SOURCE: "The Jailers's Daughter and the Politics of Madwomen's Language," in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 46, No. 3, Fall, 1995, pp. 277-300.

[In the essay below, Bruster focuses on the mad speeches of the Jailer's Daughter, asserting that through the "mad language of this otherwise disempowered character" the power structure within the play is revealed, as are the social relationships and cultural changes in the Jacobean playhouse and Jacobean society.]

The Jailer's Daughter in Shakespeare and Fletcher's The Two Noble Kinsmen (1613) is a pivotal figure in Jacobean drama. More than any other character in Shakespeare's late plays, she embodies changes in both dramatic representation and the larger culture of early modern England. As if testifying to the social and dramatic difference of this important character (who is absent, it should be pointed out, in the source materials from which the play's more familiar main plot derived), Shakespeare and Fletcher work to isolate her from the rest of the drama's action and characters.¹ Grounded in a pathetic madness, she stands outside the play's self-definition of the social and is not recognized as politically significant by any character in the drama. As I will argue, however, it is precisely in the mad language of this otherwise disempowered character that we get the richest picture of the arrangements of power in the play, of social relations in the early modern playhouse, and of transformations in the Jacobean culture that produced The Two Noble Kinsmen.

The play came into existence as a collaboration of two dramatists and two dramatic traditions at a transitional moment in the early modern theater. On one hand, the rise of melodrama and courtly plays was augmenting the power of female roles; on the other, folk strains in the drama were dwindling as both urban and courtly plots and characters replaced the rural. As a result, it became increasingly difficult to imagine community, folk and otherwise; indeed the attempt to do so in The Two Noble Kinsmen is awkward and tense. The play both coincides with and, through the Jailer's Daughter, voices truths about this twofold transition in the history of London's stage. As we will see, her voice is not only culturally thick but historically telling, for she is uniquely situated between a Shakespearean tradition that emphasized folk culture and Fletcher's commitment to strong female characters and dramatically striking episodes irrespective of social class. It is often claimed that an immediate inheritance of late Elizabethan drama was a complex literary model of subjectivity and individuality. I will show that only with the Jailer's Daughter was this model translated—and, significantly, translated downward—to a member of those lower orders without which it had once been impossible to define the social community.

Isolated from the play's community, the Jailer's Daughter acts more as a choric figure than as an agent in its plot. Yet she remains a chorus with a difference. Her private language of madness works in several directions at once. First, its style establishes her as an individualized character. While many critics today focus on the disintegration and radical self-estrangement of character,² I will stress here the deeply continuous character of the Jailer's Daughter as it unfolds in her speaking style, arguing that to read or hear the play is to perceive her as a character because of how she speaks. Even as it establishes individuality, however, her speech also directs one's attention to the worlds inside and outside the playhouse. The private is in her case oddly public, for the rich sociolinguistic textures of her speech lend it a significance inversely proportional to her social status.³ If she is the least powerful figure in the play—power here understood to mean both self-determination and the ability to affect one's environment—the Jailer's Daughter has a powerful significance for the play; what she says and how she says it are crucial, in fact, to understanding the place of The Two Noble Kinsmen in its time and culture.

I

The dramatic idiolect of the Jailer's Daughter is remarkable because it appears to transcend the peculiarities of authorial style—to retain a stylistic integrity, that is, despite the two playwrights' own compositional idiolects. She appears in nine scenes in The Two Noble Kinsmen, two of which were probably written primarily by Shakespeare (2.1 and 4.3), the rest primarily by Fletcher (2.4; 2.6; 3.2; 3.4; 3.5; 4.1; and 5.2).⁴ How she speaks depends less on who was writing, however, than on who the playwrights imagined her to be.

Her role in the play is defined in terms of her difference from other characters—social and psychological as well as linguistic. Daughter of the jailer charged with keeping Palamon and Arcite (the "two noble kinsmen"), she soon falls in love with what she sees as Palamon's gentility; she frees him and later finds herself alone in the forest, her love unrequited. Suffering from lack of food and sleep, as well as from love-sickness, she goes mad, is taken up temporarily as a morris dancer, and returns home to her father and to her long-time but unrecognized Wooer. On the advice of a Doctor, the Wooer pretends to be Palamon to cure her of her delusions from within the context of her fantasy. This fantasy and its dramatic complications dominate the play's underplot.

The Jailer's Daughter is marked as a character of both the underplot and the lower orders by the fact that she is never shown in the company of Palamon—or in the company of any of the noble characters in the drama. Her freedom is restricted to spatial movement and linguistic facility; the former appears in her journey into the forest and her return, the latter in ballad-singing and in an unconstrained though stylized "mad" discourse. Four scenes in the middle of the play—2.4; 2.6; 3.2; and 3.4—consist entirely of her speeches; it should be noted as well that in these scenes she appears alone, sharing her speech with the audience only.

The language of the Jailer's Daughter is not only separated from the speech of characters in the main plot but is also distinguished from that of the predominantly lower-class figures in the underplot through an ensemble of signature phrases, topics, and images. Her speech has the following characteristics: sentences ending with else; the phrase like a top, used idiosyncratically in various scenes and contexts; sporadic but concentrated alliteration; and frequent use of all, a word that occurs nineteen times in her speech, often in clusters.⁵ Despite Shakespeare and Fletcher's differing modes of literary representation (Shakespeare at 2.1 and 4.3 employing prose, Fletcher typically preferring verse throughout his scenes), the fact that similar concerns and images infuse both playwrights' versions of the speech of the Jailer's Daughter indicates a mutual concept of her character. These shared speech characteristics include emphasis on sounds and noise, the sea and sailing, gentility, martyrdom, animals (especially birds), festivity, clothing, flowers, her maidenhead, and the "law" as an oppositional force.

The influence of gender on this idiolect can be seen initially in this character's tension with the law and in her emphasis on virginity. Like Hermia in A Midsummer Night's Dream, the Jailer's Daughter loves someone whom the paternalistic order of her society forbids her marrying, but her problem runs deeper than Hermia's. Although Palamon and Arcite are doubles like Lysander and Demetrius, their play advances the problem of cross-class desire in a way A Midsummer Night's Dream does not.⁶ The Jailer's Daughter, who sees the fulfillment of her desire as dependent on her freeing Palamon ("What should I do to make him know I love him?" [2.4.29]), finds her desire blocked by the "law" and her family: "Say I ventur'd / To set him free? what says the law then? / Thus much for law or kindred!" (ll. 30-32). After setting Palamon free, she imagines her role as a martyr to an ambiguous law: "If the law / Find me, and then condemn me for't, some wenches, / Some honest-hearted maids, will sing my dirge, / And tell to memory my death was noble, / Dying almost a martyr" (2.6.13-17). The law she keeps mentioning seems ambiguous. It is difficult to discern exactly what she refers to because, I would argue, the powers that affect her are more properly "law and kindred"; as a jailer's daughter she is part of a family whose social role is to penalize. Since this is a family without a mother—part of a Shakespearean pattern of gender relations⁷—"kindred" for her is her father and his brother. It is significant, then, that when she violates the law, she creates a female community, imagining female voices chronicling her martyrdom to this penalty of law and kindred: "some wenches, / Some honest-hearted maids, will sing my dirge." The choric virgins she imagines are given voice, in this play, through the songs she herself sings.

The influence of gender on her speech also includes the sexually frank language of her madness. This increasingly conventional language derives from a subgenre familiar from, and perhaps originating in, Ophelia's mad discourse. Representations of madness were themselves subject to gendered conventions during the early modern era. "Beliefs about gender and sexuality influenced conceptions of madness in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England in complex ways," Michael MacDonald notes. "It could hardly have been otherwise."⁸ Theaters both depended on and dramatized these beliefs in their portrayals of madwomen. It has been argued about madwomen on the Renaissance stage, for instance, that "their madness is interpreted as something specifically feminine, whereas the madness of men is not specifically male."⁹ We can see this claim borne out formally in early modern plays; the pathetic madness manifested in song, for example, was gender-specific in the Elizabethan and Jacobean theaters. As one scholar observes of the English Renaissance dramatic lyric, "Male characters whose madness is meant to be pitied do not sing."¹⁰ The pathetic mad singer in early modern drama is always female.

This pathetic madness sometimes had liberating aspects. For instance, like the mad speech of the She Fool in Fletcher's The Pilgrim (1621) and that of Isabella in Middleton and Rowley's The, Changeling (1622), the mad discourse of the Jailer's Daughter points to what was becoming a convention of the early modern theater, a convention that licensed sexually explicit language by female characters when they were "mad." Of course, sexual language is not confined to the Jailer's Daughter in this play. In twice referring to her maidenhead (2.4.13 and 4.1.112), for instance, she might appear merely to extend the Prologue's (in)famous trope of play-as-maidenhead. But in her mad discourse, virginity is both a real and a more serious thing. Where the speaker of the Prologue strikes a courtly, even dilettantish tone, the Jailer's Daughter speaks from a decidedly embodied position.

Precisely how embodied becomes apparent when we trace differences between the speech of the Jailer's Daughter and that of Ophelia, with which the bawdy of the Jailer's Daughter has clear intertextual links. One might compare, for instance, Ophelia's "'How should I your true-love know / From another one? / By his cockle hat and staff'" and "'Young men will do't if they come to't, / By Cock, they are to blame'" (Hamlet, 4.5.23-25 and 61) with the Jailer's Daughter's "Close as a cockle" (4.1.131). "I must lose my maidenhead by cocklight" (1. 112), "Then would I make / A carreck of a cockleshell" (3.4.13-14), and "O for a prick now . . ." (1. 25). It seems significant that no other character in The Two Noble Kinsmen uses any form of either cock or prick or any words that contain them. What we can see in this play, I believe, is that Ophelia's bawdy has formed the basis for the speech of the Jailer's Daughter. Linked by an intertextual relation with Ophelia, the Jailer's Daughter nonetheless asserts sexual desire more directly than her predecessor, whose statements are often enigmatic and riddling. The Jailer's Daughter's "Sirrah tinker, / Stop no more holes but what you should" (3.5.82-83) and "I must lose my maidenhead by cocklight" are lines it is difficult to imagine Ophelia speaking.

Why should the bawdy of the Jailer's Daughter be more direct than Ophelia's? Initially their situations appear much alike: each loves a man who does not return her love; each appears motherless; each engages a pathetic language of madness that draws heavily on the natural world and popular forms of representation. Her social class, I would argue, is one reason why the madness of the Jailer's Daughter registers more "coarsely."¹¹ We are not surprised to find her speech prosaic and direct, since she comes from a lower order of society; as has been mentioned, she never shares the stage with members of the higher orders. Her speech is more directly about her body, and bodies generally, because in dramatic representations of her social stratum, neither madness nor bawdy is typically phrased in decorative poetry.

We can also see the class valences of her idiolect in an unusual feature of her speech—that is, in its strange emphasis on numbers. After her early statement that "'Tis odds / [Palamon] never will affect me" (2.4.1-2), the Jailer's Daughter shows a marked, almost obsessive concern with numbers and counting. Consider the following: "When fifteen once has found us"; "I lov'd my lips the better ten days after"; "Tell ten—I have pos'd him"; "I can sing twenty more"; "at least two hundred now with child by him—/There must be four"; "and at ten years old / They must be all gelt"; "he had not so few last night / As twenty to dispatch. He'll tickle't up / In two hours"; "a whole million of cutpurses"; "He'll dance the morris twenty mile an hour"; "Some two hundred bottle, / And twenty strike of oats"; "and two coarse smocks"; "And twenty?"¹² What is the significance of this trait? I maintain that her emphasis on figures locates her character in a quotidian, ledger-centered sphere; full of numbers, her speech is the language of reckoning, of the shop and tavern tallies. These numbers also link her to the play's main plot, where the plurals found in epic and romance traditions are signs of narrative as well as cultural wealth: three kneeling queens, two noble kinsmen. This play appears to need someone to reckon this wealth, someone to keep the score. If in counting things that the main plot does not require she count—imaginary boys and provisions—the Jailer's Daughter comes close to parodying the play's need, her devotion to Palamon shows that she has enumerated something that matters to the play's traditional narrative. By thematizing her as the play's counter, her obsession with numbers establishes her as an audience figure within the play—someone, like us, impressed by the powerful figures of the main plot.

But the most striking mark of difference in the Jailer's Daughter lies in the complexities of her mad discourse, with its close link to music. She does not sing or refer to songs or singing until after she goes mad and begins, in her father's words, to dream "of another world and a better" (4.3.5). Like her music, madness sets her apart from other characters in the play; this separateness, in turn, allows Shakespeare and Fletcher to show the audience how and what she is thinking as she is thinking it. However stylized their portrayal of her mental processes, we are left with an early modern dramatic stream of consciousness.

We can best begin to understand how this stream of consciousness registers the cultural and historical by examining a characteristic sample of her mad discourse. The following soliloquy comprises the whole of Act 3, scene 4:

I am very cold, and all the stars are out too,
The little stars and all, that look like aglets.
The sun has seen my folly. Palamon!
Alas, no; he's in heaven. Where am I now?
Yonder's the sea, and there's a ship. How't tumbles!
And there's a rock lies watching under water;
Now, now, it beats upon it—now, now, now!
There's a leak sprung, a sound one. How they cry!
Open her before the wind! you'll lose all else.
Up with a course or two, and tack about, boys!
Good night, good night, y' are gone. I am very hungry:
Would I could find a fine frog! He would tell me
News from all parts o' th' world. Then would I make
A carreck of a cockleshell, and sail
By east and north-east to the King of Pigmies,
For he tells fortunes rarely. Now my father,
Twenty to one, is truss'd up in a trice
To-morrow morning; I'll say never a word. Sing.
"For I'll cut my green coat a foot above my knee,
And I'll clip my yellow locks an inch
below mine e'e.
Hey, nonny, nonny, nonny.
"He s' buy me a white cut, forth for to ride,
And I'll go seek him through the world that is so wide.
Hey, nonny, nonny, nonny."
O for a prick now, like a nightingale,
To put my breast against! I shall sleep like a top else.

(ll. 1-26)

Her speech in this twenty-six-line scene is unusually condensed and varied. Questions give way to exclamations; quiet introspection to noisy description and shouted, slangy advice; realism to fantasy; and blank verse to ballad. The relative brevity of this speech's periods joins sudden, disjunctive transitions of thought and subject, marking it as an instance of remarkable poetic compression. Its images oscillate between large and small, diminutive and expansive, as the Jailer's Daughter unfolds her solitary state against the nocturnal background of the natural world in nominative pairs, some of which contrast: "I/stars"; "stars/aglets"; "sea/ship"; "ship/rock"; "I/frog"; "carreck/cockleshell"; "prick/breast"; "[I]/nightingale"; "I/top." In the logic of the play, her distress is exacerbated by her lack of sleep and by her hunger, both of which she indicates with sentences beginning "I am very," making use of the kind of repetition that we see creating her speaking style across the play. In the poetry of this scene, she shows a heightened sensitivity to both internal and external stimuli; her soliloquy acts almost as an unmediated voice revealing thoughts and feelings.

The soliloquy also bears certain idiolectal marks we have come to expect of her speech, such as her tendency to end sentences with else; concentrated alliteration ("carreck of a cockleshell," "Twenty to one, is truss'd up in a trice / To-morrow"); the signature simile like a top; fondness for animal imagery ("frog," "cut," "nightingale"); emphasis on numbers ("Twenty to one"); and repeated use of all. Except for the animal imagery, none of these features occurs in the quoted language of the ballad, which possesses a speech genre or register of its own. Of different meter and rhetorical form, the ballad embraces a pattern of images and themes that emphasizes colors ("green," "yellow," "white") and the action of cutting, with the ballad's "I'll cut" and "I'll clip" anticipating the "white cut," that is, the ballad's cut-tailed horse. Though differing from the language of the rest of the soliloquy, the ballad harmonizes with it in several areas. For example, the "white cut" joins "frog" preceding it and "nightingale" following it in referring to the natural world. The "nonny, nonny, nonny" refrain (sung twice in the ballad) recalls with repetition and its initial n sound the "now, now, now!" of line 7. Perhaps most important is how the scenario of the ballad heroine (who crossdresses in order to gain the social freedom to seek her absent lover "through the world that is so wide") concretely articulates the soliloquy's fantasy of making "A carreck of a cockleshell, and sail[ing] / By east and north-east to the King of Pigmies."

While the ballad lines underscore the position of the Jailer's Daughter in the real world—she is cold, hungry, and blocked in her desires—they offer by way of compensation "another world and a better." Playwright-like, the Jailer's Daughter imagines such a world through folk narratives. Here and elsewhere she represents the folk world of The Two Noble Kinsmen—and the culture beyond the stage on which it was originally performed—in a play within and apart from the mythological narrative of the main plot. Along with her ballads, the language of work matters to this folk texture; her shouted instructions to the sailors, for instance—"Open her before the wind! you'll lose all else. / Up with a course or two, and tack about, boys!"—display a strange familiarity with the vocabulary of their occupation. The emphasis on animals and on nature imagery in her speech, though, hints at how this folk world would be increasingly associated primarily with the countryside itself—considered in abstraction—rather than with work practices or groups in the countryside. What she imagines is full of fantasy: the Utopian freedom of the ballads she sings is only that. She nonetheless carves out an important space of imagination and possibility. She does so, I suggest, at a shift in the history of the drama of early modern England.

II

With Shakespeare's retirement as playwright, drama moved more obtrusively toward less popular forms. Such a move had been occurring for several years and had left its mark on Shakespeare's romances through the influence of tragicomedy. The change in drama corresponded to larger cultural changes in the seventeenth century, when the gap between patrician and plebeian steadily widened.¹³ In the words of R. Malcolm Smuts, striking stylistic changes—during the early Stuart period in particular—"were symptomatic of . . . fundamental reorientation of attitudes, values, patterns of conspicuous consumption, and modes of thought and feeling."¹⁴ While this reorientation was inherently toward the courtly and urban, folk elements persisted. Certainly in the work of Herrick and other poets—Jonson's "To Penshurst" comes immediately to mind—we see an attempt to preserve, even recreate traditional patterns.¹⁵ But however serious such attempts at preservation were, they testified to the forces of cultural transition affecting literary representation in early modern England. Drama, because it had traditionally spoken to heterogenous audiences in various registers of discourse, was especially sensitive to such changes.

The attraction of city and court altered the politics of seventeenth-century plays. In relation to the court, the rise of a more aristocratic aesthetic affected drama and other literary modes during James's first decade on the throne. We can see this evidenced in the King's Men's taking over of the Blackfriars as their private theater in 1608, an action that coincided with Fletcher's adaptation of Guarini's Il pastor fido as The Faithful Shepherdess. Each of these actions shows both commitment to a more aristocratic vision and audience and the changes in moral and ethical directions implied by that commitment. Jonson, for example, would later describe Guarini as someone who "in his Pastor Fido kept not decorum in making shepherds speak as well as himself could"¹⁶—as someone, that is, who effectively erased sociolinguistic difference by elevating dramatic speech regardless of the characters' class markers. At the same time that the influence of the court worked to change the drama, the rapid growth of London made the city increasingly popular as a source of inspiration and as the setting for imaginative works.¹⁷ "With time," King James himself declared, "England will be only London."¹⁸ London-born playwrights like Jonson and Middleton felt at home in the urban environment they wrote of. By contrast, Shakespeare's interest in the language of games, occupations, animals, and nature drew on the countryside, and he often took the action of plays outside cities to the rural world.¹⁹

The important difference between Fletcher and Shakespeare was that between the court and the country.²⁰ The folk basis of Shakespeare's plays had temporarily produced, Robert Weimann aruges, a "'scene indivisible'" that ultimately "gave way to a divided scene where the universal perspective found itself forever compromised. Seen either from the court or the city, the growing tensions could no longer be apprehended in their entirety and incorporated in a poetic vision of society. The register of dramatic values and attitudes would henceforth cease to be as broad and as vital as the social organism itself."²¹ Customarily stretched, during the Elizabethan period, to encompass various social groups and visions, drama during the early Stuart era no longer possessed this suppleness. The social integration that an Elizabethan dramatic tradition had situated in the country is lacking in the plays of later dramatists like Beaumont and Fletcher, whose social visions were more aristocratic than folk. Following Shakespeare, the chief dramatic developments—the court (Beaumont and Fletcher) and the city (Heywood and middleton)—were not, as the Elizabethan theater had been, directed toward the mingling of social classes, attitudes, and values, toward the "kings and clowns" whom Sidney loathed to see, but evidently did see, together. We will examine how the business of a cross-class, play-within-the-play performance, executed without friction—albeit condescendingly—in A Midsummer Night's Dream, is harder to duplicate after the dissolution of what has been called the "Elizabethan compromise."²² But while this compromise implied an acceptance of the prevailing Tudor hierarchies, it also recognized the need for criticism of that hierarchy and of those who abused privilege.

Lear's railing, for instance, comes as something like the culmination of a Tudor theatrical tradition much more interested in social justice than most Stuart drama would be: "see how yond justice rails upon yond simple thief. Hark in thine ear: change places, and handy-dandy, which is the justice, which the thief?" (King Lear, 4.6.151-54).²³ When, nearly a decade after Lear, the Jailer's Daughter voices similar criticism, it is less connected with an object:

Alas, 'tis a sore life they have i' th' tother place, such burning, frying, boiling, hissing, howling, chatt'ring, cursing! O, they have shrowd measure! take heed: if one be mad, or hang or drown themselves, thither they go—Jupiter bless us!—and there shall we be put in a cauldron of lead and usurers' grease, amongst a whole million of cutpurses, and there boil like a gammon of bacon that will never be enough.

(4.3.31-39)

The Doctor observing her responds, "How her brain coins!" (l. 40). Because the overplots of The Two Noble Kinsmen do not touch on the issues that the Jailer's Daughter raises, and because she is not integrated into any of the plots, this mad coinage floats within the play.

We might take "usurers' grease" as an example. This reference undoubtedly figured into an intensification, in the early 'teens, of a longstanding debate on usury in early modern England.²⁴ Around 1612 someone penned an apology for the infamous usurer Thomas Sutton, who had died the preceding year.²⁵ At Paul's Cross on 7 March 1612, the eloquent Puritan Thomas Adams preached a sermon against usury entitled "The White Devil; Or, The Hypocrite Uncased."²⁶ In the same year William Pemberton inveighed against greed in financial affairs in The Godly Merchant, or the Great Gaine.²⁷ Norman Jones tells us that it was perhaps in relation to a 1612 committee for the "Repair of the King's Estate and Raising of Monies" that Francis Bacon prepared his famous tractate on "Usury and the Use Thereof."²⁸ While her reference to "usurers' grease" gestures toward the debate these texts represent, there is little in the traditional social satire of the Jailer's Daughter that attaches to anything in the play itself. Unlike Lear and Lear's Fool, she is positioned by Shakespeare and Fletcher in a part of the drama which prevents her language from finding an object. Like those she mentions, she too is "thither," in another place.

The shift in dramatic representation I have been describing—a shift away from mingling social spheres—ensures that this is the case, for it underwrites the general separation of the Jailer's Daughter from the characters of the play and the fact that she is even silenced in the presence of the aristocratic characters. This separation is part of what we consider the weakness of the Fletcherian pattern toward which English drama moved. Formally, it produced flatter characters, less-motivated action, and an emphasis on conveying emotion immediately, through situation, rhetoric, and condensed scenes, in contrast to the rounder characters and the tableau-oriented practice of the Shakespeare play. Aesthetically, this shift strikes us as unfortunate; it nonetheless provided Fletcherian playwrights with advantages and possibilities that Shakespeare lacked.

Prominent among these was an increase in strong female roles. Shakespeare's Cleopatra was followed by such characters as the Duchess of Malfi, Vittoria Corombona, Bonduca, Livia, and Beatrice-Joanna. The Jailer's Daughter, though partly in the tradition of the pathetic, often powerless heroine of Shakespearean tragedy and romance,²⁹ also enjoys some of the strengths of these more powerful characters. Her madness, for example, licenses speech freer than that of any other female character in Shakespeare's plays. Where The Tempest begins with the cries of mariners aboard a sinking ship, The Two Noble Kinsmen channels such cries through the voice of the Jailer's Daughter. She also uses, as we have seen, the biting language of social satire, something previously relegated to male fools and cynical choric figures. Shakespeare's practice of keying characters' speech to their social position (generally using prose for lower-class characters and verse for nobility—the latter able to cross the formal boundaries "down-ward" when occasion demanded, but not vice versa) also implies limits on the Jailer's Daughter which Fletcher's drama refused to accept.

In Shakespeare's drama where characters come from, socially, determines how they can speak. In turn, how they speak often determines their dramatic possibilities. Such constraint, for example, gives madness certain class valences. Brian Vickers has observed that "if we establish a hierarchy of psychological normality, those characters who predominantly speak verse can fall down into prose when they lose their reason: Ophelia, Othello, Lear, Lady Macbeth. (Characters from the prose domain never go mad—their dramatic status would not warrant it.)"³⁰ Vickers is right that madness is a psychic property of the aristocracy if we look at plays written before The Two Noble Kinsmen. In an earlier Shakespeare play the Jailer's Daughter would not have gone mad: her social status would have precluded it. Yet in this collaborative effort, Fletcher's tendency to give every character blank verse, albeit with various textures, levels a prejudice inherent in the Shakespearean pattern and helps make madness newly available to a member of a lower class. If the honor initially seems dubious, we should remember that with madness the Jailer's Daughter inherits a complex subjectivity we typically associate with aristocrats, often male, of late Elizabethan tragedy. Thus if we compare her to a probable model—Mopsa in Sidney's Arcadia (1593)—we can see significant changes in what their authors imagined for women of the lower orders.³¹ Sidney's Mopsa is a cruel caricature, lacking the depth and the affective power of the Jailer's Daughter. The differences between them. I maintain, arise from more than authorial idiosyncrasy; these differences have a historical cause as well. During Shakespeare's career, drama lost some of its vitality and its ability to represent diverse social values and attitudes; the Elizabethan compromise ironically also limited social possibilities that later dramatists would be able to explore, even though they lacked what had made Shakespeare's drama so powerful. The principle of decorum of character, to which Shakespeare adhered and which Fletcher would become renowned for violating, reminds us that the social integration of Shakespeare's theater often came at a great price.³²

III

The madness of the Jailer's Daughter is remarkably social in content, yet this content has an importance not immediately apparent. If initially the space of her madness seems a dustbin of materials randomly deposited, closer examination shows it to explore topics that the play's traditional plot has little language for or interest in. With its emphasis on folk culture, what is inside her mind is the outside world. That this happens to be the world outside London follows, I would suggest, from the increasingly centripetal pull of court and city that marked the transition from Shakespeare to Fletcher.

This pull renders madness in part a resistance to the historical pressures of the modern. It was precisely in terms of such pressure that C. L. Barber explained a new emphasis in late Elizabethan literature on folk pastimes and festivals: "During Shakespeare's lifetime, England became conscious of holiday custom as it had not been before, in the very period when in many areas the keeping of holiday was on the decline. Festivals which worked within the rhythm of an agricultural calendar, in village or market town, did not fit the way of living of the urban groups whose energies were beginning to find expression through what Tawney has called the Puritan ethic."³³ Indeed, it seems a sign of the changes the festive underwent that Barber chose, in Shakespeare's Festive Comedy, not to follow out his claims in relation to plays after Twelfth Night (1601). Along with Bartholomew Fair (1614), which emphasizes the thoroughly "contagious" commercialism of that traditional environment, The Two Noble Kinsmen shows how subordinated to the city and the court the country had become.³⁴

For example, the morris dance in which the Jailer's Daughter is forced to participate seems on the surface similar to the mechanicals' performance in A Midsummer Night's Dream. But coming thirteen years after Will Kemp had begun to commercialize the form by dancing from London to Norwich,³⁵ this morris dance is dark, even menacing. One might note the joy of the countrymen at having found her:

3 COUNTRYMAN There's a dainty mad woman, master,
Comes i' th' nick, as mad as a March hare.
If we can get her dance, we are made again.
I warrant her, she'll do the rarest gambols.
1 COUNTRYMAN A mad woman? We are made, boys!

(3.5.72-76)

To be "made" here is to succeed at putting on a good morris dance and to receive, like the mechanicals, a reward for their performance from the aristocratic spectators. But the Jailer's Daughter is given no lines to speak in the performance before Theseus. It is as though Shakespeare and Fletcher did not know what she could say to Theseus, or Theseus to her. Unlike in A Midsummer Night's Dream, there is no dialogue between and among the various levels of society: Bottom hears the nobles talking about him and responds; the Jailer's Daughter does not—perhaps, as conceived, cannot.

Yet the word made in the above exchange puns as well on maid—as in the Maid Marian figure central to the tradition of morris dancing. An important part of the May games in many English villages, the morris dance was perhaps the most resonant symbol of an older rural way of life. "The Hobby-horse is Forgot," the seemingly omnipresent ballad to which Shakespeare refers in both Love's Labor's Lost (3.1.29) and Hamlet (3.2.135), alludes simultaneously to a popular fondness for the morris dance (in which the hobby-horse had traditionally been a figure) and to nostalgia for a time when its vitality was better appreciated. Significantly, much of the morris dance in which the male characters of the underplot employ the Jailer's Daughter appears to have been borrowed from a courtly document, Francis Beaumont's Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray's Inn, performed at Whitehall on 20 February 1613 in honor of Princess Elizabeth's wedding to the Elector Palatine. In this performance the morris dance was an antimasque. Philip Edwards captures its function in describing it as "a parody of the traditional country dances at the ancient may-games, or summer 'maying' festivals."³⁶ The appropriation of this traditional celebratory dance for a performance at Whitehall is in line with the growing separation of court and city from the countryside represented in The Two Noble Kinsmen. This play's awkward revision of A Midsummer Night's Dream, whose vision of social integration is based on the pre-Reformation calendar, also shows that the rituals of the countryside and the related myths of the Elizabethan compromise were displaced by the power of the court and city.³⁷

The Jailer's Daughter represents the country. We can see this in an important strain of her idiolect: her use of rural words and phrases. Such words as "whoobub," "reak," and "mop'd," for instance, survived only in northern England and even in 1613 marked her speech as rural; they work with other words of dialectal valence—for example, "char'd," "rearly," "ken'st," "shrowd," and "cut" [i.e., horse]—to ground her language in the country.³⁸ This dialect and the ballads in which it is frequently found evoke rural culture. That the Jailer's Daughter was followed in 1629 on London stages by Constance, heroine of Brome's The Northern Lasse and a character based strongly on the Jailer's Daughter, indicates that the latter may already have seemed provincial to urban and courtly audiences.³⁹

The rural undoubtedly held associations of the past for London playgoers in 1613. In the genre of coney-catching pamphlets, journeying to London is a process of gaining experience; the geographical movement of rural characters doubles as an educational one. For London readers, such narratives would assure them not only of the sophisticated complexity of their city but also of the backwardness of the country. When taking the stage in 1613, the Jailer's Daughter must have represented both the countryside and the Elizabethan past,⁴⁰ even as, in the twentieth century, obscene jokes about farmers' daughters create a naive and simple past set in the country. Three plays and entertainments written well before The Two Noble Kinsmen help to reveal how traditional the Jailer's Daughter would have seemed: The Painter's Daughter (1576), The Blacksmith's Daughter (1578), and Fair Em, the Miller's Daughter of Manchester (1590).⁴¹ While only the last of these plays has survived,⁴² their titles speak to the potential nostalgia connected with the dramatic "type" of the Jailer's Daughter. All these titles identify the heroines with their fathers' occupations. Only Fair Em specifies the location of its action; significantly, it is laid in Manchester. As past is to present, so is the north to London. Part of a dramatic tradition that found expression during the Elizabethan period, the Jailer's Daughter thus signifies what Leah Marcus has called "survivalism"—the symbolic representation in early modern England of "communal economic activities" and "the maintenance of old collective customs and collective village order."⁴³ But the survivalism of the Jailer's Daughter character is inflected through a complex psychology. Where Barber describes England as being newly "conscious" of traditional customs, we must invert this observation for The Two Noble Kinsmen: this play is conscious of folk culture primarily in the unconscious language of the Jailer's Daughter.

Far from being a random collage of materials, the unconscious that her mad discourse vents has directions as well as expressive modes. As for the latter, we have already seen that the Jailer's Daughter frequently sings ballads. In The Two Noble Kinsmen she sings, alludes to, or is described as singing almost a dozen different songs, even boasting at one point "I can sing twenty more" (4.1.106). Both as topic and as practice, such songs as "The George Alow" (3.5.59-71) and "O fair, O sweet" (4.1.114) connect her to an oral folk tradition even as they lend her character a sentimentalized, pathetic aura. In the drama, ballads represent sources and limits of the social realm as perceived in Jacobean London; they traditionally feature country themes, incidents, and characters as their subjects. But ballads changed in important ways during the Jacobean era, latching onto and emphasizing the country in a survivalistic way. As Tessa Watt indicates, "Although early Elizabethan ballads were sometimes billed as 'A warning to London' or addressed to 'London dames,' by the second quarter of the seventeenth century they were much more commonly given titles like 'The cooper of Norfolke' or 'A pleasant new northerne song, called the two York-shire lovers.'"⁴⁴ We can see in this shift, I believe, a chiastic change in audience and subject matter: early Elizabethan ballads about London were addressed to country folk, whereas Jacobean ballads about the country were more often addressed to urban dwellers.

Singing also associates the Jailer's Daughter with the politics of the ballad form. Inexpensive and ephemeral, ballads were often despised as mere commodities, too easily fashioned and too publicly sold. Contemporary critics repeatedly described them as "ribald," "lascivious," "common," and "base."⁴⁵ In A Defense of Poetry (1579), Thomas Lodge stated, "Beleeve mee the magistrats may take aduise (as I knowe wisely can) to roote out those odde rymes which runnes in euery rascales mouth, sauoring of rybaldry."⁴⁶ Here ballads ("odde rymes") have a promiscuous life of their own, running "in euery rascales mouth": they remained popular because rhythm, music, rhyme, and patterned theme combined to ensure memorability. Lodge's description highlights the fact that songs can "sing" people, filling empty moments with what seems a will of the songs' own. Occupying an important place in the madness of the Jailer's Daughter, popular ballads work to situate her, both vertically (in a hierarchy of power and rank) and horizontally (by her agency and mobility within those places) on the social scale. As we have seen, they also provide the folk content of her madness.

But ballad-singing proved only part of a larger method of assembling cultural materials through a discourse of madness on the early modern stage. In a recent essay on madness and gender in Shakespeare's tragedies, Carol Thomas Neely compares Lear with Ophelia and observes that "the construction of Lear's mad discourse, like that of Ophelia's, involves fragmentation, formula, depersonalization, the intersection of communal voices, and secularized ritual. Like Ophelia, he uses tags of social formulas incongruously."⁴⁷ Neely calls this process quotation:

Shakespeare's language of madness is characterized by fragmentation, obsession, and repetition, and most importantly by what I will call "quotation," which might instead be called "bracketing" or "italicization." The mad are "beside themselves"; their discourse is not their own. But the voices that speak through them are not (even in the case of Edgar's parody of possession) supernatural voices but human ones—cultural ones perhaps. The prose that is used for this mad speech (although it includes embedded songs and rhymes) implies disorderly shape, associates madness with popular tradition, and contributes to its colloquial, "quoted" character. These quoted voices, however, have connections with (or can be interpreted to connect with) the mad characters' pre-mad gendered identity and history, their social context and psychological stresses—as well as with larger themes of the plays and of the culture. The alienated speech allows psychological plausibility, thematic resonance, cultural constructions, and social critique.⁴⁸

As I have shown, the madness of the Jailer's Daughter does connect with larger cultural forces. But however pertinent the cultural quotation of voices Neely describes, the precise nature of the connections it forges is left unclear: "cultural ones perhaps." In relation to the Jailer's Daughter, for instance, how are we to understand what this culturally evocative madness means?

I have suggested above that the dramatic space of her madness forms a charged register. This register is at once dynamic, thick with the worlds inside and outside the playhouse yet carefully demarcated from the rest of the drama. The madness of the Jailer's Daughter works as something like the play's unconscious—hidden yet present, unseen and at the same time powerful. Indeed her madness remains relatively inaccessible to the traditional narrative of the drama while continually suggesting the cultural and historical forces that drive her play. In Fredric Jameson's view the political unconscious of literature is the "repressed and buried reality" of once vital cultural struggles, practices, and beliefs.⁴⁹ History—to Jameson "the experience of Necessity" or, in a phrase almost poetic in its frankness, "what hurts"—is articulated positively in literature through antagonistic class voices and the dominant class's "management" of social and political impulses.⁵⁰ In a manner that speaks to Jameson's notion of the reality buried in texts as well as to the coercive nature of historical forces, the madness of the Jailer's Daughter explores topics that elude the rest of the play.

Throughout The Two Noble Kinsmen her speech is an emblem of difference; embodying an oral, folk, and desiring world, she labors both in and for a dramatic community relatively unconscious of her existence. Through the fullness of her speech, the Jailer's Daughter voices truths about what brought that drama into being. With its survivalistic emphasis on folk culture, the content of her mad speech foregrounds the pull of court and city and highlights the corresponding differences between Shakespeare and Fletcher. But this madness is also acutely concerned with relations of work and gender inside the playhouse, themselves set forth in a way that accentuates their place in a history of cultural performances.

I have said that the Jailer's Daughter functions as both audience and playwright in this drama. Her obsession with Palamon embodies—even offers a pattern for—an audience's own desires for the aristocratic characters. One of her most insistent themes involves the figure of the boy actor. The play opens with a boy "singing and strewing flow'rs" (1.1.2 SD) for the wedding procession. The Jailer's Daughter repeats this action in a more homely fashion when she enters later and remarks, "These strewings are for their chamber" (2.1.21). Obeying her father's orders to care for the two prisoners, she brings new rushes for the floor of their cell. She thus mimics the custodial role of the boy who opens the play. Her relation to the boy actor is more complicated, though, for the play places special pressure on the boy actor. Significantly, the Jailer's Daughter both mentions and is mentioned in context with singing boys. Her Wooer describes to a group of her concerned friends and relatives, all males, how he accidentally found her next to a lake:

As I late was angling
In the great lake that lies behind the palace,
From the far shore, thick set with reeds and sedges,
As patiently I was attending sport,
I heard a voice, a shrill one; and attentive
I gave my ear, when I might well perceive
'Twas one that sung, and by the smallness of it,
A boy or woman.

(4.1.52-59)

The Wooer emphasizes the difference of the voice he heard ("a shrill one," "smallness"), which tells him it belongs to "A boy or woman." Like the chorus of maids the Jailer's Daughter has fantasized, this voice registers the body behind it: to the Wooer, to be "A boy or woman" means to sing with a small, shrill voice.

What does not register for him in this "woman's key," however, is the difference between boy and woman. In this lack of recognition, he is like the third fool in a ballad stanza that the Jailer's Daughter has already sung:

"There was three fools fell out about an howlet:
The one said it was an owl,
The other he said nay,
The third he said it was a hawk,
And her bells were cut away."

(3.5.67-71)

An owl to one fool, to another the howlet is a female hawk—without bells. These cut-away bells point to a trope of cutting that underlies how the Jailer's Daughter explains gender difference. For example, when she fantasizes about the four hundred children Palamon has fathered with "All the young maids / Of [the] town" (4.1.125-26), she speaks of the need for them to be castrated: "at ten years old / They must be all gelt for musicians, / And sing the wars of Theseus" (ll. 132-34). For these boys, to keep the woman's key means to be gelded. In the pas de deux of the "woman's part" in the theaters of Jacobean England, the image of the castrated boy must have seemed a logical figure to foreground the tension between female role (as with the Jailer's Daughter) and adolescent male actor. But there remains something critical in her otherwise offhand remark about the compulsory gelding of all these boys at ten years of age.

This criticism shows what it meant to be a boy actor in the early modern playhouse, where his lack of power in the company was exacerbated by an impending change of voice and body. At the same time, this remark seems concerned with what it meant, culturally, to have boys play women. The "maids" she has once imagined singing her martyrdom are, in this passage, merely the potential mothers of boys who will sing Theseus's wars. The cutting imagery of the ballad in the twenty-six-line soliloquy discussed earlier—clipping the hair, cutting the coat, riding a cut-tailed horse—offers her character a freedom she would not otherwise possess; here the idea of gelding four hundred boys removes even the possibility of representing such freedoms in the theater. The play's Athenian society, like that of London's stages, employs boy "musicians" to "sing the wars of Theseus"—to accompany, admire, sing for, and strew flowers in front of its heroes, and, most important, to play its women.

Unlike the traditional morris dance, early modern stages had no place for real jailers' daughters because all-male acting companies appropriated all female roles. Although the Maid Marian character in the morris dance was sometimes played by a crossdressed male during Shakespeare's lifetime, there are many indications that women had typically taken the role and were traditionally a welcome part of the morris dance performance.⁵¹ When Kemp performed his morris to Norwich, for example, he danced with several women on separate occasions—one of whom he calls his "Maid Marian"—and shows great respect for their abilities.⁵² Yet the purpose-built playhouses of early modern London shunned the gender inclusiveness of the folk tradition that Kemp reproduced in dancing with these women. If The Two Noble Kinsmen is about a growing separation of the court and city from the countryside, one of the differences defining this separation lay in the business of playing. By using boy actors for female roles, London's professional theaters denied women the freedom to perform that they enjoyed in more rural environments. The morris dance in The Two Noble Kinsmen, then, remains a formal irony. For even in the appropriative employment of the (mad) Jailer's Daughter in their morris dance, the underplot male characters display a respect for the woman behind the role that early modern acting companies did not share. We can perhaps see Theseus's "trick"—begetting only boys on the "maids" of Athens—as a metaphor for the all-male acting companies themselves. But the politics of Theseus's "trick" are something the main plot of the drama shows no concern for. The mad language of the Jailer's Daughter, in contrast, raises these otherwise ignored issues by foregrounding the material relations of the theaters that brought it into being.

IV

Giving voice to certain cultural topics in a separate part of the play, the Jailer's Daughter is, I have suggested, analogous to its unconscious. But if her mad emphasis on the rural world and its folk culture implies a tension between the courtly idealism of the overplot and the decidedly nonheroic lives of those in the underplot, her allusions to the politics of playing remind us that she is separated from others in that plot. Her discourse is so marked by its surplus of individualizing features that both she and it become the objects of analysis by other characters, many of them male. Like Ophelia, Cassandra, and Lady Macbeth, the Jailer's Daughter, in her madness, comes under scrutiny. The burden of her gendered madness, like theirs, is to be watched and analyzed.

Portrayed as almost transparent, in fact, her mad language becomes the focus of a crude psychotherapy. The Doctor hired to heal her sets out his diagnosis and proposed cure in a forty-one-line, darkly farcical disposition. I quote its beginning and end here:

That intemp'rate surfeit of her eye hath distemper'd the other senses. They may return and settle again to execute their preordain'd faculties, but they are now in a most extravagant vagary.

I will, between the passages of this project, come in with my appliance. Let us put it in execution; and hasten the success, which doubt not will bring forth comfort.

(4.3.70-73 and 98-101)

The Doctor's love of Latinate words ("execute," "faculties") and redundant phrases ("intemp'rate surfeit," "extravagant vagary") adds to the tone of authority, however parodic, in his speech. Later this intensifies when he talks about the physical administration of a cure. After the Wooer relates that the Jailer's Daughter has asked him (as Palamon) to kiss her and sing for her, the Doctor urges him to do so, concluding: "If she entreat again, do any thing, / Lie with her, if she ask you" (5.2.17-18).⁵³

The Jailer, listening to this conversation, objects vehemently—"Ho there, doctor!" (l. 18); but the physician insists that the Wooer's sleeping with the Jailer's Daughter is necessary to the "cure": "Cure her first this way; then if she will be honest, / She has the path before her" (ll. 22-23). After the Jailer departs, the Doctor turns to the Wooer and conspiratorially remarks:

What e'er her father says, if you perceive Her mood inclining that way that I spoke of, Videlicet, the way of flesh—you have me?

Please her appetite,
And do it home; it cures her ipso facto. . . .

(5.2.33-37)

The Doctor uses Latin tags to accompany his prescription and intrudes authoritatively on familial space, his "professional" advice taking precedence over the Jailer's paternal concern. The Schoolmaster who enlists the Jailer's Daughter for his morris dance also uses Latin when he speaks of influencing her behavior. "Go take her," he instructs his men, "and fluently persuade her to a peace. / 'Et opus exegi, quod nec Jovis ira, nec ignis'—/ Strike up, and lead her in" (3.5.86-89). The slight misquotation of Ovid here,⁵⁴ like his Latin quotations generally, supports the audience's perception of him as a complete pedant. But his Latin tag has implications beyond characterization, for it reveals an implicit gendering of speech and language in the underplot of the play. Known only to those who oversee, evaluate, and direct others, Latin becomes a male language, with the "mother" tongue of colloquial English—the language of the countrymen and of the Jailer's Daughter—gendered female.⁵⁵ Even as the Schoolmaster's (false) etymology of the word morris (3.5.118-20) testifies to a clumsy, inadequate, and academic relation to the morris dance tradition, his use of Latin in relation to the Jailer's Daughter signals a harmfully wrong "fit" with her situation and with the cultural forces she represents.

Using Latinate language as framing discourse, Fletcher and Shakespeare emphasize the authority of the Doctor's early modern psychotherapy even as they further isolate the speech of the Jailer's Daughter. This isolation is an objectification, one that hinges on the gendering of mad language. We have seen that the pathetic mad singer is always female, her musical language always strongly gendered. The reciprocal nature of this relation is not accidental. The pity accorded such mad singers as Ophelia and the Jailer's Daughter depends on an acknowledgment of their relative powerlessness. Their madness, in turn, appears to result from conflictive pressures. As a woman and as a daughter, the Jailer's Daughter lacks the autonomy enjoyed by adult male figures in the play. As the daughter of a jailer, she cannot gain the attention or affection of the aristocratic Palamon. So while she represents a pattern of social pressure in early modern England, the Jailer's Daughter also stands between forces that have a more personal implication. The contradictions between her social position and her personal desires recur in images of pressure and division throughout the play. Sometimes such images are used of the Jailer's Daughter; at other times they are used by her.

These images go deeply to our understanding of her character, her dramatic situation, and the politics of her speech. In her first scene, for instance, she describes how Palamon and Arcite express frustration over their captivity:

sometime a divided sigh, martyr'd as 'twere i' th' deliverance, will break from one of them; when the other presently gives it so sweet a rebuke that I could wish myself a sigh to be so chid, or at least a sigher to be comforted.

(2.1.40-44)

The "divided sigh" she refers to is half uttered. Her description of it as repressed, "martyr'd . . . i' th' deliverance," and rebuked, her desire to be either that sigh or "at least a sigher," prefigures her pathetic speaking position later in the drama. In 2.4 she ascribes such pressures to her sex and age: "What pushes are we wenches driven to / When fifteen once has found us!" (11. 6-7). ("Fifteen" is her approximation of social as well as sexual maturity.) Still later, as we have seen, she utters a desire for a pain that will keep her from sleeping: "O for a prick now, like a nightingale, / To put my breast against!" The "martyr'd" sigh, the "pushes" that "wenches are driven to," and the "prick" against which, like a nightingale, the Jailer's Daughter desires to press her breast—all these images contribute powerfully to a sadistic model of speech. This model is connected, in this play and many others, with women's speech.

Like the mad language of Ophelia, the songs and mad speech of the Jailer's Daughter come as the result of pressure. Not surprisingly, then, what is literally her final word in the play anticipates pain:

DOCTOR Let's get her in.

WOOER Come sweet, we'll go to dinner,
And then we'll play at cards.

DAUGHTER And shall we kiss too?

WOOER A hundred times.

DAUGHTER And twenty?

WOOER Ay, and twenty.

DAUGHTER And then we'll sleep together?

DOCTOR Take her offer.

WOOER Yes, marry, will we.

DAUGHTER But you shall not hurt me.

WOOER I will not, sweet.

DAUGHTER If you do, love, I'll cry.

(5.2.107-12)

The Wooer and the Doctor take the parts of Palamon and Arcite while maintaining a separate if equally theatrical space for their discourse of "reality." The Jailer's Daughter explores her fantasy within the context of their obliging conspiracy. Yet significant in this sequence is how her final line conveys an image of the body in pain. "If you do, love, I'll cry" comes as an unsettling last word, testifying to how she has been alternately frustrated and manipulated throughout the play.

It is important to heed the individual situation of the Jailer's Daughter because her pathos is formally linked to how she expresses cultural and historical forces. Without the madness prompted by what initially seems a personal situation, the more public valences of her speech would be less concentrated. While signaling the cultural, for instance, the ballads she sings in her madness depend on a conception of the private for their existence. The drama's individuation of the Jailer's Daughter—including her personal manner of speech—leads to the production of a textual unconscious responding to her pain; that unconscious, in turn, is demonstrated in her individual state and the condition of the worlds around her.

I have claimed that the Jailer's Daughter is a pivotal figure in Jacobean drama and have offered reasons that her character, richly synthesizing Fletcherian and Shakespearean traditions, remained historically specific and unrepeatable. But although she was not to be duplicated in the drama of the time, what I have argued about her role implies that we need to expand our definition of culturally significant content in early modern drama. Materialist criticism, for instance, has traditionally emphasized the choric speech of male characters like fools and gravediggers. It is the Jailer's Daughter, however, who provides the richest evidence of the cultural in The Two Noble Kinsmen. While female characters in Shakespeare's history plays have been described as "antihistorians," in this late play the Jailer's Daughter is the character with the clearest and most meaningful relation to historical change.⁵⁶ The special manner and matter of her speech record what other characters and other speech genres in The Two Noble Kinsmen do not—the increasing separation of court and city from country. If her speech makes little happen in the drama's political world, it nonetheless represents the worlds inside and outside the playhouse and formulates their truths.

Notes

I am indebted to Elizabeth D. Scala, Christopher Cannon, Scott Paul Gordon, David Bevington, Elizabeth Helsinger, J. Paul Hunter, Janel Mueller, John G. Norman, Richard Strier, and William Veeder for their thoughtful comments on earlier versions of this essay. Marjorie Garber and Steven Mullaney generously allowed me to present some of my remarks here in the "Character Assassination" panel of the Shakespeare division at the 1991 annual meeting of the Modern Language Association. I am also grateful to the members of the Renaissance Colloquium at Harvard University for their helpful responses and to my students at the University of Chicago.

¹ On the sources of the play, see Philip Edwards, "On the Design of The Two Noble Kinsmen," Review of English Literature 5 (1964): 89-105; E. Talbot Donaldson, The Swan at the Well: Shakespeare Reading Chaucer (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1985), 50-73; and Ann Thompson, Shakespeare's Chaucer: A Study in Literary Origins (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1978), 166-215. Approximate dates for plays are from Annals of English Drama, 975-1700, Alfred Harbage, ed., rev. S. Schoenbaum and Sylvia Stoler Wagonheim (London: Routledge, 1989).

Unless otherwise noted, quotations of The Two Noble Kinsmen and of other Shakespeare works follow The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1974); Evans's editorial brackets have been elided to avoid confusion with my own interpolations.

² See, for example, Linda Charnes, Notorious Identity: Materializing the Subject in Shakespeare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993); and Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare's Ghost Writers: Literature as uncanny causality (New York: Methuen, 1987). For a recent study of the relation of character to rhetoric in Shakespeare's plays and of character criticism generally, see Christy Desmet, Reading Shakespeare's Characters: Rhetoric, Ethics, and Identity (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1992).

³ The Jailer's Daughter has long proved the affective center of the play; from the Restoration to the present, audiences and critics have invariably acknowledged the unexpected force of her role. See, for example, G. Harold Metz, "The Two Noble Kinsmen on the Twentieth-Century Stage," Theatre History Studies 4 (1984): 63-69; and Eugene M. Waith, ed., The Two Noble Kinsmen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 30-42. Chronicling its stage history from the Restoration, when the Jailer's Daughter was known as "Celania," Waith remarks, "In interpreting the play we need to pay attention to the success enjoyed by several actresses in the role of the Jailer's Daughter" (42). Susan Green has described the Jailer's Daughter as both a "locus of the play's illusioning power" and "the play's most potent figure of desire"; see her "'A mad woman? We are made, boys!': The Jailer's Daughter in The Two Noble Kinsmen" in Shakespeare, Fletcher and "The Two Noble Kinsmen, " Charles H. Frey, ed. (Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1989), 121-32, esp. 121 and 124.

⁴ The authorship question in The Two Noble Kinsmen has generated a bibliography too lengthy to list here (even in excerpt). The best summary of the history of this debate and of the various positions scholars have taken can be found in Will Hamlin, "A Select Bibliographical Guide to The Two Noble Kinsmen" in Frey, ed., 186-216.1 am basing my assignment of 4.3 mainly to Shakespeare on four considerations: on Waith's suggestion in the note to 4.3 in his edition of The Two Noble Kinsmen; on the fact that it, like 2.1, is written in prose; on the fact that both scenes include the only uses of "troth" in the play (a word favored by Shakespeare); and on the social satire in the "mad" speech of the Jailer's Daughter (4.3.31-56)—the latter being very similar to the kind of mad discourse Shakespeare employs in Hamlet and King Lear.

⁵ On else, see 3.4.9; 3.4.26; 3.5.77; 4.1.110; and 4.1.113. For uses of the phrase like a top, see 3.4.26 and 5.2.50. Alliteration occurs at 2.1.22-24; 2.4.20-25; 2.4.27-28; 3.2.8; 3.2.20; 4.1.126-27; 4.1.130-31; 4.3.25-26; 5.2.50; 5.2.67; and 5.2.84. Act 4, scene 1, contains six occurences of all at lines 125, 127, 130, 131, 133, and 136.

⁶ However parodic the Bottom/Titania romance may be, it occurs within a play (and within that play's forest world) where social difference seems (temporarily) less important than desire. On the relations between Dream and Kinsmen, see Glynne Wickham, "The Two Noble Kinsmen, or A Midsummer Night's Dream, Part II?" Elizabethan Theatre 1 (1980): 167-96.

⁷ On Shakespeare's absent mothers, see, for example, Mary Beth Rose, "Where Are the Mothers in Shakespeare? Options for Gender Representation in the English Renaissance," Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991): 291-314; Coppélia Kahn, "The Absent Mother in King Lear," and Stephen Orgel, "Prospero's Wife," both in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers, eds. (Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 1986), 33-49 and 50-64.

⁸ Michael MacDonald, "Women and Madness in Tudor and Stuart England," Social Research 53 (1986): 261-81, esp. 280.

⁹ Maurice Charney and Hanna Charney, "The Language of Madwomen in Shakespeare and His Fellow Dramatists," Signs 3 (1977): 451-60, esp. 451. See also Carol Thomas Neely, "'Documents in Madness': Reading Madness and Gender in Shakespeare's Tragedies and Early Modern Culture," SQ 42 (1991): 315-38. On the songs of madwomen in Renaissance drama, see Joseph T. McCullen Jr., "The Functions of Songs Aroused by Madness in Elizabethan Drama" in A Tribute to George Coffin Taylor, Arnold Williams, ed. (Richmond, VA: U of North Carolina P, 1952), 185-96. We can see Lear acknowledging the gender of one kind of madness in his lines: "O how this mother swells up toward my heart! / Hysterica passio, down, thou climbing sorrow, / Thy element's below" (2.4.56-58).

¹⁰ William R. Bowden, The English Dramatic Lyric, 1603-42: A Study in Stuart Dramatic Technique (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1951), 38, n. 8.

¹¹ So Coleridge, in Collier's report: "The mad scenes of the Jailor's daughter are coarsely imitated from 'Hamlet': those were by Fletcher, and so very inferior, that I wonder how he could so far condescend." And while "coarsely" here has an aesthetic denotation, connotations of morality, even class difference may exist as well; see Coleridge's Shakespeare Criticism, ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor, 2 vols. (London: Constable and Co., 1930), 2:32.

¹² The passages quoted are from, respectively, 2.4.7 and 26; 3.5.79; 4.1.106, 129-30, 132-33, and 137-39; 4.3.37-38; 5.2.51, 64-65, 84, and 109.

¹³ See Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson, "A Polarised Society?" in Order and Disorder in Early Modern England, Fletcher and Stevenson, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985), 1-15.

¹⁴ R. Malcolm Smuts, Court Culture and the Origins of a Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1987), 1. See also Graham Parry, The Golden Age restor'd: The culture of the Stuart Court, 1603-42 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981).

¹⁵ See Leah S. Marcus, The Politics of Mirth: Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvell, and the Defense of Old Holiday Pastimes (Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 1986).

¹⁶Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Oxford. UP, 1925-52), App. 1, 1:134.

¹⁷ On the growth and economic importance of London, see F. J. Fisher, London and the English Economy, 1500-1700, ed. P. J. Corfield and N. B. Harte (London and Ronceverte: Hambledon, 1990), esp. "The Development of London as a Centre of Conspicuous Consumption in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries," 105-18 (orig. pub. 1948), and "London as an 'Engine of Economic Growth,'" 185-98 (orig. pub. 1971); see also E. A. Wrigley, "A Simple Model of London's Importance in Changing English Society and Economy 1650-1750," Past and Present 37 (1967): 44-70, rpt. in Wrigley, People, Cities and Wealth: The Transformation of Traditional Society (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 133-56. For the influence of London on Jacobean drama, see Brian Gibbons, Jacobean City Comedy: A Study of Satiric Plays by Jonson, Marston and Middleton, 2d ed. (New York: Methuen, 1980); and Theodore B. Leinwand, The City Staged: Jacobean Comedy, 1603-1613 (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1986).

¹⁸ Quoted, in a different form, in Fernand Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce, trans. Sîan Reynolds (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), 41. For the rapid population growth of London in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, see E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England 1541-1871: A Reconstruction (New York: Cambridge UP, 1989), esp. 531-32.

¹⁹ On Shakespeare's deep reliance on imagery drawn from nature, country life, sport, and games, see Caroline F. Spurgeon, Shakespeare's Imagery and What it Tells Us (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1935). I have discussed the influence of London on playwrights' dramatic projects in Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992), 124, n. 28. In Ben Jonson, Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984), Anne Barton notes that in The New Inn (1629) Jonson "abandoned the metropolis which had served him so long in favour of a country setting" redolent of Shakespeare's Elizabethan comedies and Jacobean romances (259). See Barton's remarks on the nostalgic impulse behind this and other late plays by Jonson (258 ff.).

²⁰ My use of these terms necessarily calls to mind Perez Zagorin's classic study, The Court and the Country: The Beginning of the English Revolution (New York: Atheneum, 1969), which uses "the Country" to describe a "loose collaboration or alliance of men in the governing class, peers and gentlemen of assured position and often of substantial fortune, alienated for a variety of reasons from the Court" (75). In contrast, I am employing it in the sense Lawrence Stone provides in defining the country as "a culture and a style of life," one that could stand for "an experience of the world confined to the shires of England" (The Causes of the English Revolution 1529-1642 [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972], 106). See also Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford UP, 1973), where country and city can stand for "the experience of human communities" (1 and passim).

²¹ Robert Weimann, "Le Declin de la Scene 'Indivisible' Elisabéthaine: Beaumont, Fletcher et Heywood" in Dramaturgie et Societe, 2 vols. (Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1968), 2:815-27, esp. 825. Weimann's remarks have been confirmed in a recent study that contrasts Will Kemp, the famous Elizabethan clown, with Robert Armin, the satirical clown who replaced Kemp in the Lord Chamberlain's Men; see David Wiles, Shakespeare's clown: Actor and text in the Elizabethan playhouse (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987). In a recent article on Will Kemp, Max W. Thomas argues that by 1600, Kemp himself was inside the circuit of commercial desire and performance; in his reading, Kemp's famous morris dance from London to Norwich was a phenomenon that moved "toward the commercialization of rural festivity" ("Kemps Nine Daies Wonder: Dancing Carnival into Market," PMLA 107 [1992]: 511-23, esp. 514). See also, of course, Weimann's Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978).

²² Paul N. Siegel, Shakespearean Tragedy and the Elizabethan Compromise: A Marxist Study (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983).

²³ While Lear is commonly read as straddling the feudal and modern eras, the play also speaks to a smaller, even generational transition. In Poets on Fortune's Hill: Studies in Sidney, Shakespeare, Beaumont & Fletcher (London: Faber and Faber, 1952), John F. Danby sees 1606 as the beginning of a four-year transitional period, with Lear representing the former era's last statement (19). For Danby the change has a generational cause: "Sidney's Arcadia has more in common with Shakespeare's Lear and Pericles than these have with the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher. Shakespeare and Sidney . . . are somehow members of the same moral community. Beaumont and Fletcher, using the same theatre as Shakespeare, belong to a different world" (17). Shakespeare, born in 1564, came from a background that—though full of qualifying circumstances—was markedly lower in status than that of Fletcher, born in 1579 and educated at Corpus Christi. It should be noted that it is a generational shift which leads Christopher Hill to call 1614 the turning point of the era; see Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 10-13 and 95. For a reading of Lear that stresses its roots in the resistance theory of the sixteenth century, see Richard Strier, "Faithful Servants: Shakespeare's Praise of Disobedience" in The Historical Renaissance: New Essays on Tudor and Stuart Literature and Culture, Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier, eds. (Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 1988), 104-33.

²⁴ See Norman Jones, God and the Moneylenders: Usury and the Law in Early Modern England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), esp. chap. 7.

²⁵ See Jones, 179 ff.

²⁶ See Thomas Adams, The Works of Thomas Adams: Being the Sum of His Sermons, Meditations, and Other Divine and Moral Discourses, ed. Joseph Angus, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: James Nichols, 1862), 2:221-53.

²⁷ William Pemberton, The Godly Merchant, or the Great Gaine (London, 1613).

²⁸ Jones, 182 ff.

²⁹ Characterologically the Jailer's Daughter seems somewhere between the literary traditions of the Renaissance inamorata and the Dickensian "angel of the hearth." This last phrase comes from Alexander Welsh, The City of Dickens (London: Oxford UP, 1971), and is quoted here from Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1981), 186. Elizabeth Helsinger has pointed out to me certain resemblances between the Jailer's Daughter and characters in the novels of Walter Scott, including Madge Wildfire in The Heart of Midlothian (1818) and Lucy Ashton in The Bride of Lammermoor (1819); such resemblances include the former's lyrics and the latter's insanity over an unrequited passion.

³⁰ Brian Vickers, "Rites of Passage in Shakespeare's Prose," Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft West: Jahrbuch (1986): 45-67, esp. 45.

³¹ See Ann Thompson, "Jailers' Daughters in 'The Arcadia' and 'The Two Noble Kinsmen,"' Notes and Queries n.s. 26 (1979): 140-41.

³² Later commentators frequently indict Fletcher for breaching decorum of character. See, for example, Richard Flecknoe, who wrote in A Short Discourse of the English Stage (1664) that "Beaumont and Fletcher were excellent in their kinde, but they often err'd against Decorum, seldom representing a valiant man without somewhat of the Braggadoccio, nor an honourable woman without somewhat of Dol Common in her" (quoted from Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, J. E. Spingarn, ed., 3 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908], 2:91-96, esp. 94). Commenting on A King and No King in The Tragedies of the Last Age (1677), Thomas Rymer stated that "The Characters are all improbable and unproper in the highest degree, besides that both these, their actions and all the lines of the Play run so wide from the Plot, that scarce ought could be imagin'd more contrary" (Rymer, The Critical Works of Thomas Rymer, ed. Curt A. Zimansky [New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1956], 42). Rymer would later repeat some of these charges against Othello (in A Short View of Tragedy [London, 1693]); but there he stresses the improbability of the plot—one more appropriate to farce, he intimates, than formal tragedy.

³³ C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1959), 16.

³⁴ On the contagion of the marketplace in Bartholomew Fair and on Jonson's imagination generally, see Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1986), 59-79.

³⁵ See Thomas, passim.

³⁶ Philip Edwards, in his introduction to the text of "The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray's Inn" in A Book of Masques: In Honour of Allardyce Nicoli (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1967), 127-30, esp. 129.

³⁷ On the layers of calendrical phenomena in Dream, see David Wiles, Shakespeare's Almanac: A Midsummer Night's Dream, Marriage and the Elizabethan Calendar (Rochester, NY: D. S. Brewer, 1993).

³⁸ See 2.6.35; 3.2.7 and 25; 2.4.18; 3.2.21; 4.1.110 and 151; 4.3.34; and 5.2.49. For the use of such words in the sixteenth century, see The English Dialect Dictionary, ed. Joseph Wright, 6 vols. (London: H. Frowde, 1898-1905). The survival of certain words in the North does not prove that they originated there; that a great number of a character's words are later recorded as dialectal, however, seems to point to geographical inflection. As Eugene Waith indicates in the Oxford edition of the play, the northern dialect form e 'e for eyes in one of the Jailer's Daughter's songs—"And I'll clip my yellow locks an inch below mine e'e" ("eie" in the Quarto)—is "frequently found in ballads" (3.4.2n).

³⁹ See Eduard Faust, Richard Brome: Ein beitrag zur geschichte der englischen litteratur (Halle: 1887), 55; Lawrence Babb, The Elizabethan Malady: A Study of Melancholia in English Literature from 1580 to 1642 (East Lansing: Michigan State College P, 1951), 166; and A Critical Edition of Brome's "The Northern Lasse", ed. Harvey Fried (New York: Garland, 1980), xxx-xxxi.

⁴⁰ Her intertextual relations with Ophelia, for example, anchor her to a dramatic story at least as early as 1600/1601. The Jailer's Daughter is also part of a tradition of middle- and lower-class heroines most closely associated with Thomas Heywood (The Fair Maid of the West [1604]) and Thomas Dekker (Patient Grissel [1600], with Chettle and Haughton). For an important essay on (later) nostalgia for the Elizabethan period, see Anne Barton, "Harking back to Elizabeth: Ben Jonson and Caroline nostalgia," ELH 48 (1981): 706-31 (reprinted as chapter 14 in Barton, Ben Jonson, Dramatist, 300-20).

⁴¹ Compare also Hamlet's allusion to the story of Jephthah and his daughter; see Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins (London: Methuen, 1982), 2.2.399ff., esp. Jenkins's "Longer Note" on this story, 475-77. I should note that The Two Noble Kinsmen refers to three other women as daughters (none of them seen): "the tanner's daughter" (2.3.44), "The Lord Steward's daughter" (3.3.29), and "Cicely the sempster's daughter" (3.5.44).

⁴²Annals of English Drama lists Fair Em as an anonymous play. In his critical edition of the text, Standish Henning leans toward Anthony Munday as author; see Fair Em: A Critical Edition (New York: Garland, 1980), 51-80.

⁴³ Marcus, 6-7. Marcus derives her concept of "survivalism" from the work of such critics and historians as Raymond Williams, Christopher Hill, and Keith Thomas. The foundational study of the festive base of Renaissance drama is, of course, C. L. Barber's Shakespeare's Festive Comedy; see also Michael D. Bristol, Carnival and Theater: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England (New York: Methuen, 1985), and François Laroque, Shakespeare's festive world: Elizabethan seasonal entertainment and the professional stage, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991). Laroque's study contains an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary materials on the "festive" in Renaissance England.

⁴⁴ Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991), 6.

⁴⁵ Natascha Würzbach, The Rise of the English Street Ballad 1550-1650, trans. Gayna Walls (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990).

⁴⁶ Quoted in Würzbach, 256.

⁴⁷ Neely, 334.

⁴⁸ Neely, 323.

⁴⁹ Jameson, 20. To be sure, Jameson's "political unconscious" is both overdetermined and vaguely defined. And because it is precisely that which cannot be represented, nowhere does he identify it with a character. In fact Jameson is much more likely to describe characters as allegorical figures for periods and processes. For example, he calls Heathcliff "the locus of history" in Wuthering Heights (128), and he identifies two authority figures in Dog Day Afternoon with, respectively, the local and national (even multinational) power structures of late capitalism (Signatures of the Visible [New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, 1990], 50). In contrast, I would argue that the Jailer's Daughter exceeds such two-dimensional symbolism by actively staging the cultural forms she represents.

⁵⁰ Jameson, Political Unconscious, 102.

⁵¹ See Laroque, 122-25. See also E. K. Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1903), 1:195-98.

⁵² See Kemp's nine days' wonder. Performed in a Morrice from London to Norwich in Social England Illustrated: A Collection of XVIIth Century Tracts, ed. Edward Arber (Westminster: Archibald Constable, 1903), 143-58, esp. 147 and 149-50.

⁵³ Here the Doctor touches on a belief common in early modern medical theory. As Michael MacDonald puts it, "When women were deprived of sexual satisfaction, [it was believed] they were prone to illness and insanity" (268). Reading a similar "cure" from Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, Juliana Schiesari refers to "the phallic subservience of women" (The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature [Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1992], 250). This subservience works linguistically in The Two Noble Kinsmen through the gendering of languages.

⁵⁴ The Riverside translates this passage from Metamorphoses (15.871) as "And I have built a work which neither the wrath of Jove nor fire [will destroy]."

⁵⁵ Although apparently arbitrary—in the sense that no language has an essential political or sexual bias—this gendering of speech registers resulted from the institutions where Latin was taught. Walter J. Ong's argument about Latin education being a "puberty rite" for boys during the Renaissance, for instance, suggests that the sexual segregation of the grammar schools, their strict corporal discipline, insistence on obedience and imitation, and emphasis on the epic/heroic values of classical literature led to a hardening of the individual student toward "the extra-familial world in which he would have to live" (Ong, "Latin Language Study as a Renaissance Puberty Rite," Studies in Philology 56 [1959]: 103-24, esp. 123). Latin thus came to be perceived as the language of manhood, English remaining the mother tongue. This diglossic structure, William Kerrigan argues, led to the articulation of a bifurcated "linguistic ego" in Renaissance authors brought up in the "rigid, masculine world" of the grammar school: "as the boy was separated from women, so he was divorced from the mother tongue" (Kerrigan, "The Articulation of the Ego in the English Renaissance" in The Literary Freud: Mechanisms of Defense and the Poetic Will, Joseph H. Smith, ed., Psychiatry and the Humanities 4 [New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1980], 261-308, esp. 269).

⁵⁶ See Phyllis Rackin, Stages of History: Shakespeare 's English Chronicles (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1990), who speaks of the marginal role female characters play in the world of Shakespeare's histories and holds that "the women who do appear are typically defined as opponents and subverters of the historical and historiographic enterprise" (148).