The Two Noble Kinsmen
Act I

Prologue

The Prologue seems very un-Shakespearean. A conceit connecting “New plays and maidenheads” (Pro.1) explains: “for both much money is gi’en” (Pro.2). Money and whores: Stratford values, but Shakespeare? This is followed by a source citing — Chaucer (Pro.13) — and a lot of faux-humble fretting that the play will encheesify his admirable work.

. . . You shall hear
Scenes, though below his art, may yet appear
Worth two hours’ travail. To his bones sweet sleep.
(Pro.27-29)

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 acknowledged (Asimov, I 183). 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.

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, Potter 40, cf. Gilvary 447). An Oxfordian perspective on “Our losses” concerns the lost 1566 play Palamon and Arcite, likely an early draft of this play. “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, cf. Anderson 32).

ACT I

SCENE i

“The first act is largely static, almost a closet drama” (Potter 2), and is considered Shakespeare’s, while most of the subsequent three acts are considered Fletcher’s (Asimov 61). After a lot of stilted, 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.

In a persistent and weird Shakespearean pattern, brought forth are entities we don’t really want to reference, and then do:

The crow, the sland’rous cuckoo, nor
The boding raven, nor chough hoar,
Nor chatt’ring [mag]pie,
May on our bride-house perch or sing,
Or with them any discord bring….
(I.i.19-23)

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). “The interruption of the opening wedding procession, by three queens in mourning, establishes a pattern of disrupted rituals that continues through the play” (Potter 2). They have a request to make of Theseus. Queen 1 starts: “For pity’s sake and true gentility’s, / Hear and respect me” (I.i.25-26). “Gentility” reminds us of Chaucer’s Knight (The Knight’s Tale 920).

Redemption is promised: “This good deed / Shall raze you out o’ th’ book of trespasses / All you are set down there” (I.i.32-34); but what exactly are Theseus’ sins? The queens’ dead husbands are the victims of “The wrath of cruel Creon” (I.i.40), king of Thebes. They have not been allowed to collect their husbands’ bones. Sound familiar? It’s just that from the Greek play The Seven Against Thebes the queens have been reduced to three (Asimov, I 57), but the word “suppliants” (I.i.133) turns up, alluding to the Euripides play.

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). Queen 2 makes her appeal to Hippolyta, using the nonce word “soldieress” (I.i.85): “Most dreaded Amazonian, that hast slain / The scythe-tusked boar” (I.i.78-79) — perhaps an Ovidian influence (Gilvary 449); but Hippolyta was not among the hunters of the Calydonian boar.

Theseus remains courteous but adds a gruesome bit: “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). “Some of the language is grotesque, as when one of the queens urges Hippolyta to imagine how she would feel if Theseus were lying dead on the battlefield, ‘Showing the sun his teeth, grinning at the moon’ (I.i.100)” (Potter 3).

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)

Queen 3 says to Emilia, “my petition was / Set down in ice, which by hot grief uncandied / Melts into drops” (I.i.106-108), echoing a confectionery 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 and Oxford’s note in his Geneva Bible. Queen 1 compliments Theseus on the basis of his reputation reputation 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).

“Chaucer’s Knight and Shakespeare’s earlier Theseus [pre-MND] are chivalric skeptics; the final Theseus might be called a brutal nihilist, who nevertheless plays at maintaining the outer forms of chivalry” (Bloom 696). Er, okay. Or Bloom just likes the terms “nihilistic” and “proleptic.”

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 fashion lemmings of 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 they agree to fight for the sake of Thebes when a bloke called Valerius enlists them in the name of the King. His reference to Phoebus’ reaction to news of his son Phaeton’s reckless driving death-punishment (I.ii.85ff) is Ovidian (Gilvary 449) but a helluva long way to go for the occasion!

SCENE iii

Hippolyta and Emilia send their best wishes to Theseus through Pirithous. With a mealy-mouthed promise of a prayer to Bellona, goddess of war (I.iii.13-16), “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 [boiled] their infants in (and after eat them) / 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). The image extends one by Chaucer again, from The Knight’s Tale: “Yet saugh I … The sowe freten [finished devouring] the child right in the cradel” (2017-2019).

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 war. So the queens are pleased, and Theseus gives them the go-ahead to go collect bones. 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). He’d rather have them prisoners than dead. “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). So, see you all finally at that great mall in the sky.