The Two Noble Kinsmen
Act I

Prologue

The Prologue seems very un-Shakespearean. A conceit connecting “New plays and maidenheads” (Pro.1f) is followed by a source citing — Chaucer (Pro.13) — and a lot of faux-humble fretting that the play will encheesify his admirable work. But Shakespeare never otherwise mentions Chaucer, even where one would expect something (Richard II), despite being more subtly influenced by “the father of English poetry” than has yet been sufficiently recognized. Only in Pericles, with another possibly spurious prologue is a source acknowleged (Asimov, I 183).

You shall hear
Scenes, though below his art, may yet appear
Worth two hours’ travail. To his bones sweet sleep!

Some would like to think that the reference to “Our losses” (Pro.32) is an allusion to the burning of the Globe in June 1613 (Wells 382, cf. Gilvary 447). An Oxfordian perspective on “Our losses” concerns the lost 1566 play Palamon and Arcite. “Disaster struck shortly before the Oxford University performance: a staircase in the building where the performance was being held had collapsed, killing three people and injuring several more. The show still went on” and would have required a momentary acknowledgement of the disaster (Chiljan 63).

The Prologue is “jaunty, bawdy, and colloquial” (Garber 890). But,

one cannot help wondering if this sort of thing isn’t a sign of a certain insecurity on the part of the playwright. Uncertain as to the worth of the play, does he call on the name of a revered ancient as a shield against criticism? (Asimov, I 53)

Maybe Fletcher (or whoever finished this play) does….

ACT I

SCENE i

The first Act is considered Shakespeare’s, while most of the subsequent three acts are considered Fletcher’s (Asimov 61). After a lot of formal pageantry signifying a wedding, we listen to a boy sing a song about flowers and birds. The first line, “Roses, their sharp spines being gone” (I.i.1), must allude to Queen Elizabeth’s poesy: “Rosa sine spina” (Rose without thorns). The “Daisies” (I.i.5), like Twelfth Night‘s violets and key flowers in Midsummer Night’s Dream, are “forget-me-nots.” The second stanza begins with “Primrose, first-born child of Ver” (I.i.7), Ver being an obsolete term for Spring (Asimov, I 56). But, I mean! If “her bells” (I.i.9) are harebells as editor Skeat suggested, then they signify submission. Next come “Oxlips” (I.i.10), “Marigolds” (I.i.11)) for grief, and “Larks’-heels” (I.i.12). Flowers are strewn before a stanza-plus concerning birds. The reference to “bridehouse” (I.i.22) resurrects a handy medieval instance of metathesis of the ‘r’. (The letter can shift before or after the vowel. Hence, birds and brides, Kirsten and Kristen being the same name, etc.)

Three veiled queens in black interrupt the proceedings at Athens by falling at the feet of Theseus (titled “Duke” here as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and indeed Chaucer), his bride Hippolyta, and her sister Emilia — this last “a character who does not belong to classical myth at all, but to medieval fiction. She is to be the heroine of this play, the puppet about whom will circle the mummery of courtly love” (Asimov, I 56). They have a request to make of Theseus, and “This good deed / Shall raze you out o’ th’ book of trespasses / All you are set down there” (I.i.32-34). Their dead husbands are the victims of “The wrath of cruel Creon” (I.i.40), king of Thebes. Sound familiar? From the Greek play The Seven Against Thebes the queens have been reduced to three (Asimov, I 57).

The Queens’ supplicating laments are ritualistic, essentially baroque in their elaborations. The luxuriance, not so much of grief, but of outrage dominates. Outrageousness is the rhetorical tonality of Shakespeare’s final mode, where most voices carry the burden of having been outraged: by injustice, by time, by eros, by death. (Bloom 699)

Theseus is courteous but also moved: “Pray you kneel not; / I was transported with your speech, and suffer’d / Your knees to wrong themselves” (I.i.54-56). Amid their superfluous pleadings, and “Himself about to be married, Theseus abruptly laments (rather unflatteringly to her face) the loss of the first Queen’s beauty” (Bloom 700): “O grief and time, / Fearful consumers, you will all devour!” (I.i.69-70). The second queen appeals to Hippolyta, using the nonce word “soldieress” (I.i.85) and adding a gruesome bit of courtesy: “Lend us a knee; / But touch the ground for us no longer time / Than a dove’s motion when the head’s plucked off” (I.i.96-98). Much here seems genuinely Shakespearean; and Wells says about the long address to Hippolyta (I.i.77-101),

The complex rhetoric of the speech, with its sixteen-line first sentence, tortuous in construction, piling subordinate clauses one on top of another, some in apposition, some subordinate to others, with its qualifying and parenthetical clauses, its figurative language, its mixture of concrete and abstract expressions, its coined compounds (“scythe-tusked” and, later, “blood-sized”), its invented words (“soldieress,” not previously recorded), its inversions and ellipses and elisions, its run-on verse lines and feminine endings, and the grotesque imagery of the concluding lines, amounts almost to a parody of Shakespeare’s late style, making no concessions to either the speaker or the hearer…. (Wells 383-384)

The third queen to Emilia says, “my petition was / Set down in ice, which by hot grief uncandied / Melts into drops” (I.i.106-108), echoing a bit in Anthony and Cleopatra.

Theseus agrees to lead an army against Creon, and the queens urge immediacy: “Now you may take him / Drunk with his victory.” “And his army full / Of bread and sloth” (I.i.157-159) with that echo of Hamlet. The first queen compliments Theseus on the basis of his reputation: “Thus dost thou still make good / The tongue o’ th’ world” (I.i.226-227). Theseus furthers this Shakespearean theme: “As we are men / Thus should we do, being sensually subdu’d / We lose our human title” (I.i.231-233).

SCENE ii

Palamon and Arcite are cousins, “creations strictly of the medieval romances” (Asimov, I 60). “Shakespeare wastes no art in rendering them at all distinct them from each other; they seem, indeed, as inseparable cousins, to share the same high, somewhat priggish moral character, and to exhibit no personality whatsoever” (Bloom 701).

Arcite proposes they leave Thebes and its temptations “before we further / Sully our gloss of youth” (I.i.4-5). Palamon frets extraneously over being expected (by whom?) to follow others’ manners of gait, speech, fashion (I.ii.42-62). The two seem to feel that “Affectations of style, speech, and dress have overtaken the court of Creon” (Garber 893). They sound more fed up with the Elizabethan court than with ancient Thebes. These two are also nephews of Creon, whom they acknowledge is “A most unbounded tyrant” (I.ii.63) and from whom they distance themselves morally: “Let / The blood of mine that’s sib to him be suck’d / From me with leeches! let them break and fall / Off me with that corruption!” (I.ii.71-74). They cannot be “his kinsmen / In blood unless in quality” if they stay (I.ii.78-79).

Yet when Valerius calls upon them in the name of the King, they agree to fight for the sake of Thebes.

SCENE iii

Hippolyta and Emilia send their best wishes to Theseus. “We see why Emilia, even more than Chaucer’s Emily, will be so despairingly passive as to whether she will be awarded to Arcite or to Palamon” (Bloom 704).

Pirithous is an “authentic mythological character” and friend of Theseus (Asimov, I 56). Though he’s not in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, we find there a mention of the Ovid story concerning the battle of the Centaurs, which took place at Pirithous’ wedding.

The scene includes a “grotesque vision” that creates an “alienation effect” (Bloom 702) in Hippolyta’s reference to wartime scenes of “babes broach’d on the lance, [and] women / That have sod their infants in … / The brine they wept at killing ’em” (I.iii.20-22). “If one cannot weep at mothers boiling, in their own salt tears, their own infants for dinner, one can perhaps laugh, in psychological self-defense” (Bloom 702). Hippolyta also sounds bizarre in her description of Theseus’ and Pirithous’ army experiences, ending with the thought that “Theseus cannot be umpire to himself, / Cleaving his conscience into twain and doing / Each side like justice, which he loves bet” (I.iii.45-47). “To say that your marriage may outwear but never outdo your husband’s relation to his closest male companion is again to manifest an uncanny dispassionateness, particularly since Hippolyta evidently does not care which one Theseus loves best” (Bloom 703).

Emilia defends Theseus’ and Pirithous’ closeness, telling Hippolyta that she herself could never love any man, only another maiden such as her youthful chum Flavina, with whom she was so much in tune that if she put a flower between her breasts then Flavina would whimper until she had one to place between her own. “The contrast between this union of serenities and the murderous violence of the Palamon-Arcite strife for Emilia could not be more persuasive” (Bloom 704). If Hippolyta believed a word of this she’d be so upset she’d have to consider breaking up with Theseus, but she’s sure the silly girl doesn’t know what she’s saying.

SCENE iv

Theseus triumphs in the big was, so the queens are pleased. Among the casualties, Palamon and Arcite are near death but have impressed Theseus greatly: “I fix’d my note / Constantly on them; for they were a mark / Worth a god’s view” (I.iv.19-21). “The very lees of such (millions of rates) / Exceed the wine of others” (I.iv.29-30). He sends for doctors.

SCENE v

The queens escort hearses with their dead husbands to the tune of a snappy little dirge. The third queen ends the Act, remarking, “This world’s a city full of straying streets, / And death’s the market-place, where each one meets” (I.v.15-16).