SOURCE: "Emilia's Argument: Friendship and 'Human Title' in The Two Noble Kinsmen;' in ELH, Vol. 64, No. 3, Fall, 1997, pp. 657-82.

[In the following essay, Shannon examines the character of Emilia and claims that she "revises the definitional prejudices of the male model regarding both gender and sexuality. "]

The masculinity of ideal friendship in the Renaissance is as proverbial as the "one soul in two bodies" formulation that celebrates it. Extending Cicero's disqualification of women from ideal friendship in De Amicitia, Montaigne's influential essay "De l'amitié" argued that women's minds were "not strong enough to endure the pulling of a knot so hard, so fast, so durable" as that composing a friendship based on (masculine) virtue.¹ Writers throughout the Renaissance commonly employed the classical trope of a virtuous friendship between male equals as a counterpoint to the conditions of engagement with a political tyrant. In gender terms, the manly autonomy of friendship virtue and its rule by reason contrasts both with the obedient deference deemed appropriate for women and with an inference of "womanishness" or effeminacy regarding the tyrant, whose subjection to passion and appetitiveness emasculates him in the gendered register of Renaissance moral values.² Not without reason did Montaigne describe friendship as "soveraigne Amitie."³

Why, then, given these conventions, would Shakespeare and Fletcher collaborate to construct a female voice as the advocate of both reasonable rule and a same-sex friendship principle that, doubly revising Montaigne, admits sexuality to the friendship script?⁴ Although The Two Noble Kinsmen (1613) has generally been read in accord with the conventional privileged place of marriage in dramatic comedy, the play provocatively casts marriage as the expression of unreasoning political power, tainting it as the favored means of a ruler's caprice and as inimical to a subject's self possession or volition. Marriage and unreasonable rule are associated and juxtaposed with the principles of friendship and choice. The play thus construes "human title"—power and authority over the disposition of the self—as a bedraggled prize in a struggle between personal affective autonomy, on the one hand, and an external prerogative understood less as state power than as a personal excess by an unreasoning "tyrannical" ruler on the other.⁵ Jacques Derrida describes this opposition between autonomy and heteronomy as a philosophical trademark of "the tradition of a certain concept of friendship."⁶ But here, against tradition, a female voice dramatizes friendship and reason, and it is the voice of an Amazon, a figure infinitely more likely in the period to serve as an absolute other beyond reason's pale.⁷

In the following discussion, I suggest that female friendship appears in a specifically social form of female chastity which revises the characteristic masculinity of friendship rhetoric in the period. In The Two Noble Kinsmen, Emilia, a votaress of Diana and a lady knight, articulates a commitment to such a chastity of women among themselves. Chastity, envisioned as a bond between women rather than as "single blessedness," in turn, carries political meanings analogous to the autonomy valorized in ideal male friendship.⁸ But Emilia's case also extends the range of this principle of self-rule, and so it complicates an already vibrant scholarship considering early-modern sexuality.⁹ The drama conceives same-sex associations, including those that are erotic, in a vocabulary of "persuasion" and even "faith."¹⁰ In so doing, The Two Noble Kinsmen offers an alternative to the present terms of the historical debate. It reflects neither the anti-identitarian view that same-sex eroticism transpired detached from any means to articulate it, nor the more essentialist view that such eroticism pertained to those whose "nature" prescribed it.¹¹ Instead, same-sex associational primacy appears as something one might profess or choose, as an espousal of a "faith," or as a "way of life," echoing distantly the vital idea of conscience so resonant in the period.¹²

The construction of a female character's commitment to other women as an argument or position contrasts interestingly with Jonathan Goldberg's investigation of the word "sodometries." Noting its "nonce-word suggestiveness," Goldberg expands on an idea of logics or metrics, citing the term's use "to impugn . . . customs . . . and arguments."¹³ Goldberg's assessment of "sodometry" as a period allegation of false logic is neatly reversed in this case of a female homoerotics advocated by a reasoning Amazon. For rather than representing a negativized position or a sedition without limits as "sodomy" seems to have done, female association here reprehends a tyranny without limits, admonishing the abuse of absolute power from the established viewpoint of reason.¹⁴ The phenomenon of female friendship, so elusive in the texts of the Renaissance, appears to extraordinary dramatic effect, linking marriage and tyranny and enhancing the otherwise familiar disapprobation the play registers toward absolute (or unreasoning, unbounded, "tyrannical") power.

The non-subordinating relation of friendly equals represented a Utopian alternative to the subordination without limits inflicted by the tyrannical ruler. More generally, friendship's "twinned soul" vision of parity represented the sharpest contrast to the politics of vertical difference, authority, or "degree." Gendering friendship female makes available metaphors of chastity to express an urgent rationale for opposition to external powers of incursion—and suggests how the ideal of manly self-possession might profitably be considered a kind of masculine political chastity. This cross-gender identification, in turn, emphasizes the flexibility of gender representations, even to the point of their submission to moral and political categories. Emilia (and all she represents) advocates a position not only on the content of friendship's meanings, but also in the contest over who shall determine them, as she attempts to defend the threatened terrain of the subject's prerogative.

I. Chastity and the Space of Female Friendship

What are the possible meanings of "chastity" in Shakespeare and Fletcher's historical context? Beyond both a modern conflation of chastity with celibacy and the familiar Renaissance innovation of marital chastity, a third, less regulatory interpretation involves a morally ambitious chastity, a pursuit of integrity and autonomy, which operates like masculine "virtue" and embodies a similar power.¹⁵ Exploring this aspect of chastity, Philippa Berry considers the use of Petrarchan models in poet-courtiers' representations of Elizabeth I, whose own grand improvisation on her choice "to lyve out of the state of mariage" provides the most (in)famous contemporary reference for chastity as a "determynacion."¹⁶ Berry examines the role of Elizabeth as chaste beloved in the development of masculinity through Petrarchan forms, suggesting that

the most vital aspect of the beloved's role as mediator of a new masculinity, her chastity, had a disturbing habit of eluding or contradicting the significance accorded to it by the male lover as poet or philosopher. It often seemed to connote .. . the survival of a quality of feminine autonomy and selfsufficiency.¹⁷

Berry's analysis occasionally notes that imaginings of female chastity in Elizabethan literary representation can suggest a female community, allowing that the "quality of feminine autonomy and self-sufficiency" could be troped in the plural. She proposes, for example, that male fear of an active female sexuality presented "the disturbing possibility of woman taking narcissistic, and possibly even homosexual, pleasure in the female body," and that this latter "possible possibility" is suggested by "the recurrence of the figure of the goddess Diana . . . whose association with close-knit communities of women . . . is stressed." Despite this indication, the associative aspects of a chastity figured by Diana's circle are never explored. Berry reads such plural instances in terms of female narcissism, or in terms of Elizabeth's female "community" with her mother, Anne Boleyn, or in terms of a unified feminine sphere, by which the masculine is excluded or civilized.¹⁸ Where these categories fail, Berry defaults to a lexicon of "ambiguity" rather than directly argue the implications of a self-specified, same-sex association that her texts would seem to offer. She refers to "the theme of sexual ambiguity inscribed in the mythology of Diana"; "when we remember that the primary allegiance of [Sappho] was to women, [her] words . . . could be interpreted as somewhat ambiguous"; Lyly's Gallathea is said to involve "somewhat ambiguous subject matter"; and an analogy to Sappho is "a comparison which of course carries the ambiguity I mentioned earlier."¹⁹ Berry's systematic rendering of these textual moments as "ambiguous," stemming perhaps from a too specifically erotic categorization of their meanings, occludes the social dimension of her "feminine sphere" from view. A fuller understanding of Renaissance representations of female chastity, however, requires an account of its frequent configuration as female association, often by reference to Diana and her followers, where a commitment to chastity incorporates a choice for the company of women.

Diana's most resonant presence in sixteenth-century lore is the story narrated in Ovid's Metamorphoses.²⁰ In Ovid's version of her explosive encounter with Actaeon, Diana is discovered in a place sacred and proper to her, in a grotto in its deepest, wooded recess ("Vallis erat . . . sacra Dianae / cuius in extremo est antrum nemorale recessu").²¹ The withdrawn privacy of the spot enhances the sense of Actaeon's transgression when he enters it. The locale is private, indeed, but it is not lonely: Ovid enumerates the activities of Diana's companions, and he lists many of their names (11. 165-72). When Actaeon bursts upon them, they weave a protective wall around Diana with their bodies ("circumfusaeque Dianam / corporibus texere suis " [11. 180-81]) and guard her ("comitum turba est stipata suarum" [1. 186]).²² Here, in its original version for the Renaissance, Diana's legend locates female chastity in a sacred, enclosed or withdrawn realm and also populates that space with a plural female company.²³ Literary references to Diana preserve the social nature of this cult of chastity. An adherent of Diana takes a vow and joins a group, she becomes a "votaress"; Diana's votaries are members of a "company," a "sweet troop"; they belong to a "band."²⁴ In this plural form, female chastity takes on a volitional character.

Images of Diana and her company are generally situated in the kind of private locale depicted in Ovid, a zone of feminine autonomy physicalized as the grove, the locus amoenus or the garden (indeed this spatialization gives female friendship an even more marked sense of place than idealized male friendship enjoyed). In social terms, of course, this seclusion of women within the garden and domestic space has a primarily regulatory purpose.²⁵ As Georgiana Zeigler argues, there is a developing homology or identification between women and household, chamber, garden, or closet that plays a role in the rise of the idea of the private; she notes the degree to which "the woman's room signifies her 'self" in Shakespearean drama.²⁶ As Zeigler's materials indicate, the will to keep women within the domestic sphere also generates an anxiety about their conduct within the women's quarters. The act of seclusion is slightly at odds with the desire to control women's "private" conduct, as the continuous recommendation of activities like sewing and prayer attests.²⁷ What these literary feminine places begin to suggest is the Foucaultian prospect that the "proper" zone of female persons accorded by the conduct books and gender ideology of the period could take on a "proprietary" sense, affectively and erotically.²⁸ As we shall see, The Two Noble Kinsmen unites the paradigms of plural chastity and female proprietary spaces to surprising effect.

II Improvisations on the Friendship Form

Much critical consideration of The Two Noble Kinsmen has concerned itself with allocating authorship between Shakespeare and Fletcher.²⁹ Treatments undertaking more thematic interpretation have often utilized an idea of the "naturalness" of marriage to interpret this drama, which, as I will show, could hardly go further than it does to argue that marriage is a (brutally) political institution. As one editor of The Two Noble Kinsmen suggests, "perhaps the chief difficulty is that the play seems to compel us to attribute to Shakespeare at the end of his career an apparently partial and distorted attitude to love."³⁰ Other critics read the play as a representation of the inevitability of such a "distorted" attitude's ultimate defeat. Mary Beth Rose argues that "the best studies of the play have relied on the psychoanalytic conception of individual development to argue . . . that The Two Noble Kinsmen concerns . . . the unavoidable process of growth."³¹ Barry Weiler characterizes marriage, though soberly, in terms of "the inevitability of this institution as both the building block of the social order and the seal of adult sexuality."³² Rose sees The Two Noble Kinsmen as a "representation of neurotic suffering"; in her reading the play equates any resistance to marriage as a celebratory zone for self-fulfillment with "perversity" and an "unnatural recoil from experience and, specifically, from sexual love."³³

Critical approaches that blend nature, growth, and love with marriage underestimate the power of the theories of friendship in the play, especially since marriage was only just becoming normative as a locus of affectivity.³⁴ They fail to grapple with the astonishingly negative conception of marriage the drama involves. They also diminish the force and interest of the character Emilia, who walks on stage to dramatize the most explicit case for same-sex association in the period except for what Janel Mueller terms John Donne's "brief for lesbianism" in "Sapho to Philenis." Describing this unprecedented poem as a "what if? imagining," Mueller proposes that Donne fully envisions lesbianism, in both erotic and economic terms, as a Utopian resolution of the sexual dilemma in Montaigne's friendship theory.³⁵The Two Noble Kinsmen 's Emilia, by comparison, appears as an advocate of female homoerotics in a contest situation, as a representative of individual, volitional association against the sovereign's power to reorganize one's affective arrangements. In a sense, the play moves female homoerotics from utopia into the realm of political contest, where it remains positively coded as Utopian; its apparent defeat by marriage is marked by funerals rather than celebration. Since the power of the sovereign and the imposition of marriage are so morally tainted in The Two Noble Kinsmen, Emilia's advocacy is not simply an example of what James Holstun usefully terms "lesbian elegy."³⁶ For the "inevitability" of a female homoerotics pressed into the past tense is just what Shakespeare and Fletcher qualify and recast as political injustice.

The literary rarity of Emilia's position, its specific political role in the drama, and its connection to female proprietary spaces make The Two Noble Kinsmen an extraordinary text. For Emilia's combined dedication to women and to chastity makes the case for chastity as an associative form. This chastity opposes not only tyrannical or coercive marriage, but also tyranny in its plain political sense. While Rose locates the play's conflict between "erotic love and friendship" and Weiler instead considers the play to "dramatize the conflict between friendship and marriage," friendship and marriage arguably trope another conflict.³⁷ This third conflict places non-subordinated affective bonds in opposition to compulsory and hierarchical ones, where relations preferred or chosen counter those compelled by tyrannical compulsion. Thus the primary conflict of the play pits Emilia as a spokesperson for volitional association against Theseus as the agent of imposed marriage. Their contest determines which of the two paradigms will capture "human title."

The prologue to The Two Noble Kinsmen signals its source in Chaucer's "The Knight's Tale." The points of deviation, however, are equally interesting, for they all tend to highlight friendship—for both sexes—and to darken marriage and diminish its prestige. In Chaucer's tale, Theseus's marriage to the captured queen of "Femenye" is already completed, not indefinitely deferred as in the drama. The playwrights have also de-emphasized the marriage of Emilia and Palamon, deferring it too beyond the play's borders. The drama enhances Pirithous's presence, giving his friendship with Theseus sufficient weight to counterbalance that of Palamon and Arcite; the kinsmen's friendship is given a new declamatory intensity. Finally, the play vastly expands the role of Emelye into a character who articulates an entirely new, pro-female argument, actively connecting a female preference for chastity with the pursuit of a camaraderie of women. All these changes weaken the marriage element they adapt from Chancer while substantiating the counter-presence of friendship.

The friendship theme is strengthened by Shakespeare and Fletcher, but it is also made more complex, a fact previous criticism has not addressed. Indeed, one critic has asserted that Palamon and Arcite are just "younger versions of Theseus and Pirithous."³⁸ The case of Palamon and Arcite, however, deviates so markedly from Theseus and Pirithous's model friendship that it must be considered a parody of the highly-rhetoricized period ideal. The drama presents the secure friendship of Theseus and Pirithous by way of others' observation. In a rich conversation between Hippolyta and Emilia, the two Amazon sisters analyze both the scope and basis of this famous friendship. Their dialogue proceeds as Pirithous leaves them to follow Theseus to war:

Emilia: HOW his longing
Follows his friend!
 . . . Have you observed him
Since our great lord departed?

Hippolyta: With much labor;
And I did love him for it. They two have cabined
In many a dangerous as poor a corner,
Peril and want contending . . .
. . . Their knot of love,
Tied, weaved, entangled, with so true, so long,
And with a finger of so deep a cunning,
May be outworn, never undone. I think
Theseus cannot be umpire to himself,
Cleaving his conscience into twain and doing
Each side like justice, which he loves best.

(1.3.26-47)³⁹

The sisters, experienced in war themselves, find this friendship to be rooted in mutual experience and trial over time. Emilia subsequently comments on the friendship's sense of "ground" and its "maturely seasoned" quality (1.3.56). This perspective distinguishes the Theseus-Pirithous friendship from the rapture of Montaigne's formulation.⁴⁰

In contrast to this model, Palamon and Arcite articulate their twinning friendship with a youthful excess that effectively parodies some of Montaigne's declamatory rhetoric. The Jailer's Daughter had observed that the imprisoned kinsmen (not unlike Donne's lovers in "The Good-Morrow") "have all the world in their chamber" (2.1.25). Arcite begins to imagine that they can thrive in confinement:

And here being thus together,
We are an endless mine to one another;
We are one another's wife, ever begetting
New births of love; we are father, friends, acquaintance;
We are, in one another, families.
I am your heir, and you are mine; this place
Is our inheritance; . . .

We shall live long and loving.

(2.1.132-40)

A few lines before this extravagantly rhetoricized relationship has ended, Palamon asks "is there record of any two that loved / Better than we do Arcite?" (2.1.166-67) and concludes in the same self-congratulatory tone "I do not think it possible our friendship / Should ever leave us" (2.1.168-69). However, the entire declamation of Palamon and Arcite's friendship notably transpires in the shadow of a captivity that serves as both its context and its caveat. Unlike Theseus and Pirithous, the kinsmen envision their friendship both as a haven from the trial of their virtue in the world and as a bond vulnerable in the circumstance of liberty. The prison is a "holy sanctuary" to keep them from corruption (2.1.125). "Were we at liberty, / A wife might part us lawfully, or business; / Quarrels consume us . . . A thousand chances, / Were we from hence, would sever us" (2.1.142-49). On the contrary, within Renaissance friendship theory, "neither sovereign's nor father's hate / A friendship fix'd on virtue sever can."⁴¹ The kinsmen's speeches were premature. Montaigne refers to Cicero on this issue: "Clearly friendships are to be judged by wits, and ages already strengthened and confirmed."⁴² Compared to Theseus's "knot of love" as Hippolyta and Emilia had just described it, the kinsmen's friendship is precarious in the extreme.

This precariousness is immediately dramatized as their love for Emilia registers primarily as a quarrel between them over rights to love her.⁴³ The collapse of Palamon and Arcite's friendship falls decisively short of the right result, according to friendship lore, when two virtuous friends fall in love with the same woman. The touchstone to which this dilemma refers is Boccaccio's story of Tito and Gesippo, a tale circulated further in Elyot's Boke Named the Governour. In Weiler's words, "one friend surrenders his bride to the other, but this gift creates an asymmetry that, in the second movement of the tale, is presumably rectified when the recipient of the bride offers to die for the donor. The crises of death and sexual desire test the proposition that a friend is an 'other self under extreme conditions."⁴⁴ False to form, Palamon and Arcite instantly pursue their separate interests, and vow instead to take one another's lives. A "true" friendship would not have collapsed under this pressure. By the drama's close, both will sadly question the fatality by which one love exacts the life of another love.

Theseus himself takes on the role of spokesman for this sense of fate as an unpredictable external power. In the final speech of the play, he offers this commentary on the bizarre—and appallingly serious—turn of events: "Never fortune / Did play a subtler game . . . yet in the passage / The gods have been most equal . . . The gods my justice / Take from my hand, and they themselves become the executioners / . . . O heavenly charmers, / What things you make of us!" (5.4.112-32). Theseus's light tone here belies the spiritual bruises, long faces, and blood that surround him. His claim that outcomes have been effected by fortune or the gods, however, masks his agency in setting up the original "fateful" dilemmas in over-passionate exercises of his unilateral power. Despite these gestures to the role of fate in the drama, the absolute power, the "tyranny," of Theseus remains to be explored.

III. Theseus's Power

In act 1, we find the kinsmen discussing the nature of Creon's power in Thebes. They call him "a most unbounded tyrant" and prepare to exile themselves, when the approach of warring Theseus revives their political loyalty to Creon: "we must / With him stand to the mercy of our fates / Who hath bounded our last minute" (1.2.63, 101-3). Such is the tyrant's character. He has a boundary problem, exceeding his own and contracting or violating the boundedness of others. Theseus displays exactly this fault, insisting upon a relationship of intimacy with persons over whom he has absolute power.⁴⁵ Both the kinsmen and both the Amazons are less than subjects in Theseus's dukedom. They are captives, prisoners of war, lives to be disposed of by decrees. This specifically political circumstance does not register in readings of the play that are concerned with individualistic or exclusively private meanings of love and sexuality. Hippolyta and Emilia are captive soldiers, Amazons to be domesticated by Theseus's phallic power; Palamon and Arcite were combatants near death when Theseus ordered "All our surgeons / Convent in their behoof . . . we had rather have 'em / Prisoners to us than death!" (1.4.30-37). Theseus's comportment towards all four combines domination with desire, aggression with affection and admiration, as he blurs personal inclination with political office. All of their fates will originate in Theseus's imagination and will be effected by the mechanisms of his political power. None will be motivated by individual "growth."

Theseus functions as an unreliable but absolute political ruler. In the first scene of the play, Theseus is urged to take revenge. Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons, joins the other queens in a position commonly used to address him: she is on her knees (1.1.86).⁴⁶ Theseus at first protests the queens' insistence upon kneeling ("Pray you, kneel not" and "O no knees, none, widow" [1.1.54, 74]). But after Theseus has once refused them, the widows ask Hippolyta to "Lend us a knee" and Emilia "O help now! / Our cause cries for your knee" (1.1.96, 199-200). When the spectacle of the kneeling ladies finally affects Theseus, "All the Ladies rise" (1.1.207-5).

This is not the only time an extravagant display of kneeling deference indexes Theseus's tyrannical capriciousness as a ruler. When Arcite and Palamon are discovered dueling and an enraged Theseus orders both shall die, he is besieged by another wave of entreaties, this time not for revenge, but for forbearance. Lacking princely probity, he appears not to know which is appropriate to a given case. When he decides to let the kinsmen duel first and then kill the winner, the ladies resort to their knees, again, in supplication, with Emilia proclaiming "I will be woman and have pity. / My knees shall grow to th'ground but I'll get mercy / . . . the powers of all women will be with us" (3.6.191-94). As the sisters beg to no avail, even Pirithous enters the fray: "Nay, then, I'll in too" (3.6.201). Their combined and repeated conjurings for mercy finally cause Theseus to relent, only to produce a more arbitrary decree.

Theseus's disposition of the problem that Palamon and Arcite raise enmeshes an innocent bystander: the singleby-choice Emilia. In a mode of reasoned counsel, Emilia urges him to take back his oath to execute the kinsmen. "That oath was rashly made, and in your anger; / Your reason will not hold it" (3.6.227-28). Further, she reminds him of a prior oath made to her "of more authority . . . / Not made in passion neither, but good heed" (3.6.231-32). By this oath Theseus had promised to fulfill any reasonable request of Emilia's, and she proclaims "I tie you to your word now" (3.6.236). Emilia on her knees has presented Theseus with a morally serious challenge. In asking him to stand firm to his "word" and to be ruled in his rule-making by reason, Emilia mobilizes all the humanist principles of good rule by reason against the inconstant, wavering rule by passion or anger associated with the tyrant. Here Emilia distinguishes herself from the madness and unreason variously displayed by the kinsmen, Theseus, and the Jailer's mad daughter. She asks Theseus to banish both the kinsmen and to make them "swear . . . never more / To make me their contention, or to know me" (3.6.251-53). Thus, framed within a demonstration of marked moral clarity in Renaissance terms, Emilia's one request is that these kinsmen, without violence, should leave her alone.

Instead of heeding her reasonable request, Theseus offers her a choice that entails exactly the degree of involvement and responsibility from which she has just sought to be relieved. When she refuses to implicate herself in Theseus's process of "justice," ("for me, a hair shall never fall of these men" [3.6.287]) Theseus improvises. He decides to permit the duel, execute the loser, and give her to the winner. Death is a fate the kinsmen had already undertaken to risk, so instead of punishment there is now a prospect of reward. In violating his word, Theseus casually, as if his attention has already lapsed, transgresses the known, stated desire of Emilia, who seconds earlier was hunting with him as an equal. Only Emilia, who has lowered her body and raised her voice for mercy, has been punished by the end of the whole transaction.⁴⁷ Emilia is arbitrarily thrust out of the role of a reasoning interlocutor and into the role of a silent item of booty in the decree Theseus establishes unilaterally and in violation of "reason." Theseus's autocratic conduct suggests a wavering, divided mind, but one nevertheless possessed of final authority. Emilia's consent, of course, is never given.

While Theseus's treatment of Emilia illustrates the brutality of his thought, it highlights the equivocal position in which all the characters subject to his power find themselves. Theseus's injection of marriage here is important, for, as Rose notes, "marrying Emilia is never an explicit concern [even] of the kinsmen, who quarrel only over the right to love her."⁴⁸ In this sense, Theseus is in fact imposing marriage upon everyone else, as an expression of his control over them. Marriage, as an element of his imagination, is instituted as an act of Theseus's political power. Arcite upon his "victory" tells Emilia "To buy you I have lost what's dearest to me / Save what is bought" (5.3.112-13). Palamon, swept by Arcite's demise into "victory," reflects on the paradox "that we should things desire which do cost us / The loss of our desire! That naught could buy dear love but loss of dear love!" (5.4.110-12). Thus Palamon and Arcite equate the passions of friendship and love, while in Theseus's regime the two forms are set in a life-and-death struggle. As a consequence, both kinsmen articulate mixed evaluations of the "fate" Theseus has wrought for them. Subjection to passionate desire, subjection to absolute power; both place Palamon and Arcite as well as Emilia under a tyranny of false choices, in the thrall of others' imperatives.

On the other hand, as the only politically unsubordinated character, Theseus is able to make choices he considers consistent with maintaining what he calls "our human title" (1.1.233). Despite the fact that Theseus uses language suggesting a view that Rose terms "the heroics of marriage," in which marriage is seen as a definitional watershed in human identity, it is precisely the prospective threat posed to his "human title" by marriage that moves Theseus to defer it. He goes to war instead, claiming "As we are man, / Thus should we do; being sensually subdued, / We lose our human title" (1.1.231-33). While he can compel or defer his own marriage, his compulsion of connections among other characters represents for them a constraint inconsistent with that "human title" as volitional freedom or self-disposition. When Emilia, facing the prospect of the duel and its results, announces "I am extinct" (5.3.20) and, given to the victor, laments "Is this winning?" (5.3.138) it is clear that the right to freely choose one's affective association is an expression of selfownership and integrity. But for all these characters, Theseus's unlimited authority cancels their self-possession. Theseus holds "title" to their lives.

IV. Emilia's Choice

Emilia is the dramatic counterweight to Theseus as well as his political victim. While Emilia is the only figure in the drama capable of what Weiler describes as a "conscious articulation" of desire (for chastity and the company of women), criticism has neglected and misread her to an astonishing degree.⁴⁹ Roberts argues that "the Amazonian Emilia comes closer to being a simple allegorical figure than any of the men. Like Hippolyta, she remains curiously static, seeming more a projection of a male problem than an interesting dramatic character."⁵⁰ But Emilia's unwavering consistency is a sign of valued self-knowledge in a play (and a period) where inconstant desires and shifting appetites are deeply stigmatized, and her "persuasion" for women in itself offers a check to the male process of "projection." Rose describes Emilia quite misleadingly as the "remote superior lady" of courtly love tradition.⁵¹ But rather than being remote or superior, Emilia articulates an actual rebuttal of the Petrarchan system, asserting resistance to the gender roles within courtly love. Rose places her along with Palamon and Arcite as "three ambivalent narcissists, for whom love becomes an isolated, compulsive experience."⁵² On the contrary, Emilia's version of love is emphatically homosocial, and her impending marriage is compelled, not "compulsive." Rose asks, "Is she merely a passive victim in regard to choosing a mate, or is she unwilling to assert her prerogative as a subject and make a choice?"⁵³ This is an impossible question because Emilia has done nothing if not actively articulate her choice, throughout the drama, as a matter of her virgin "faith." To the exceptions taken against her "persuasion" for "true love 'tween maid and maid," she equably replies with model tolerance "I am not / Against your faith, yet I continue mine" (1.3.91, 81, 96-97).

Indeed, Emilia's "prerogative as a subject" is exactly what is canceled by Theseus's unbounded power over her. The drama traces this brutal cancellation of individual prerogative, which it connects to the political issue of "human title." The figure of Emilia in particular resists a construction of the play as focusing "exclusively on the conflicts of private life, conceived of as a separate domain" from the public sphere.⁵⁴ Instead, in juxtaposing the unboundedness of Theseus's absolute power with Emilia's articulated choice and its final subjection to Theseus's authority, the play actually expresses a longing for a form of life—public or private—from which the subordinating power of tyranny is absent. There, the individual might experience freedom of association as a means to self-fulfillment and Montaigne's "jovissance."⁵⁵ While The Two Noble Kinsmen associates marriage with tyranny and compulsion, its representation of female "chastity" is coextensive with a full-blown argument for a female homosociality in pursuit of "jovissance." Emilia's advocacy carries more poetic and political weight than the weaker and tainted male friendships in the drama.

Emilia's association with reason and wisdom, her sense of moderation, and the manner in which she intelligently takes part in efforts to persuade Theseus to mercy all combine with the absence of any hint of monstrosity to code this Amazon astonishingly positively. As Bawcutt notices, "Emilia is shown as a serious and intelligent girl."⁵⁶ Her seriousness is clear from her attempt to restrain Theseus from rash oaths and from her firm advocacy of the rule of reason. Exhibiting the Renaissance virtues of probity and "decorum," she is a proponent of both martial severity (1.1.128) and compassion (3.6.239, 242) when either is appropriate. All of these positions are morally serious; here they are propounded in a female voice. Only Emilia questions Theseus's illegitimate manner of rule.

In this same voice, Emilia sounds a critique of the gender mechanics of courtly love. In Emilia, the "female beloved" speaks up to announce that she has a critical consciousness that does not consent, exposing the Petrarchan system as "projection." When Palamon and Arcite are caught dueling, Arcite pleads with Theseus: "Duke, ask that lady / Why she is fair, and why her eyes command me /. . . to love her" (3.6.168-70). Hippolyta similarly blames Emilia's face: "that face of yours / Will bear the curses . . . of after ages / For these lost cousins" (3.6.186-88). The follower of Diana finally responds, "in my face, dear sister, I find no anger to 'em, nor no ruin"; instead, she argues, "the misadventure of their own eyes kill 'em" (3.6.188-90). This rejoinder is a fresh yet practical analysis of the Petrarchan situation from the "beloved's" point of view; in another play, perhaps, it would be a comic moment. After horrified pleading against her implication in the violence of the duel—"Shall anything that loves me perish for me?" (3.6.241)—Emilia continues to protest the Petrarchan role she is accorded through the balance of the play. She laments "that my unspotted youth must now be soiled / With blood of princes and my chastity / Be made the altar" of death (4.2.59-61). She prefers that "neither for my sake should fall," (4.2.69) but also hopes in her address to Diana that "If well inspired, this battle shall confound / Both these brave knights" and she might "continue in [Diana's] band" (5.1.166-67, 162). She refuses to be an inspirational presence at the combat itself, exclaiming "O, better never born, / Than minister to such a harm!" (5.3.65-66). Thus The Two Noble Kinsmen offers a woman who, rather than being remote and silent or exercising "a fundamental aloofness," is articulate and in the fray, repudiating continually the gender and affective roles graven in the Petrarchan system.⁵⁷

What is the form of frauendienst that Emilia offers instead? She provides a fully developed articulation of an Amazonian position, situating herself affectively and socially among women alone. She not only connects chastity with a female associational preference; her idea of her reputation and her identity is drawn from and maintained within the company of women. Emilia's first speech would be perfectly unremarkable if made by a male knight. The Third Queen, invoking virginity, has called upon Emilia to be the queen's advocate. In high contrast with Theseus, Emilia responds: "No knees to me. / What woman I may stead that is distressed / Does bind me to her" (1.1.35-37). Emilia's performance of chivalric service results in a specifically female loyalty, and this first exchange links virginity with bonds between women. Emilia describes herself as "a natural sister of our sex" (1.1.125).

Emilia's sisterhood, according to Hippolyta, rises to the level of a "persuasion," and we begin to hear its history. Emilia makes a case for same-sex affective primacy—even though she begins by assuring Hippolyta that "reason" supports that Theseus will place his marriage to her above his friendship with Pirithous.⁵⁸ When Emilia begins to recount the history of her youthful friendship, Hippolyta knows immediately what is coming: "'Twas Flavina," she interjects (1.3.54). As Waith ironically notes, "it appears that women, pace Montaigne, are also capable of such ideal relationships."⁵⁹ Indeed, the celebratory reminiscence proceeds in the profound language of Montaigne's most emotional passages: "I,"

And she I sigh and spoke of were things innocent,
Loved for we did, and like the elements
That know not what, nor why, yet do effect
Rare issues by their operance, our souls
Did so to one another.

(1.3.59-64)

Emilia here echoes the sense of sublimity and mystery with which Montaigne supplements Ciceronian rhetoric, suggesting an imperative not only within the soul but also beyond it, driving it without its conscious involvement.⁶⁰ Interestingly, Emilia's narrative does not suggest that likeness was the source of the friendship. Instead, sameness seems to have been, in a way, its goal, as the two copy one another, adopting the other's patterns and striving for resemblance. Flowers, bodily ornament—conventional female signs—are circulating, here, between women themselves. Even the casual actions and careless habits of dress of one become the serious ambition of the other:

The flower that I would pluck
And put between my breasts—O, then but beginning
To swell about the blossom—She would long
Till she had such another, and commit it
To the like innocent cradle, where phoenix-like
They died in perfume; on my head no toy
But was her pattern; her affections—pretty,
Though happily her careless wear—I followed
For my most serious decking.

(1.3.66-74)

Emilia brings her rapturous but delicately erotic lines to a close with a rhetorical turn, offering that "this rehearsal" has an "end." She concludes with the proposition that "true love 'tween maid and maid may be / More than in sex dividual" (1.3.81-82). The final locution is unusual, and it is clear that Emilia's is a dramatic proclamation, ushered in by a transport of passion, as she discloses in conceding that her "rehearsal" is "old emportment's bastard" (1.3.80).⁶¹ Hippolyta's first comment is to tell Emilia "you're out of breath" before she reflects on Emilia's "high-speeded pace" to convert a declaration for homosociality into one against heterosexuality. She surmises that Emilia "shall never . . . love any that's called man" (1.3.83-85).⁶² Emilia is sure she shall not, and the events of the play support this statement. On the death of Arcite she acknowledges him as a "right good man," still saying nothing about love (5.4.97).

The language used to describe Emilia's position here is based on notions of choice, conviction, or "determynacion"; her position is not centered in acts or in essences, but is articulable as a faith or a profession. It further rises to the level of an argument, proposing its thesis. In Hippolyta and Emilia's final exchange on the subject of Emilia's "rehearsal," Hippolyta calls Emilia's position an "appetite," a "persuasion," and Emilia refers to it as a kind of doctrine, a "faith" (1.3.89, 91, 97). The scope of this "faith" extends beyond particular friendships or object choice narrowly construed; Emilia invariably evaluates situations in terms of a world view markedly centered on a female standard. When the others commend Arcite at the tournament, Emilia says "Believe / His mother was a wondrous handsome woman; / His face methinks goes that way" (2.4.19-21). When Theseus vows that Palamon and Arcite must die, Emilia fears becoming the "scorn of women": "the goodly mothers that have groaned for these, / And all the longing maids that ever loved 'em, / If your vow stand, shall curse me" (3.6.250, 245-47). Trying to choose one of the kinsmen in order to avoid violence between them, Emilia strangely links Arcite's beauty with homosexual models and Palamon's looks to his mother. She compares Arcite to Ganymede and his brow to Juno's. As for Palamon, his melancholy appearance is "as if he had lost his mother" (4.2.28). All the affective links in this speech exceed the scope of heterosexual models. But Emilia remains "guiltless of election," either between the kinsmen or for marriage, in her long address to Diana. Instead, she entreats Diana to give her to whichever man loves her best "or else grant / The file and quality I hold I may / Continue in thy band" (5.1.160-62).

The address to Diana highlights the question of jurisdiction that Theseus has been shown to confound. For Emilia's appeal to Diana finds her with an undetermined husband already appointed to her. Nevertheless, Emilia still holds out the possibility that she will be given to neither kinsman. Strangely, the servant of Diana, rather than betraying her oath of chastity or falling in love, is instead separated from her mistress by a decree of the civil power; no impulse of "nature" has eroded her vows. The play dramatizes the degree to which Diana's mythic power is eclipsed by Theseus's absolute sovereignty. On the verge of her betrothal to the unknown victor, Emilia describes herself as "bridehabited, / But maiden-hearted" (5.1.150-51). This split in subjectivity results not from her ambivalence, but instead arises as a wound to subjectivity that results from Theseus's power to compel. Emilia's "faith" retreats to the interior realm of the heart under Theseus's authority to compel her body into marriage.

In considering the construction of the "heart" as an interiority produced for Emilia by the regime of marriage in the public sphere, there is one scene-within-a-scene that appears to be completely neglected in criticism. For Emilia's recollection of friendship with Flavina, though passionate, is not the only evidence the drama offers regarding expressions of Emilia's "prerogative" in contexts free of Theseus's control. While the Flavina story of a past love is nostalgic, there is one episode in The Two Noble Kinsmen in which our "maiden-hearted" heroine is "merry-hearted" in the play's present tense. In the scene so much considered for the collapse of friendship between Palamon and Arcite, where from their prison window they observe (but, like the criticism, do not hear) Emilia and her Woman, the two women engage in a rich exchange. This exchange and its location suggests that serious female association is linked to a proprietary space and is not just a matter for nostalgia. The trajectory of this suggestive exchange is obscured by interlineation with Palamon and Arcite's dialogue. Perhaps performance could make it very clear. Quoting the extracted conversation in full will reveal its intriguing teleology:

Emilia: This garden has a world of pleasures in't.
What flower is this?
Woman: 'Tis called narcissus, madam.
Emilia: That was a fair boy, certain, but a fool
To love himself; were there not maids enough?
Or were they all hard-hearted?

Woman: They could not be to one so fair.
Emilia: Thou wouldst not.
Woman: I think I should not, madam.
Emilia: That's a good wench;
But take heed to your kindness, though.
Woman: Why, madam?
Emilia: Men are mad things.
Canst thou work such flowers in silk, wench?
Woman: Yes.
Emilia: I'll have a gown full of 'em and of these.
This is a very pretty colour; will't not do
Rarely upon a skirt, wench?
Woman: Dainty, madam.
Emilia: Of all flowers,
Methinks a rose is best . . .
It is the very emblem of a maid;
For when the west wind courts her gently,
How modestly she blows, and paints the sun
With her chaste blushes! When the north comes near her,
Rude and impatient, then, like chastity,
She locks her beauties in her bud again,
And leaves him to base briars.
Woman: Yet, good madam,
Sometimes her modesty will blow so far
She falls for it; a maid,
If she have any honour, would be loath
To take example by her.
Emilia: Thou art wanton.
The sun grows high, let's walk in. Keep these flowers;
We'll see how near art can come near their colours.
I am wondrous merry-hearted, I could laugh now.
Woman: I could lie down now, I am sure.
Emilia: And take one with you?
Woman: That's as we bargain, madam.
Emilia: Well, agree then.

(2.1.172-7)

Like Donne's lovers' chamber, like Palamon and Arcite's prison, "this garden" in which the women are alone "has a world of pleasures in't." The garden, a proprietary female space, composes a plenitude. The reflections on Narcissus, a possible commentary on the validity of Palamon and Arcite's friendship, introduce the concept of "hard-heartedness" in maids' response to men. Emilia proceeds to warn her "wench" to limit the "kindness" she shows to them, since "men are mad things." (This judgment is being confirmed simultaneously by Palamon and Arcite's descent into the "madness" of love).⁶³ Emilia's question "were there not maids enough?" assumes a certain dramatic irony as well, in its identification of maids as objects of love. The conversational shift to silk weaving incorporates and echoes two elements already seen in Emilia's Flavina narrative: flowers and dress, blossoms and patterns, suggesting the intimacy of women in a dressing chamber. The references to work and art in producing the silk gown strengthen the sense of plenitude, showing that the feminine space inhabited by the women is a creative economy.⁶⁴ Ironically, this "world of pleasures" is perfectly consistent with the urgings of conduct books that women, in the quarters presumably not set aside for their pleasure, should engage in useful pursuits like sewing and embroidery.

Emilia and her Woman continue their commentary on flowers, oblivious of being observed, as Emilia proposes the rose as the "very emblem of a maid" on account of its chastity. It is now the Woman's turn to warn the Lady: the rose is an unsafe metaphor, risky for a "maid," because it eventually opens and falls. Here the exchange takes perhaps its most interesting and unexpected turn. Emilia, having raised the issue of "hard-heartedness" in connection with a warning against unchastity (as an over-kindness to men), now teases the Woman, "Thou art wanton." On this note she proposes that they withdraw into their quarters with "Let's walk in." The suddenly "wondrous merryhearted" Emilia feels she could laugh; the Woman's response that she could "lie down" completes the allusion to a card game called "laugh and lie down" that both the Penguin and Oxford annotations consider a proverbial expression with sexual meanings.⁶⁵ Sexual meanings indeed, but this bantering conversation begs the question of just what sort of sexual meanings are in play. The familiarity of the usages "thou" and "wench," the "merry" flirtatious tone of the otherwise markedly serious Emilia, and the by now obvious inference that Emilia, at least, cannot be referring to a sexual "bargain" with a man—all these converge to suggest that these final lines refer to a sexual encounter between Emilia and her Woman. The ambiguity of the lines—are they hypothetical? Do they refer to some (future) "bargain" with a "mad" man?—is substantially dispelled by Emilia's "now" and her imperative tense in "Well, agree then." One is left with a sense that an "agreement" is concluded, that, indeed, may already have been established ("That's as we bargain, madam").

V. Conclusion

The Two Noble Kinsmen's Emilia, then, offers a rebuttal to Renaissance commonplaces about female friendship's impossibility. She appears on stage with a marked preference for her own sex, a preference that places homoerotics squarely within the scope of female friendship. The status of "Emilia's choice" with respect to her impending forced marriage is unknowable, but its location in a proprietary female space suggests that it is likely to be unaffected.⁶⁶ While Emilia's probable sexual transaction with her Woman diverges from Montaigne's model—in admitting sexuality, in traversing class lines, and in the element of "bargaining" it contains—it nevertheless suggests a form of female association that fits smoothly with conventional Renaissance patterns of female household seclusion or governance. Although domestic and interior spaces are widely associated with women, they are never investigated as the plural, female community which, in the larger households so often described, they must always have been. In the character of Emilia, as she becomes quieter and quieter under Theseus's ducal prerogative, the possibilities and nuances inherent in the Renaissance configuration of the (noble) female household just make it into articulation; they are obscured but reconstructable as a fragmented scene-withina-scene. Emilia's "Let's walk in" gestures towards a Renaissance space in which female "chastity" finds expression as a feminine economy, a social arrangement of women "among themselves."⁶⁷ This zone is constructed as a space beyond political tyranny, at least for a time.

Strikingly, in The Two Noble Kinsmen, the great figure of this resistance to tyrannical power is not the paradigmatic friendship-gendered-male so popular with writers of the period. Instead, friendship's partisan is a lady knight who revises the definitional prejudices of the male model regarding both gender and sexuality. In effect, Emilia's advocacy constitutes a "friendship theory" that does Montaigne one better: by embodying Montaigne's penultimate criterion of volitional association, Emilia shows how his effort to exclude women and sexual love from the field of friendship actually limits the sense of real choice that he exalts when he claims "our voluntarle choice and libertie hath no production more properly her owne, than that of affection and amitie."⁶⁸ Emilia's case argues that the preemption of self-specified, affective association is a political act in violation of reason.

An Amazon as the voice of reasoning autonomy and the critique of absolutism? It appears that Shakespeare and Fletcher here were perfectly capable of overriding gender conventions and sexual silences, motivated by a need to effectively trope opposition to the intrusive power of tyrants, of absolute monarchy, of persons possessed of "greatness." Chastity, pluralized, strengthened as female friendship, and linked to a proprietary zone of affectionate autonomy, offers the only contest in the play to political subjugation and unreasonable rule. The fabulous intensity with which "chastity" is urged for women in the Renaissance context was, no doubt, predominantly a device of control and authority. But perhaps a part of the reason "chastity" absorbs so much interest and attention is the way it, in turn, could metaphorize anxious (male) relations to sovereign political power, to the unreviewable strength of those "appointed" to rule. The Two Noble Kinsmen raises this possibility even as it deploys a fully-articulated Amazonian position as the gendered, homoerotic voice of individual prerogative under siege. What it shows is that even the strongest conventions regarding gender and sexuality could rewrite themselves when governed by a stronger urgency: the frightening blend of personal and political power embodied in the Renaissance conception of authority.

Notes

This essay is part of a larger project entitled Soveraigne Amitie: Friendship and the Political Imagination in Renaissance Texts. I thank Janel Mueller for her engagement in this conversation and for access to her transcriptions of the speeches of Elizabeth I; Lauren Berlant and Josh Scodel for their helpful comments on earlier drafts; and Jonathan Goldberg for his reactions to this essay.

¹ Michel de Montaigne, "Of Friendship," in The Essayes of Montaigne: John Florio's Translation, ed. J. I. M. Stewart (New York: Modern Library Editions, 1933), 147. For Cicero's treatment of women and friendship, see De Amicitia in De Senectute, De Amicitia, De Divinatione, tr. W. A. Falconer (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, Loeb Classical Library, 1923), xiii, 46 (156-57).

² Rebecca Bushneil argues that "the tyrant's love of pleasure, his impulse to shift shapes, and his improper sovereignty often generate the accusation that he is, in effect, 'feminized'" (Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and Theater in the English Renaissance [Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1990], 9). Bushnell also discusses the classical sources of these gender associations and their implications for the Renaissance stage (20-25).

³ Montaigne, 150.

⁴ Though Montaigne's explicit discussion of sexuality in "De l'amitié" excludes it from the sphere of true friendship, Constance Jordan convincingly argues that Montaigne's account of friendship is specifically, though complicatedly, homoerotic ("Sexuality and volition in 'Sur des vers de Virgile'," forthcoming in Montaigne Studies).

⁵ William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, The Two Noble Kinsmen, ed. Eugene M. Waith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 1.1.233. Subsequent references are to this edition.

⁶ Jacques Derrida, "The Politics of Friendship," The Journal of Philosophy 85 (1988), 634.

⁷ Louis Montrose argues that "invariably, the Amazons are relocated just within the receding boundary of terra incognita," and are commonly configured in "an anticulture that precisely inverts European norms of political authority, sexual license, marriage practices, and inheritance rules" ("A Midsummer Night's Dream and the Shaping Fantasies of Elizabethan Culture: Gender, Power, Form" in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy Vickers [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1986], 71).

⁸ William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, in The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington (New York: Harper Collins, 1992), 1.1.78.

⁹ For a summary of this debate and its application to the Renaissance context, see Claude J. Summers's wellannotated discussion in "Homosexuality and Renaissance Literature, or the Anxieties of Anachronism," South Central Review (1992): 2-23. For specific considerations of sexuality in the Renaissance, compare Bruce Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England: A Cultural Poetics (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1991) and Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London: Gay Men's Press, 1982).

¹⁰ As to the role of sexuality in "chaste" female association, the presence or absence of sexual acts would be even less dispositive than it would have been for males. Janel Mueller has suggested a basis for gender asymmetry in conceiving homoeroticism, referencing "theological traditions that tended to ignore lesbianism . . . in contrast to what was viewed as the far graver perversion of male-male sexual relations" ("Troping Utopia: Donne's Brief for Lesbianism in 'Sapho to Philenis'," in Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe, ed. James Grantham Turner [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993], 195). Valerie Traub compares the asymmetry of regulated female heterosexuality and undiscussed female homoerotics to suggest the possibility that "the nature of [women's] erotic contacts did not invite sexual interpretation . . . that such behavior did not threaten the basis of the social contract—the open lineage family" (Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama [London: Routledge, 1992], 108). Female homoeroticism, then, is not inconsistent with the chastity centrally concerned with heterosexual transgressions that would threaten certainty of lineage and property.

¹¹ The spectrum of views on historical approaches to sexuality extends between these two "poles," whose representatives are taken to be John Boswell and Michel Foucault. Boswell's Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, on the one hand, is often characterized as "essentialist" in its effort to trace a history of homosexuality; volume one of Foucault's influential History of Sexuality has inspired much scholarship in a "constructivist" mode (see Summers, 20 n. 7, and Traub, 103). Both Boswell and Foucault, however, attempted to moderate these characterizations. Boswell concludes that "most of the current spectrum of belief [about what homosexuality is] appears to have been represented in previous societies. . . . Both realists and nominalists must lower their voices" ("Revolutions, Universals, Categories," Salmagundi 58-59 [1982-1983], 112-13). In an interview, Foucault commented specifically on Boswell's methodology, characterizing it as, in effect, non-essentialist and claiming that Boswell's emphasis on how people conceived the meanings of their own behaviors is essential to an archaeology of sexuality ("Sexual Choice, Sexual Act," in Foucault Live, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, tr. J. Johnston [New York: Columbia Univ. Press, Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series, 1989], 211-31).

¹² The terms are Foucault's in "Friendship as a Way of Life," rept. in Foucault Live, 203-9. Foucault's interview in Le Gai Pied reveals an emphasis on this sense of choice and innovation which is not often associated with his work. He offers a notion of (modern) homosexuality/friendship as "a way of life" involving invention, improvisation and communicative experimentation not far from the sense of choice and articulate persuasion to be found in The Two Noble Kinsmen.

¹³ Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1992), xiv-xv, 4, and following.

¹⁴ Goldberg argues that in Renaissance England "there was . . . no recognition of homosexuality per se, no terms to identify a homosexual except within a seditious behavior that knew no limits" and that "sodomy" was not visible unless linked "with the much more visible signs of social disruption represented by unorthodox religious or social positions" ("Sodomy and Society: the Case of Christopher Marlowe," in Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, ed. David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass [New York: Routledge, 1991], 75-76).

¹⁵ Illustrative of this sense are Ben Jonson's lines in "To Penshurst": "Thy lady's noble, fruitfull, chast withall, / His children thy great lord may call his own" (Ben Jonson: The Complete Poems, ed. George Parfitt [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1975], 97).

¹⁶ Elizabeth I, "Queen Elizabeth's First Speech to the House of Commons, February 10, 1559," The Speeches and Other Documents By and To Elizabeth I, Relating to the Parliaments of 1559, 1563, and 1566: Issues of Her Marriage and Limitation of the Succession, ed. and transer. Janel Mueller, a transcription of the British Library's Lansdowne MS 94, Art. 14, fol.29r-v.

¹⁷ Philippa Berry, Of Chastity and Power: Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen (New York: Routledge, 1989), 18.

¹⁸ For female narcissism, see Berry, 41, 67, and 188 n.76. These formulations derive from Irigarayan theory (as above and Introduction, 166 n.1). Compare this analysis to Traub, who notes the limitedness of narcissism as a model of early modern (female) homoerotics (104).

For the sense of female community as a biological or religious genealogy see Berry, 82. This formulation emphasizes a female tradition at a distance in time rather than as a companionate present. Barbara Lewalski's concept of "female community" as she uses that phrase to consider Amelia Lanier's Salve Deus Rex Judeorum (1611), similarly casts female association as a "community" or tradition of, "good women" throughout religious history rather than as a social present ("Imagining Female Community: Aemelia Lanyer's Poems," in Writing Women in Jacobean England [Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1993], 213-41).

For the female sphere, see Berry's discussion of Spenser's "April Eclogue," 78-80.

¹⁹ Berry, xi, 123, 124, 132.

²⁰ Leonard Barkan details the reception history of this mythical encounter in "Diana and Actaeon: The Myth as Synthesis," English Literary Renaissance 10 (1980): 317-59.

²¹The Metamorphoses, tr. Frank Justus Miller (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, Loeb Classical Library, 1916), 134-35, book III, lines 155-57.

²² Goldberg's observation regarding access to Elizabeth I might easily be applied to Ovid's Diana: "It was literally true that access to the queen's body was in the hands of a small number of women; no approach to her privy chamber without passing by the female guard. These women are the only people we can be sure were intimate with the queen's body" (Sodometries, 47).

²³ Nancy Vickers, in her effective arraignment of Petrarchan technique, observes that "in The Metamorphoses, [Diana] is surrounded by protective nymphs, but Petrarch makes no mention of either her company or of Actaeon's" ("Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme," Critical Inquiry 7 [1981], 268).

²⁴ For "company" and "sweet troop" see John Lyly, Gallathea and Midas, ed. Anne Begor Lancashire (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1969), (I.ii.12), 11. For "band" see V.1.162.

²⁵ Peter Stallybrass considers the regulatory function of the "enclosure" of the female body in Bakhtinian terms, arguing that the ideal woman is "rigidly "finished': her signs are the enclosed body, the closed mouth, the locked house" in "Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed" (Rewriting the Renaissance, 127). See also Lorna Hutson, The Usurer's Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England (New York: Routledge, 1994) in which Hutson discusses the sixteenth-century role of Xenophon's Oeconomicus in constructing masculinity through the confinement of women (17-51).

²⁶ Georgiana Zeigler, "My Lady's Chamber: Female Space, Female Chastity in Shakespeare," Textual Practice 4 (1990), 73.

²⁷ Zeigler, 75, 77, 86.

²⁸ The metaphor of Diana and company was appropriated as a means for imagining female literary community. The dedicatory sonnet to Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam employs this metaphor of female relations structured by (mutual) service to Diana. Cary dedicates the play to another woman, addressing her as "Diana's Earthly Deputess," calling her "my Phoebe" and describing her as "Luna-like, unspotted, chaste, divine." Cary presents the play as a votaress' offering: her play is "consecrated to . . . Diana" (The Tragedy of Mariam the Fair Queen of Jewry, ed. Barry Weiler and Margaret Ferguson [Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1994], 66, lines 8, 10, 13-14).

²⁹ Both G. R. Proudfoot ("Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and the Apochryphal Plays," in Shakespeare: Select Bibliographical Guides, ed. Stanley Wells [London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973]) and Paul Bertram (Shakespeare and "The Two Noble Kinsmen" [New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1965]) offer summaries of the authorship debates. In general, Fletcher is accorded the greater part of the play, with Act I, substantial parts of Act V, and scattered scenes attributed to Shakespeare. See also Mary Beth Rose, The Expense of the Spirit: Love and Sexuality in Renaissance Drama (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1988), 213 and accompanying note.

³⁰The Two Noble Kinsmen, ed. N. W. Bawcutt (London: Penguin, 1977), 9. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by act, scene and line.

³¹ Rose, 222.

³² Barry Weiler, "The Two Noble Kinsmen, The Friendship Tradition, and the Flight from Eros" in Shakespeare, Fletcher, and "The Two Noble Kinsmen, " ed. Charles H. Frey (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1989), 108.

³³ Rose, 224, 223. In pursuing the subtitle of her book, "Love and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama," Rose has no index entry or discussion of friendship as either oppositional to or included in "love and sexuality"; her indexing of homosexuality refers only to James I.

³⁴ Rose describes this transition as an official shift of "moral prestige" from celibacy to marriage (4).

³⁵ Mueller, 184, 194-96. Paula Blank has disagreed with Mueller's claim that Donne's poem represents a fully Utopian moment, arguing instead that the poetic structure of comparison, of sameness, ultimately fails in the poem in a way consistent with Donne's poetry in general ("Comparing Sappho to Philaenis: John Donne's Homopoetics," PMLA 110 [1995], 359). But while Blank's concern is to show how the poem fits into Donne's poetic practice, Mueller's contextualization takes on a different project—placing Donne's "imagining" against a backdrop of virtual silence on female homoeroticism.

³⁶ James Holstun, "'Will you rent our ancient love asunder?': Lesbian Elegy in Donne, Marvell, and Milton," ELH 54 (1987): 835-67.

³⁷ Rose, 216 and Weiler, 101.

³⁸ Jeanne Roberts, "Crises of Male Self-Definition in The Two Noble Kinsmen," in Frey, 138.

³⁹ The "knot of love" here, ("so true, so long, .. . so deep") directly incorporates the language and cadence of Montaigne's "knot" of friendship "so hard, so fast, so durable" (199) that women had not the strength to perform it. Here, the women have the power to appreciate it; Emilia, of course, will go on to describe her experience of it, despite Montaigne's theory.

⁴⁰ "Wee sought one another before we had seene one another, and by the reports we heard of one another; . . . we embraced one another by our names" (Montaigne, 149).

⁴¹ Cary, 92.

⁴² Montaigne, 148.

⁴³ A number of critics have noted the degree to which Palamon and Arcite's love for Emilia is a figuration of a primary love for each other. See, for example, Weiler, 96, and Roberts, 141. While I emphasize here the measurement of failure in this friendship in terms of classically-derived doctrine, their warm affectivity survives both their disclaimers of love for each other and their murderous oaths. See, for example, act 3, scene 2, in which they promise "no mention of this woman, 'twill disturb us," (1. 15) and the scene where they lovingly dress each other for combat (3.6). This would be a textbook case of "homosociality" as Eve Sedgwick originally specified it, in which love (even if murderous) codes passionate relations between men (see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire [New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1985]).

⁴⁴ Weiler, 93.

⁴⁵ D'Orsay Pearson describes as a "critical myth" the notion that Theseus represented the ideal Renaissance prince, a reasonable man and an equitable ruler. Instead, he argues, Theseus's "Renaissance image as an unnatural, perfidious, and unfaithful father and lover far outweighed .. . his accomplishment in organizing the demes of Athens .. . or his reputation as an icon of the virtues of friendship" ("Unkinde Theseus: A Study in Renaissance Mythography," English Literary Renaissance 4 [1974], 276).

⁴⁶ In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Theseus had proclaimed "Hippolyta, I woo'd thee with my sword, / And won thy love doing thee injuries" (I.1.16-17).

⁴⁷ Rose considers Theseus's command that one kinsman must die as a "pointed deviation from Chaucer" that "emphasizes the harsh, arbitrary, human irrationality of the monarch's decree." She does not address the matter of any cruelty here towards Emilia (219). Compare Theseus's similarly harsh decree in A Midsummer Night's Dream, in which Hermia, in insisting on her own choice of a husband, violates her father's authority; Theseus, escalating the threat there too, offers a dilemma inversely related to Emilia's: Hermia must choose "either to die the death or to abjure / For ever the society of men" (I.1.65-66).

⁴⁸ Rose, 220.

⁴⁹ Weiler, 103.

⁵⁰ Roberts, 141.

⁵¹ Rose, 219.

⁵² Rose, 222.

⁵³ Rose, 222.

⁵⁴ Rose, 216.

⁵⁵ Montaigne, 147.

⁵⁶ Bawcutt, 24.

⁵⁷ Weiler, 96.

⁵⁸ Weller interestingly argues that Hippolyta too may be unsure of herself in this respect. "In rebuking Emilia's praise of single sex friendship, [Hippolyta] also seems to rebuke something in herself that Emilia's words have sympathetically evoked" (99).

⁵⁹ Waith, 55.

⁶⁰ "In the amitie I speake of, [mindes] entermixe and confound themselves one in another. . . . If a man urge me to tell wherefore I loved him, I feel it cannot be expressed, but by answering; because it was he, because it was myself. . . . There is beyond all my discourse . . . I know not what inexplicable and fatali power" (Montaigne, 149).

⁶¹ The Oxford English Dictionary defines "dividual" as an adjective describing something "that is or may be divided or separated from something else; separate, distinct, particular," citing first a 1598 use, interestingly, in Florio and second this appearance in The Two Noble Kinsmen. The sense of the phrase would thus be that a love composed of "maid and maid" can exceed (for example, in strength) a love composed of separable or distinguishable sexes.

⁶² Almost comically, Pirithous will repeatedly observe, with admiration, that Palamon and Arcite are "men" in a series of one line speeches. Observing Arcite in the tournament: "Upon my soul, a proper man" (II.iv.16), upon the duel, "O heaven, what more than man is this!" (III.vi.156-57), and "These are men!" (III.vi.265).

⁶³ The Diana/Acteon myth is also directly relevant here. As Palamon and Arcite observe Emilia and her Woman in a private moment, they too are stricken and transformed in a change that will lead to death.

⁶⁴ This scene, in envisioning a female sphere as a plenitude, echoes the sense of self-sufficient female economy Mueller establishes in Donne's poem and is suggestive of the sense of place or actualization that appears to be (the only thing) lacking in Donne's powerful envisioning of lesbian economy (200-2).

⁶⁵ Bawcutt, 195; Waith, 115.

⁶⁶ For the spatial and affective arrangements of the noble household, particularly in reference to distances of both kinds between wives and their husbands, see Laurence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (New York: Harper, 1979), 81.

⁶⁷ Luce Irigaray, "Commodities Among Themselves," in This Sex Which Is Not One, tr. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985), 192-97.

⁶⁸ Montaigne, 146.