Blackfriars was built as a Dominican priory in 1286. Even before the dissolution of the monasteries, its buildings had been used for non-ecclesiastical purposes; later, some of the larger rooms were partitioned off to become, for example, fencing schools and private lodgings (Smith, Blackfriars, 12–13). Located as it was in the heart of the City of London but free of City jurisdiction because of its ecclesiastical history, Blackfriars was an obviously attractive site for entrepreneurs. A short-lived children’s theatre company from 1576 to 1584 converted one of its rooms for acting purposes; the plays performed there included Lyly’s comedies. In 1596 James Burbage, hoping to move from his playhouse in the north suburbs of London, acquired part of the Blackfriars property but was prohibited from using it because of a petition of neighbours who were afraid of the noise and disorder. He rented his building to a children’s company, which functioned successfully from about 1600 to 1608, until the company dissolved due to a combination of bad management and a controversial repertoire. Burbage profited from its difficulties and from 1609 Blackfriars was the winter home of the King’s Men, with the Globe serving as their summer playhouse.

  There has been much discussion about how important the acquisition of Blackfriars actually was to writers. After all, Henry VIII must surely have been written with an eye to the obvious appropriateness of performing it in the Great Chamber at Blackfriars, the original setting for the divorce trial of Queen Katherine and Henry VIII, but it was almost certainly the play being presented at the Globe in June 1613, when the theatre burned down. If the same plays were given at both theatres, dramatists must have written with both in mind. However, the year that passed between the burning of the Globe and its rebuilding was an exceptional one, and one about which we need to know more. The capacity of Blackfriars has been estimated, by various scholars, at anything from 500 to 900 (Lavin, 80) – at best, only a third of the Globe’s capacity. Did the smaller size of the auditorium mean that the King’s Men needed to give more performances of the same play in order to accommodate the same public, or did they arrange to perform their most popular plays in another company’s playhouse? Did they raise their prices in order to make up for the smaller size of their new audience or did they lower them in order to retain the less wealthy members of their old one? Did the medieval appearance of the buildings have anything to do with the choice of medieval subject-matter, or with scenes like the one in The Duchess of Malfi where Antonio, supposedly in the ruins of a cloister, talks about his love for ‘these ancient ruins’? Did working in a theatre so strongly associated with the boy actors inspire Shakespeare, as Leah Scragg suggests (117–18), to return to the conscious artificiality of Lyly’s plays of the 1580s?

  All that is known for certain about the Blackfriars interior is that, unlike the Globe, it was rectangular. Richard Hosley thinks that it had a large two-storey tiring house with plenty of room to erect an inner stage setting such as would have been needed for 5.1 of The Two Noble Kinsmen. Its façade was elaborately decorated, and if it really did look like Richard Southern’s conjectural drawing (Fig. 2), Blackfriars would have been ideal for plays with a classical setting. The theatre allowed its wealthiest spectators to sit on the stage, a fact that is much commented on and that may have encouraged an intimate atmosphere (Smith, Blackfriars, 236).

  The traditional contrast between the outdoor playhouse with its natural light and the indoor one with its candlelight is now thought to be exaggerated: the indoor playhouses held performances in the afternoon and, to save candles, must have relied on the light from the windows as much as possible, while the outdoor stage, which seems to have been designed to remain in the shade at all times, may have achieved effective contrasts by using torches and candles for nocturnal scenes (Brown, 1–13). Still, it seems likely that the indoor playhouse made more use of lighting, some of it nocturnal, than the outdoor one. Candles needed trimming and replacing, which in turn meant breaks between the acts while music was played. As has been pointed out (Hosley, 230–1; Taylor & Jowett, 30–42), the result was to create a new emphasis on the five-act structure. The Two Noble Kinsmen, as noted earlier, links its various scenes in a way that suggests continuous action, but it also seems to assume a time-lapse between acts. Taylor gives some examples (Taylor & Jowett, 42) and one might add others: for instance, Palamon and Arcite’s supposedly terminal wounds heal between Acts 1 and 2; at the start of Act 3, both have been out of prison for some time, Arcite as a member of the court and Palamon as a starving, manacled fugitive; they journey to Thebes and come back with their knights in Act 4 while the Jailer’s Daughter remains seriously deranged, and Act 5 is taken up with the resolution of both plots. The Jailer’s Daughter has several nocturnal scenes and it is possible that some of the other scenes in the middle of the play are meant to be nocturnal, though The Two Noble Kinsmen does not exploit the darkness as much as Webster does in The Duchess of Malfi.

  Other features of the Blackfriars might have affected the staging of The Two Noble Kinsmen. The three stage doors which Hosley hypothesizes (228) would have facilitated the end of Act 1, where each of the three queens departs with the hearse bearing her husband’s body, and perhaps the opening of Act 5: Theseus and his court apparently enter from one door while Palamon and Arcite, each with his knights, presumably come from opposite sides of the stage (though they might also, perhaps, have entered from the auditorium). The central door could have concealed an elaborate altar, or (with the curtains opening and closing between visits) a series of altars to the different gods addressed in 5.1. Alternatively, three different altars might have been used, since that of Diana requires a trap door, more likely to have been positioned in front of the tiring house than within it. This scene also calls for atmospheric, supernatural music, probably from above, in the music room. It does not, apparently, require the descent of any of the three gods addressed in it.

  Knowing more about Blackfriars would make it easier to understand the intended staging of the prison scene. Although the quarto stage direction calls for Palamon and Arcite to enter at the start of 2.2, no separate exit is marked for them in 2.1, where they are perceived above; some editors cut the entry direction, assuming the action to be continuous. But this would mean the playing of a long scene on a platform which, if Hosley is right, would have been either a curtained music room or a ‘shallow area some 6 or 7 feet wide at the foot of one of the boxes of the tiring-house gallery over the stage’ (Hosley, 232). Lines 2.1.49–52 indicate that the men are only partly visible from below; if the audience can see them no better than the Jailer can, it will be hard to sustain interest in 2.2, but of course the dialogue between the Jailer and his daughter may be intended to create an illusion of distance between the downstage characters and the prisoners: 2.2 depends on the assumption that the men cannot hear the women talking and that the two women neither see nor hear the men. If the actors did descend to the floor level, they were given very little time in which to do it, even if the Daughter’s last line in 2.1 is spoken as a soliloquy to cover their descent. Irwin Smith, noting the plural in the Jailer’s ‘The windows are too open’ (2.2.265), suggests that Palamon and Arcite appeared at two windows above the stage. Alternatively, the ‘windows’ may simply have meant the curtained space above. The garden where Emilia walks may have required a change of scene, but it would be equally possible (as Richard Proudfoot suggests) for her to enter with her flowers, already gathered, in a basket, as does Marina in Pericles (4.1.12 SD).

  Casting and repertory

  We have no evidence about the original casting of The Two Noble Kinsmen. Arguing that the King’s Men operated on a strictly hierarchical principle, T. W. Baldwin assigned the roles of Palamon and Arcite to the company’s leading actors, John Lowin and Richard Burbage (Baldwin, 201–4). However, at forty-seven and forty respectively, they were surely too old for characters whose youth is so often stressed in the text. If The Two Noble Kinsmen was being rehearsed at the same time as The Duchess of Malfi, in which we know that Burbage and Lowin had the major roles of Ferdinand and Bosola, it would have made sense to cast them in smaller parts (perhaps Theseus and the Jailer, respectively) and take the opportunity to bring on a couple of younger actors. For such a comparatively long play, The Two Noble Kinsmen is unusual in its lack of large roles: Palamon’s part, the longest in the play, is about half the length of Richard III’s.

  Also unusual is the large number of female characters. If all were played by boys, as T. J. King assumes in Casting Shakespeare’s Plays (King, 252), The Two Noble Kinsmen had more speaking roles for boys than any Shakespeare play since Richard III. Even if (as I think) the three queens were acted by men, a large number of boys is still needed for the small non-speaking roles of the nymphs in 1.1, the morris dancers in 3.5, the ‘maids’ who accompany Emilia at the altar of Diana and the other maid who comes on stage with the Jailer’s Daughter in her final scene. Fletcher’s plays usually contain a number of good parts for boy actors – the result of his experience with the boys’ companies, for which he was still writing at this period. It is clear that the role of the Jailer’s Daughter was written for a boy with a real following, perhaps (since he also had to sing) the one who had played Ariel in The Tempest. Famous boy actors of women’s roles were Richard Robinson, who played the unnamed Lady in The Second Maiden’s Tragedy in 1611, and Richard Sharpe, the Duchess of Malfi in 1613; either might have played the Daughter or Emilia, in many ways a more difficult role. The part of the Daughter may even have been written (or expanded) for a talented visitor. Heywood’s Rape of Lucrece (1608) has a large singing role for a character called Valerius, and the published text refers to songs added by ‘the stranger that lately acted Valerius his part’; subsequent editions of this play include still more songs (see Greg, 1.273–4).

  All this is assuming that the play always belonged exclusively to Blackfriars and to the King’s Men, as the title page states. Perhaps we should also consider other possibilities. The period 1613–14 appears to have been one of fluctuation for theatre companies. The Lady Elizabeth’s Men, an adult company, amalgamated in 1613 with the Children of the Queen’s Revels, formerly the boy company that had played at Blackfriars, intending to play at both Whitefriars and the Swan (Foakes, ‘Playhouses’, 31). The alliance seems to have lasted only until the lease on the Swan Theatre ran out in 1614, but this is precisely the period in which The Two Noble Kinsmen was probably performed (Middleton’s Chaste Maid in Cheapside, which requires nine female characters on stage at once, was performed by the amalgamated company during the same year (Richard Proudfoot)). A similar amalgamation – that of the King’s Men and the Queen’s Men, who normally played at the Red Bull – took place at about the same time. According to Heywood, the two final plays in his epic dramatization of Greek legend, The Iron Age, were ‘Publickely Acted by two Companies, vppon one Stage at once, and haue at sundry times thronged three seuerall Theaters, with numerous and mighty Auditories’ (Greg, 3.1219). The occasional merging of two companies, or the borrowing of a particularly talented actor by another company, might enable a more spectacular production and help with the sharing of expenses in a slack period.

  Both the Queen’s Revels and Lady Elizabeth’s Men were companies for which Fletcher had previously written. Nathan Field, who has already been mentioned as one of his main collaborators, was a star performer in both, successively; he joined the King’s Men in 1616 (JCS, 2.434–6), apparently succeeding to Shakespeare’s share in the company. Joseph Taylor was also a member of Lady Elizabeth’s Men from 1611 until 1616. He joined the King’s Men in 1619 and inherited many of the roles formerly played by Richard Burbage, who had died early that year (JCS, 2.590–8), eventually becoming, along with Lowin, the leader of the company. Field and Taylor, both still in their twenties in 1613, sound like the ideal Palamon and Arcite, and must surely have played the parts once they had moved to the King’s Men. In Bartholomew Fair, where Jonson parodies the Kinsmen, he makes someone ask which of the puppets is ‘Your best Actor. Your Field?’ (5.3.88). This is a characteristic Jonsonian in-joke, since Bartholomew Fair was written for Lady Elizabeth’s Men, Field’s company. If Field played Winwife, the character who at one point chooses the name Palamon, we might guess that he had also played the latter role in the Kinsmen. He had been a central figure in the theatre even as a child. Jonson patronized and to some extent helped to educate him; he had acted leading roles in Jonson’s early satiric plays for the Children of the Chapel at the age of about thirteen and was long remembered for his playing of the romantic and heroic role of Chapman’s Bussy d’Ambois. The contemporary portrait (Fig. 3) may be as close as we can get to the kind of actor that Fletcher, at any rate, had in mind for one of his heroes. If Field played Palamon, the prayer to Venus must have taken on an even more cynical tone than has sometimes been suspected, since he had something of a reputation as a cuckold-maker (JCS, 3.301). Plans for the play’s revival in 1619–20 may have been linked to Taylor’s arrival in the company, and may have been affected by Field’s early death, which took place some time before August 1620.

  The repertory of the King’s Men at this period indicates an interest in large-cast classical or medieval plays with music – as is evident from the company’s participation in Heywood’s mythical extravaganzas. Pericles had already shown the effectiveness of romantic and chivalric material presented with a mixture of narrative and pageantry. The author of its source tale, Gower, had acted as chorus for Pericles, while Heywood used Homer as his chorus in The Golden Age, The Silver Age and The Brazen Age. The stories of the Olympian gods would have been fresh in the minds of regular theatre-goers even if the wedding masques of 1613 had not made them the focus of attention. The Knight’s Tale had been the basis both for the famous Oxford production of 1566 and for a version, also called Palamon and Arcite, listed in Henslowe’s diary as having four performances at the Rose Theatre between 17 September and 9 November 1594 (Henslowe, 24–5). In all, as Ann Thompson has pointed out, at least thirteen plays, excluding Shakespeare’s, were adapted from Chaucerian plots between 1558 and 1625 (Thompson, 17). I have already mentioned Field’s use of The Franklin’s Tale for one of the Four Plays in One, and Fletcher himself turned The Wife of Bath’s Tale into Women Pleased (1618).

  More specifically, it is interesting to think of the play being rehearsed and performed not long after the court masques of 1613 and more or less alongside Webster’s Duchess of Malfi. The three masques offered to Frederick and Elizabeth (by George Chapman, Thomas Campion and Beaumont) have so many resemblances that Jerzy Limon has suggested some kind of collusion among the authors (125). For instance, Beaumont had he- and she-baboons in his antimasque; Campion included an entire baboon antimasque, danced by small boys. Campion’s main masquers represented stars who turned back into mortal men, while Beaumont’s Knight masquers had stars on their armour. Some of these resemblances can be explained by the predictable nature of ceremonial flattery and the predilection of designers for subjects involving metamorphosis. It is hardly surprising that two of the three masques should use the conceit of the marriage of the Thames and the Rhine and depict statues coming to life. The fact that Inigo Jones designed at least two of the masques (we do not know who was responsible for Beaumont’s) may also explain their similarities. In any case, the plays produced in the aftermath of these spectacular events show the influence of all three of them, not merely the Beaumont masque of which Fletcher is likely to have heard a good deal. For instance, the emphasis on the pyramid/pillar at the end of The Two Noble Kinsmen may recall the obelisk in the final tableau of Campion’s ‘Lords Masque’, where it represented immortal fame. As I have already suggested, the decision to produce Webster’s Duchess of Malfi may have had casting implications for Two Noble Kinsmen. One or both of the co-authors must already have been impressed by Webster’s earlier tragedy, The White Devil (pub. 1612), with its frequent allusions to Shakespeare and its praise, in the preface, of both Shakespeare and Fletcher. Webster’s handling of Vittoria’s trial scene was a clear influence on the dramatization of the divorce trial of Katherine of Aragon in Henry VIII. Both The Duchess and The Kinsmen include spectacular religious rites at exotic altars and dances by madmen; while one reason may be reciprocal influence, both kinds of spectacle had figured largely at court in 1614 (see Appendix 4).

  THE PLAY’S AFTERLIFE

  Pre-publication allusions

  If allusion and parody are a sign of success, the 1613–14 production of The Two Noble Kinsmen probably qualifies as one. The earliest likely allusion occurs in Henry Parrot’s Laquei ridiculosi, a collection of epigrams published in 1613 (which, under the Julian calendar, could be as late as 24 March, 1614):

  Two wooers for a wench were each at strife,

  Which should enjoy her to his wedded wife:

  Quoth th’one, shee’s mine, because I first her saw,

  Shee’s mine, quoth th’other, by Pye-corner law;

  Where, sticking once a Prick on what you buy

  It’s then your owne, which no man must deny.

  (no. 3, B1v)

  Parrot alludes to Hamlet in his subtitle, Springes to Catch Woodcocks, and in a previous book, The Mouse Trap (1606), so it is probably not just coincidence that this epigram recalls part of another play, the confrontation in 2.2 between Palamon, who ‘saw her first’ and Arcite, who wants to ‘enjoy her’. This scene has always been successful in modern productions; the epigram may be evidence that it was equally memorable to its first audiences.