks, since her own lover has been false to her. Fletcher seems to have been equally attracted to the story. Catullus’ description of the Ariadne coverlet probably inspired the famous scene in The Maid’s Tragedy, where Aspatia, deserted by her lover, offers to be the model for an embroidery of the deserted Ariadne, attempting at the same time, as Jonathan Bate says (263–4), to rewrite the story of Theseus:

  Does not the story say, his Keele was split,

  Or his masts spent, or some kind rock or other

  Met with his vessel?…

  It should have been so.

  (Bowers, 2: 2.2.46–9)

  In her madness, the Daughter imagines the rock and makes the shipwreck occur, though she imagines that Palamon’s death has been caused by wolves. She also harps on the idea that her father will die as a consequence of her actions.

  As Clements (193–5) and Waith (Oxf1, 29) have pointed out, there are many resemblances between the Daughter and Viola in Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Coxcomb, though this part of the plot is thought to be the work of Beaumont (Bowers, 1.263). Viola leaves home to elope with her lover, who misses their rendezvous because he gets drunk with friends. She is left helpless and alone, too proud to awaken her father ‘to see his daughter’s shame’. Her comment, ‘if hee deceive mee thus, / A woman will not easily trust a man’ (1.6.7–14), may echo Ariadne’s words as quoted by Catullus: ‘Nunc iam nulla viro iuranti femina credat’ [Henceforth let no woman believe a man’s oath] (Catullus, p. 106, line 143); the Jailer’s Daughter uses much the same language:

  Sure he cannot

  Be so unmanly as to leave me here;

  If he do, maids will not so easily

  Trust men again.

  (2.6.18–21)

  Though Viola’s father is a Spanish aristocrat, not a jailer, the play also contains a jailer whose prisoners escape and who is briefly threatened with hanging even though the escapees are only a tinker and his wife. The Coxcomb was popular enough to be performed at court before Elizabeth and Frederick and would have been fresh in Fletcher’s mind in 1613.

  Viola does not go mad as a result of her sufferings (she is duly reunited with her chastened lover), but mad scenes, for both men and women, were to become something of a speciality of Fletcher’s. The madness can be real or feigned, and how seriously it is taken seems to depend on context rather than gender. The middle-aged soldier Memnon, in The Mad Lover (c. 1616), thinks himself in the Elysian fields, like the Daughter in 4.3, while the heroine of The Wild Goose Chase (c. 1621), pretending to have gone mad for the hero’s love, sounds exactly like the genuinely mad Daughter of 4.1:

  I must be up to morrow, to go to Church:

  And I must dress me, put my new Gown on,

  And be so fine to meet my Love: Heigh ho!

  Will not you tell me where my Love lies buried?

  (Bowers, 6: 4.3.62–5)

  The Jailer’s Daughter, of course, is not betrayed by Palamon, only by her own fantasies. Her ballads (see Appendix 6) create a role for her which can end in happiness (‘Child Waters’, ‘Young Beichan’) or in disillusionment (‘The Fair Flower of Northumberland’). She thus shares with Ophelia the habit of what Carol Neely has called ‘quoted discourse’ (324). Even in her final scene she is speaking the language of proverbs, asking directions to the end of the world (where damsels in romance go with their lovers) and, to the Wooer’s offer of a hundred kisses, adding a formulaic twenty.

  Doctors and poets alike compare the disturbed human mind to a ship tossed in a tempest (for example, in the popular medical work, The Touchstone of Complexions (Lemnius, A3 and A8v)). Having first observed the ship from a distance, as she goes mad (3.4), the Daughter in 4.1 forces her family and friends to become part of its imaginary crew. Falling in with her fantasies, they instinctively follow the same path that the Doctor later recommends on the grounds that ‘It is a falsehood she is in, which is with falsehoods to be combated’ (4.3.93–4). Though one reviewer of the 1928 Old Vic production found the Doctor ‘a surprisingly modern fore-runner of Dr. Freud’ (Horsnell), his methods are essentially those recommended in Renaissance treatises on lovesickness. For medieval writers, Amor Hereos (a term of mysterious origin) was a heroic malady that afflicted only men. Chaucer describes Arcite, during his exile from Athens, as suffering from near-madness: ‘Nat oonly lik the loveris maladye / Of Hereos, but rather lyk manye, /Engendred of humour malencolik’ (Chaucer, Riv, 1373–5). This ‘knights melancholie’ (Laurentius, 89) was still meaningful to sixteenth-century physicians, but in his edition of 1602 Speght could make no sense of the Chaucerian passage; he emended hereos to Eros.

  Only in the sixteenth century, Mary Wack argues, did lovesickness become a condition specifically identified with women rather than men (176). Although the Daughter’s madness has been called, by comparison to male madness, ‘“pretty” discourse rather than a soul-ravaging disorder’ (Charney, 457), she is more complex than most theatrical madwomen (including the pathetic, endlessly singing Constance of Richard Brome’s Northern Lass (1629), who was probably inspired by her). An innocent and rather colourless presence in her first scene, she is transformed by love and madness into a singer, a dancer, a person of vivid imagination and even, like Hamlet, something of a social satirist (in 4.3 at least). Her fantasies of Palamon’s death and her father’s execution can easily be explained as the product not only of grief, but of an anger that she has not previously been licensed to express.