The Two Noble Kinsmen
Act V

ACT V

SCENE i

Critical consensus holds that most of Act V (except for the second scene) is Shakespeare again (Bloom 694). Theseus calls in the combatants for them to “Tender their holy prayers” (V.i.2), and the kinsmen exchange honorable exclamations. Arcite admits, “I am in labor / To push your name, your ancient love, our kindred, / Out of my memory; and i’ th’ self-same place / To seat something I would confound” (V.i.25-28). Hugs!

After a final embrace, Arcite prays to Mars and has his knights kneel before Mars’ altar. They hear military noises such as the clanging of armor, suggesting that the war-god has heard them. Dating assumptions connect Shakespeare’s apparent disgust with the London of James I (Bloom 707) rather than the earlier court:

O great corrector of enormous times,
Shaker of o’er-rank states, thou grand decider
Of dusty and old titles, that heal’st with blood
The earth when it is sick, and cur’st the world
O’ th’ plurisy of people! I do take
Thy signs auspiciously….
(V.i.62-67)

Palamon and his knights pray to Venus: “Our argument is love” (V.i.70). A litany of Venus’ powers includes “that mayst force the king / To be his subject’s vassal” (V.i.83-84). Palamon emphasizes age differentials between men and women as an extreme sign of Venus’ influence. This address to Venus — “so painful and so personal” — has been considered “beyond irony” and a “negatively sublime coda to Shakespeare’s quarter century of dramatic poetry” (Bloom 710).

The terrible power of Venus is described here almost entirely in grotesque and catastrophic images, and yet Venus is being absolved of victimizing us, even as our wretchedness is so memorably portrayed. (Bloom 710)

Palamon gets music and doves for his divine response. Between Mars and Venus, “it would be difficult to decide which deity is more reprehensible” (Bloom 697).

Emilia prays to Diana: “O sacred, shadowy, cold, and constant queen” (V.i.137). Unlike Chaucer’s Emelye who wants to take a vow of chastity, Shakespeare’s Emilia cringes at the loss of noble lives and asks that “He of the two pretenders that best loves me / And has the truest title in’t, let him / Take off my wheaten garland,” or else, as an afterthought, that she be allowed to “Continue in thy band” (V.i.158-162). A hind disappears under the altar, and a rose tree grows with a single rose on it. Emilia takes this to mean she will be able to remain a virgin, “unpluck’d” (V.i.168). Then the rose falls off. Dammit!

Unfortunately, “with the pageantry of 5.1 the rest of the play is visually rather disappointing” (Potter 35).

SCENE ii

The Doctor questions the Wooer about the Jailer’s Daughter, who does seem to be falling for the Palamon impersonation. The Doctor insists, even more sleazily than before, that the Wooer grant the Daughter all her love wishes: more kisses, and “Lie with her, if she ask you.” “Ho there, doctor!” exclaims the Jailer (V.ii.18). The Doctor sneers at the Jailer’s concern for her “honesty.” The Daughter enters, ranting about horse-lovers and including allusions to Much Ado About Nothing: “the tune of ‘Light a’ love'” (V.ii.54; cp. Much Ado III.iv.44), “She is horribly in love with him” (V.ii.62; cp. Much Ado II.iii.235), (cf. V.ii.43, 71). She still expects daddy to be hanged in the perpetual “to-morrow” (V.ii.80), “And that would be a blot i’ th’ business” (V.ii.81) of a wedding. Another vague Much Ado echoing occurs when the Wooer dismisses the Daughter’s fashion poverty: “That’s all one, I will have you…. Yes, by this fair hand” (V.ii.85-86; cp. Much Ado V.iv.91-92). The Daughter cheers up at the prospect of her wedding with the faux “Palamon.”

A messenger announces glorious doings on the field. Off go these commoners, the Wooer and Daughter soon to marry. One is uneasy about this entire subplot, but one critic “sees the end of her story as happy and also as a parody of the main plot, showing that ‘love of a particular person is not so important as the fancy suggests'” (qtd. in Potter 151).

SCENE iii

Van Doren again detects not Shakespeare but “imitation” (esp. V.iii.4-6), as in the first scene of Act III (Van Doren 292). Here, Emilia refuses to attend the tournament, even though Theseus explains that “You must be present, / You are the victor’s meed, the price and garland / To crown the question’s title” (V.iii.15-17). He calls her also “The only star to shine,” but she says, “I am extinct” (V.iii.20). Theseus then says, “of this war, / You are the treasure, and must needs be by / To give the service pay” (V.iii.30-32). But Emilia is adamant. She stays behind and, after reflecting on the two kinsmen’s faces, receives updates on the tournament. Just as Palamon was winning, Arcite proved victorious. “The combat’s consummation is proclaim’d / By the wind instruments” (V.iii.94-95) — two bassoons?

The battle that will be the play’s denouement is … an ‘unscene,’ only reported to us…. While this denies the audience the full enjoyment of a pageant and a rousing fight, it increases the sense of random chance, and also of the untrustworthiness of report. (Garber 904)

Arcite presents his victorious self to Emilia: “To buy you I have lost what’s dearest to me / Save what is bought, and yet I purchase cheaply, / As I do rate your value” (V.iii.112-114). What a romantic! Palamon and his knights of course must be imprisoned and executed. “Is this winning?” asks Emilia (V.iii.138). Hippolyta also thinks it’s a darn shame.

Theseus orders the execution: “Let it here be done. / The scene’s not for our seeing: go we hence” (V.iii.133-134). Although the callousness and brevity may be “a way of dealing with the death of a major character, these lines are so perfunctory as to be an insult to the audience as well as to Palamon” (Potter 35).

SCENE iv

It’s not like forty years have passed since the last scene, so Palamon’s prison soliloquy comes rather out of the blue:

There’s many a man alive that hath outliv’d
The love o’ th’ people, yea, i’ th’ self-same state
Stands many a father with his child. Some comfort
We have by so considering: we expire
And not without men’s pity; to live still,
Have their good wishes; we prevent
The loathsome misery of age, beguile
The gout and rheum, that in lag hours attend
For grey approachers; we come towards the gods
Young and unwapper’d [unworn], not halting under crimes
Many and stale. (V.iv.1-11)

This certainly feels autobiographical to me, and suggests an older Oxford.

The Jailer announces his Daughter is fine and engaged to be married. Palamon and his knights all cough up big bucks for her. Just as Palamon is ready to give up his life now — in a dramatic moment borrowed from Damon and Pithias — Pirithous enters with new info. Somehow, Palamon has become the winner. “Can that be, when Venus, I have said, is false?” asks Palamon (V.iv.44-45). Nowhere in The Two Noble Kinsmen did Palamon berate the goddess, but he did so in the 1566 play [Palamon and Arcite]. Spectator John Bereblock, in his summary of the 1566 play, wrote that Palamon had prayed to Venus to win a duel for the hand of Emilia. After he lost, Palamon ‘casts reproaches upon Venus, saying that he had served her from infancy and that now she had neither desire nor power to help him'” (Chiljan 64; cf. Potter 53).

After humorously irksome digressions concerning the market value of the black horse Arcite was riding (V.iv.50ff) and the ancient origins of music (V.iv.60f), Pirithous describes the freaked horse’s behavior that did “disseat” Arcite (V.iv.72) and threw him on his head, although it also seems that Arcite was not thrown from the horse but that the horse did “a kind of somersault and [fell] on top of his rider” (Potter 156) — way more hilarious!

Arcite is brought in for his last words: “Forgive me, cousin. / One kiss from fair Emilia. — ‘Tis done. / Take her. I die” (V.iv.93-95). Theseus eulogizes:

His part is play’d, and though it were too short,
He did it well….
The powerful Venus well hath grac’d her altar,
And given you your love. Our master Mars
Hath vouch’d his oracle, and to Arcite gave
The grace of the contention. So the deities
Have show’d due justice. — Bear this hence.
(V.iv.103-109)

“This” is the dead Arcite, carried out before Palamon’s final words: “That we should things desire which do cost us / The loss of our desire! that nought could buy / Dear love but loss of dear love!” (V.iv.110-112). Theseus has the last speech, confirming that Arcite confessed Palamon’s right to Emilia, having seen her first (V.iv.117)! So, yeah, everything all along was pointless b.s.

Palamon will wed Emilia. “Since Shakespeare has emphasized that the heroine’s heart is in the grave with the eleven-year-old Flavina, we hardly rejoice at this turn of fortune” (Bloom 712). “A day or two / Let us look sadly” (V.iv.124-125), recommends Theseus. In a final passage (V.iv.131-137), “Theseus seems to have vanished, and Shakespeare himself says goodbye to us forever” (Bloom 713). [But only if you’re going with the asinine Stratfordian time-line.]

“Shakespeare’s part of The Two Noble Kinsmen might make us doubt that life is anything except sorrows” (Bloom 699). “Let’s go off, / And bear us like the time” (V.iv.136-137), says Theseus. Or was that Lady Macbeth?

Epilogue

“I would now ask ye how ye like the play” (Epi.1). It’s not Shakespeare. If this is Fletcher, what an obsequious hack! After some pointless sucking up to the audience, we hear: “If the tale we have told / (For ’tis no other) [Huh?!] any way content ye / (For to that honest purpose it was meant ye), / We have our end” (Epi.12-15). Would that the “real” Theseus from A Midsummer Night’s Dream had been given the opportunity to say, “No epilogue, I pray you; for your play needs no excuse” (MND V.i.355-356).

Final Perspective

Here’s my guess. Since a Palamon and Arcite was presented before Queen Elizabeth at the Oxford University graduation ceremonies in 1566, when the 17th Earl of Oxford graduated, and since the credited Richard Edwards was also connected with a Damon and Pithius play, and since Edwards would logically have been a mentor for the young Oxford, who maintained sufficient interest in the phenomenon of the two young nobles serving as semi-doppelgangers and, at least in revision, as cardboard figures of farce to have written The Two Gentlemen of Verona, it makes sense that Oxford is responsible for more of this play than most want to give “Shakespeare” credit for. If “More lyrical than dramatic, The Two Noble Kinsmen‘s Shakespearean portions manifest little action and minimal character portrayal” (Bloom 694), it may be because this play represents an early stage of wedding lyrical with dramatic. Oxford began in a Chaucerian tradition of lyrical poetry, tried his hand at drama which at first was bombastic (e.g. The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth), and brought the two together gradually (with Richard II still leaning towards the lyrical, but he’ll get it right soon).

The Chaucer influence grows supremely subtle later on, so Oxford would have taken up this Knight’s Tale plot more directly only when he was young. He could not have helped increasing the aspects of farce in later revision, when these goofy adolescent issues no longer held much interest for him. Traces of the same impulses can be seen in A Midsummer Night’s Dream where the young lovers are flat and nearly indistinguishable characters given to rhyming couplets but contained within a more mature and sophisticated framework. That the characters of the subplot in The Two Noble Kinsmen are given no names does suggest another hand, brought in posthumously probably in order to bulk up what was too short for the “two hours” self-consciously mentioned in the Prologue.

Part of the importance of the play, therefore, is that we can track the creative evolution of the playwright: his early thematic interests, his intellectual and compositional re-visioning, his creative arc with Chaucer as his touchstone.