SOURCE: “The Collapse of Shakespeare's High Style in The Two Noble Kinsmen,” in English Studies in Canada, Vol. XIII, No. 4, December, 1987, pp. 375-90.

[In the following essay, Magnusson examines the language and style of the eloquent first and last scenes of The Two Noble Kinsmen. In both scenes Magnusson finds that Shakespeare's stylistic ornamentation is designed to conceal a dearth of substance.]

The ornate eloquence of Shakespeare's share in The Two Noble Kinsmen has often drawn tributes to a play that has not recommended itself to directors:¹

The first and last acts … of the Two Noble Kinsmen, which, in point of composition, is perhaps the most superb work in the language, and beyond all doubt from the loom of Shakspeare, would have been the most gorgeous rhetoric, had they not happened to be something far better. The supplications of the widowed Queens to Theseus, the invocations of their tutelar divinities by Palamon and Arcite, the death of Arcite, &c. are finished in a more elaborate style of excellence than any other almost of Shakspeare's most felicitous scenes. In their first intention, they were perhaps merely rhetorical; but the furnace of comparison has transmuted their substance … into the pure gold of poetry.²

Thomas De Quincey raises no questions about the dramatic utility of the high style. His hesitation between rhetoric and poetry apparently involves a distinction between degrees of stylistic virtuosity, not between verbal display and functional excellence. Other unqualified tributes depend on the same omission. Thomas Seward, an eighteenth-century editor of the play, says of the style: “The Play almost every where abounds with such sublimity of … Sentiment and Diction … that were the Beauties to be mark'd with Asterisms, after Mr. Pope and Mr. Warburton's Manner, scarce a Page would be left uncover'd with them.”³ It is not merely the critical bias of a time when editors expressed their appreciation for Shakespeare's work by marking its scattered brilliances with asterisks which draws this kind of attention to The Two Noble Kinsmen. The many glossy speeches of the opening scene, Emilia's prettily embroidered set speech about her pre-pubescent affection for Flavina in I.iii, Palamon's savagely ironic prayer to Venus in V.i, Pirithous's mock-heroic oration on the dancing horse that throws Arcite in V.iv: the Shakespearean portion of the play is full of virtuoso pieces, so wide-ranging in tone and manner as to tend towards disparate and unrelated ends. The “gorgeous rhetoric” which De Quincey and Seward praise is precisely what has been censured by Una Ellis-Fermor: “imagery that surprises by a fine excess, but turns out to have more brilliance than potency, to dazzle, rather than to illuminate … the skill of the author seems to be deployed mainly in order to dazzle and bemuse us.”⁴ Perhaps the distinction that is needed here is between “the pure gold of poetry” and dramatic language, or between a language that puts words themselves on show and a language that is the servant of dramatic contexts. Ellis-Fermor's paper, published posthumously, does not furnish the evidence for her negative evaluation of the play's language, but she does suggest the need to look at contextual use: the stylistic qualities “must be examined afresh in relation to the purpose of the play; their function in the work of art, or the failure of function, must be diagnosed.”⁵ In this paper I will consider to what ends Shakespeare's verbal skill is deployed in the opening and final scenes of the play.⁶

I

The language of the first scene is symptomatic of the play's “gorgeous rhetoric.” The Two Noble Kinsmen begins with a dazzling theatrical display, extravagant in its spectacle, ornate in its rhetoric. Although Shakespeare has introduced masque elements into all of his late plays, in no other play does spectacle make such a bold statement before words are spoken. A marriage procession enters. Attendants strew flowers as blessings before the bridal couple to the accompaniment of a song's catalogue of flowers, which is rendered haunting in its cadence by the muted inward turning of each third short line, the graceful falling intonation of which lingers in the momentary pause:

Roses, their sharp spines being gone,
Not royal in their smells alone,
But in their hue;
Maiden pinks, of odor faint,
Daisies smell-less, yet most quaint,
And sweet thyme true.

(I.i.1-6)⁷

The final stanza expels the crow, cuckoo, raven, chough, and pie—birds of discord and ill-omen. Three widowed queens enter in black, veils stained. The striking juxtaposition of marriage and mourning proclaims, before the cause of their intrusion is articulated, how fragile human happiness is. The theatrical heightening also suggests that the audience is about to witness an event of some importance. Language rises to the formality of the occasion. Determined to persuade Theseus to revenge the inhumanity of the tyrant Creon and to bury the bones of their slain kings, the queens deliver their pleas to Theseus, Hippolyta, and Emilia in an antiphonal pattern, the rhythm occasionally modulating by means of isocolon, parison, and internal rhyme into incantation:

First Queen,
He will not suffer us to burn their bones
To urn their ashes.

(I.i.43-44)

Second Queen
Speak't in a woman's key, like such a woman
As any of us three; weep ere you fail;
Lend us a knee.

(I.i.94-96)

Not only the representation of their grief, but the responses of the wedding party and the representation of Theseus's inner conflict are curiously stylized, both strange and over-ornate.

The style resembles that of Shakespeare's late plays in its metrical freedoms, its syntactical involution, and its inventive diction; it differs in the static formality of its set speeches and in the generous profusion of its imagery. Imagery in Shakespeare's late plays is relatively sparse, and it differs in kind from the powerfully emotive associative imagery of the tragedies. The imagery of this scene is less a return to the method of the tragedies than a proliferation of the far-fetched conceits that occasionally decorate the courtier language of Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale. The Third Queen's strained expression, for example, of her “heart-deep” sorrow—“he that will fish / For my least minnow, let him lead his line / To catch one at my heart” (I.i.115-17)—recalls the odd contrivance of a courtier's pretty sentiment in The Winter's Tale: Perdita's woe “angled for [his] eyes, caught the water though not the fish” (V.ii.82-83).

This highly wrought imagery is first made the vehicle of the queens' grief. Nowadays it erects a barrier of words between their emotion and its expression. The rhetorical training of Renaissance writers did not encourage them to look into the heart and speak, or write, of passion. Yet one test of the dramatist's skill is to make us forget the intractability of his medium and the contrivance of his rhetoric—to persuade us that his eloquence is the voice of his character's feeling. The eloquence often praised in this scene is not of that sort.

The contrivance is forced on our attention partly by violent, perplexing shifts in tone, as the Second Queen's plea to Hippolyta for reinforcement in their petition illustrates:

                    dear glass of ladies,
Bid him that we whom flaming war doth scorch
Under the shadow of his sword may cool us;
Require him he advance it o'er our heads;
Speak't in a woman's key, like such a woman
As any of us three; weep ere you fail;
Lend us a knee;
But touch the ground for us no longer time
Than a dove's motion when the head's plucked off;
Tell him if he i' th' blood-sized field lay swoll'n,
Showing the sun his teeth, grinning at the moon,
What you would do.

(I.i.90-101)

The first image makes a generous appeal to the heroic spirit. It is apocalyptic in colouring; representing Theseus as an avenging angel, it heightens the stakes and heightens the status of the required heroic endeavour. The incantatory appeal to what is womanly in Hippolyta's nature sustains the lofty tone of the grief and identifies the appropriate decorum of its “woman's key.” The shift in register comes, not between the images but abruptly, perversely, in mid-course of our assent to the elegant grace of expression. The denotative meaning of lines 97 to 98 is clear. The Queen tells Hippolyta that she need only brush the ground with her knee to move Theseus to consent, so great is her sway over him “who is a servant for / The tenor of thy speech” (I.i.89-90). This meaning is complete by the middle of line 98 with the comparison of “a dove's motion” evoking the gracefulness of Hippolyta's anticipated action. But our gentler feelings are deliberately misled, lulled into sympathy that is wrenched when the dove's flutter becomes its death throes. (Marco Mincoff, following Caroline Spurgeon's method, groups this as one of Shakespeare's characteristic “love of the country” images!)⁸ Syntax and rhythm underline the deception. A spondaic substitution places a rhythmic emphasis on “a dove's motion” and creates a brief mid-line pause; the syntax does not anticipate the restrictive limitation imposed by the final clause, which is added as if an afterthought. This jarring transition made, the final picture is openly macabre, and we are invited to admire the cleverly condensed diction in the coined “blood-sized,” which prepares the ground of the word-painting by staining it in blood.

What significance can we attribute to the shift in tone? Is it rhetorically controlled by the speaker, aimed at drawing the desired response from Hippolyta and from Theseus by its shock value? Such an alienating method is oddly suited to incite the noble Theseus to heroic action. Or is the departure from decorum meant to be evocative of the Queen's suffering, an expression of her acute distress? If so, one's feeling of being manipulated points to the failure of this expressive strategy. The showiness of the utterance is distracting. Less spectacular, but as curious, is the stylistic shift where the First Queen describes the seductive allurements of the marriage bed which will keep Theseus from his promise:

                                                            When her arms,
Able to lock Jove from a synod, shall
By warranting moonlight corslet thee, O when
Her twining cherries shall their sweetness fall
Upon thy tasteful lips, what wilt thou think
Of rotten kings or blubbered queens?

(I.i.174-79)

The first image is suggestively, not explicitly, erotic; the second, its cherry lips garish in a derivative sonneteering mode, is a jaded deflation of the romantic spell. Is the utterance meant to evoke the delight of sexual pleasures or is it meant to express the speaker's distaste for such matters in her present distress?

The Third Queen, appealing to Emilia, makes explicit comments on the barrier between grief and its communication (I.i.106-19). She seems to feel both a pressing necessity for speech and the alienating effects of speech. Shakespeare might have chosen silence or incoherence for her choked emotion. Instead he embroiders it with imagery yet more laboured and contrived than he gave the other queens, but accompanied by the woman's obsessive self-consciousness about the manner of her utterance:

                                                            O pardon me,
Extremity that sharpens sundry wits
Makes me a fool.

(I.i.117-19)

One possible reason for this tactic of ornate inexpressiveness is that Shakespeare has committed himself to a pattern of formal set speeches. The three queens have but one matter to fill three speeches. Shakespeare's device effectively breaks what would be monotony if insufficiently varied by making the formal act of her appeal the matter of her utterance:

                                                            O my petition was
Set down in ice, which by hot grief uncandied
Melts into drops, so sorrow wanting form
Is pressed with deeper matter.

(I.i.106-09)

Her difficulty is felt in the difficulty of her expression. Most of the images in this scene have the sharp-edged precision of the metaphysical conceit, this the elusive impressionism of Macbeth's associative imagery, where we understand the passion before the words. She seems to mean not only that tears have obliterated from her mind the prepared words of her petition, but that the very formality of its outward statement belied her amorphous suffering. Yet that the anguish lacks formal expression makes the burden more oppressive to her. Tangled in paradox, claiming that words and outward shows can give no true image of her despair, yet compelled to give it words, she composes more and more bizarre analogies until she has turned her heart into a fish pond (I.i.115-17). Here the stylistic curiosities have the clear function of expressing her distorted mental state. But one wonders whether the inexpressibility topos is not being used almost as an authorial aside to tell us that the dramatist controls the fine excess of his rhetoric, and not it him.

If the function of this rhetoric is not always so clear, one can at least say that the incongruities of style in the portrayal of the queens' grief contribute to “the sense of disturbance” that Clifford Leech says pervades Shakespeare's section of the play.⁹ Stylistic involution, the grotesque, the archaic, the paradoxical, the primitively ritualistic, the strange—all these have a peculiar attraction that derives from their mystery or their oddity. They respond to some quirk in human nature and give the impression of meaningfulness. One wonders whether this scene, always verging on the spectacular, the ritualistic, the ridiculous, the grotesque, the unexpressed, does not draw on this kind of interest in the absence of clear dramatic intention and “basic human situations.”

Ellis-Fermor's one specific criticism of the play's action points in this direction:

When all is said, the burying of bones, a sacred and compelling necessity to Antigone, cannot be made to release the same force of passion and action for the seventeenth century, and, from beginning to end, that scene is a brilliant piece of virtuosity labouring unsuccessfully to conceal this hard fact.¹⁰

One might respond that when such an action has long lost its “compelling necessity,” it gathers a compelling interest from its strangeness and remoteness. The anachronisms of Shakespeare's great plays, which take primitive rites into Elizabethan public houses and court chambers, are proof that Shakespeare does not characteristically make merely opportunistic use of such devices.

To understand how style functions here, one must consider the significance of this spectacular prologue and its relation to the design of the play. For the central conflict of the scene, Theseus's need to choose between immediate action on behalf of the Theban widows or action delayed by his marriage ceremony, there is no hint in The Knight's Tale. In Shakespeare's source, the queens confront Theseus as he returns to Athens from his Amazonian wars. One woman is spokesman for the rest, and her plea immediately moves Theseus's pity and leads to his promise of swift revenge. Theseus and Hippolyta are married already; the contrast of marriage and mourning that produces such a striking tableau on stage in Shakespeare's invention. Chaucer's Theseus shows absolutely no irresolution: he rides forth to wreak vengeance on Creon before entering Athens. Shakespeare's intention in the scene is apparently presented in Theseus's brief irresolution: the hero's choice is made to seem momentous. It is represented as a critical moment of his life, and like the choice of Hercules, a favourite of Renaissance iconographers, is interpreted emblematically, as the outcome of the conflict between heroic action and sensual appetite. Theseus himself draws the moral as the scene ends: “Being sensually subdued, / We lose our human title” (I.i.231-32). Yet this emblematic application is stated rather than convincingly embodied in the action. One function, of both the inflated style and the ritualistic pageantry, is to escalate the importance of Theseus's dilemma—to make it seem portentous and to elevate its significance to a high level of generality. There is little in the situation itself to suggest that the choice should be so problematic, so heroic. Theseus is not called upon to sacrifice his marriage, only to delay it briefly. No indication is given that he might die in the action. We are made to feel that Theseus's accomplishment is stamped by his promise:

First Queen
your first thought is more
Than others' labored meditance, your premeditating
More than their actions.

(I.i.135-37)

The dilemma is created by the mode of its expression. Mood, as well as significance, is heightened by the static formality of presentation: each action and thought is weighted down with the sadness of the mortal condition.

Two qualities of style impart the immense weight of his decision and yet leave a grand vagueness about the significance of the central conflict. One device is simply to leave much unspoken; the other to inflate the rhetoric of what is spoken. Theseus gives little direct expression to the conflict in his mind. His only speech of any length in a scene of long speeches is an oblique response to the First Queen's incitement to action. “Transported” with her speech, he withdraws into a brooding meditation on the evanescence of earthly beauty, prompted by the decay he sees in her:

King Capaneus was your lord. The day
That he should marry you, at such a season
As now it is with me, I met your groom.
By Mars's altar, you were that time fair:
Not Juno's mantle fairer than your tresses,
Nor in more bounty spread her; your wheaten wreath
Was then nor threshed nor blasted; Fortune at you
Dimpled her cheek with smiles. Hercules our kinsman,
Then weaker than your eyes, laid by his club:
He tumbled down upon his Nemean hide
And swore his sinews thawed. O grief and time,
Fearful consumers, you will all devour.

(I.i.59-70)

The speech luxuriates in poetic elaboration, articulating a mood that the opening pageant has already established. The expansive phrasing, the hypnotic effect of similar cadences created by an artful placement of pauses, the simple poetic inversions, the occasional Fletcherian pathos of feminine endings falling on a pronominal monosyllable (“spread her,” “at you”), the emblematic emasculation of the mythical hero, and the reflective closing note contribute a dream-like remoteness to Theseus's utterance. Thus distracted, he lapses into his dark night of the soul with the self-descriptive utterance, “Troubled I am” (77), the stylized poetic inversion of which heightens and distances its statement. The conflict that develops in his mind is externalized in the formal pageant, suggested more than spoken when the pressure of the queens' pleading intensifies in response to his trance-like silence. He is once again spoken of as “transported” (186), as if his will were frozen by the contradictory impulses of his dilemma. He speaks again only to assert that the wedding ceremony must take precedence over the heroic task and then to assent in delaying the marriage. When he finally does consent to be deflected from his purpose, his words suggest that his internal debate has been as thoroughgoing as the external formal pleas: “I am entreating of myself to do / That which you kneel to have me” (I.i.205-06). If his inner struggle is indeed one between sensual appetite and heroic action, as the concluding moral explicitly establishes, this rigid Theseus never expresses his carnal inclinations. There is no trace of the sexual impatience that characterizes Theseus in A Midsummer Night's Dream, who in his opening words rebukes the moon for lingering his desires. If sexual appetite is what delays his heroic commitment, we have only the evidence of the First Queen's frigid description of marital pleasures. Yet if Theseus's long deliberation does not merely give occasion for those about him to elaborate their pleas (had he determined immediately on action, the dramatic motivation for further persuasion would have been lost), then his quiet resistance to their speeches is meant to emphasize the difficulty of his decision, the reluctance of his will, the self-division and struggle involved in making “affections bend / To godlike honors” (I.i.228-29). As the Third Queen claims that words can give no true image of her grief, so we are made to feel that the deep disturbance of Theseus's private meditation is only intimated by the words he speaks. Silence imparts a vague profundity to the heroic choice.

Theseus's words make no admission that the marriage that has such urgency for him is motivated by any turning aside from active heroism. His is an overblown description of matrimony: “This grand act of our life, this daring deed / Of fate in wedlock” (I.i.163-64). Syntactical dislocation calls attention to and exaggerates the boldness of what is an oddly hyperbolic concept of marriage as an act challenging fate. The function of this inflated rhetoric is to make the marriage an appropriate counterweight to his responsibility for the wronged widows—again, to make the choice appear momentous. Theseus's utterances repeatedly emphasize the magnitude of the ceremony in his mind:

                    Why, good ladies,
This is a service whereto I am going
Greater than any was; it more imports me
Than all the actions that I have foregone
Or futurely can cope.

(I.i.169-73)

I do not think we are meant to doubt the sincerity of the speaker. If there is a strain of bombast in the heightened language, if the rhetoric is unconvincing, it is because the language is straining to support a dramatic conflict that the situation will not sustain without some embellishment. On the other hand, Shakespeare's writing is characteristically language at a grand stretch. E. A. J. Honigmann, in an essay that indicates the need for critical examination of Shakespeare's high styles, finds the dramatist defending himself against the anticipated charge of bombast even in Hamlet.¹¹ When Othello speaks of his marriage, his language outdoes Theseus's in the pomposity of its diction:

                    for know, Iago,
But that I love the gentle Desdemona,
I would not my unhoused free condition
Put into circumscription and confine
For the sea's worth.

(I.ii.24-28)¹²

The mouthful of words in lines 26 and 27, taken alone, might be condemned as extravagant posturing. But in Othello's lines, Shakespeare has blended two styles, framing the swelling grandeur of the middle lines with such a simple statement of Othello's affection that the boastful pride in his nature is mollified by his gentleness. The language is a revelation of Othello's personality. Shakespeare's “high style,” says Honigmann, is “not just a crude wind-instrument.”¹³ Yet one feels that Theseus's inflated rhetoric has not the resilience of the high tragic style and leaves Theseus's problem too mysterious. Even as he departs from Hippolyta, word-play substitutes for affectionate leave-taking:

                    Since that our theme is haste,
I stamp this kiss upon thy current lip.
Sweet, keep it as my token.

(I.i.214-16)

His disappointment is externalized, represented only in the large symbolic gesture of his repeated insistence that the wedding celebration proceed without him (I.i.209, 219, 223-24). The image of a ritual enactment of marriage festivity emptied of its meaning and its joy by the bridegroom's absence does register the frustration and loss pervading the scene and much of Shakespeare's part in The Two Noble Kinsmen. But that the pathos of Theseus's compelled choice needs such spectacular overstatement is a puzzling characteristic of Shakespeare's stylistic method in this scene.

Yet one should consider the possibility that the verbal curiosity of the first scene is itself a comment on its subject matter rather than an indication of Shakespeare's failure to make matter answer his style. He uses precisely that strategy in the opening scenes of The Winter's Tale and Henry VIII. In The Winter's Tale, the ornate style, with its air of insincerity, is a comment on the over-sophistication of the courtiers, part of the play's critique of courtly decorum. The language that begins Henry VIII, describing the Field of the Cloth of Gold, is hyperbolic, involuted, and perplexed, rife with overgoing strategies and the cultivatiton of the inexpressible, inflating pomp into miracle (I.i.1-45). Soon we perceive that all that glistens is not gold: the glitter cloaks Wolsey's manipulations and the imminent breach of the two kings whose league is celebrated in the inflated language. Buckingham's wrath cuts the wonderful vision down to size: it becomes “fierce vanities” (I.i.54). The insincerity of the initial style prefigures this discovery. But there is nothing for such rhetorical insincerity to comment upon in The Two Noble Kinsmen: why deflate a widow's sorrow for her husband or a hero's pity for her suffering? The scene does not open the possibility of ironic intention.

II

In the first scene and throughout much of the first act, Shakespeare's high style, together with the ceremonial and emblematic pageantry, is apparently aimed at embodying a serious vision of human life as “frustrate striving” (I.ii.9), where to choose is to lose. Theseus's dilemma is repeated and varied in the situations of Arcite and Palamon, Hippolyta, Emilia, Pirithous. Every dramatic situation presents choice as dilemma; every action involves a limiting choice. For the kinsmen in Thebes, both to follow the course of the wicked Thebans and to strive against it is to compromise their nobility. For Hippolyta, to fulfil her feminine role in marriage is to close off the contradictory impulse of her will to heroic action. Emilia's paralyzing choice—between her vowed chastity and her sexual longing—is anticipated in the first act. Pirithous, sketched briefly yet vividly, is not exempt from the emotional stalemate of choice: bidden to remain in Athens, “his longing / Follows his friend” (I.iii.26-27). This serious treatment of the plot material can be construed as the homage to Chaucer the prologue seems to promise—the appropriate theatrical demonstration that Chaucer's old tale lives “constant to eternity” (Prologue.14). The thematics of the opening act are recapitulated in the moralizing statements of the ending, as when Arcite reflects on the bitterness of his gain:

                                                            Emily,
To buy you I have lost what's dearest to me
Save what is bought.

(V.iii.111-13)

Most defences of The Two Noble Kinsmen dwell on the thematic continuity between beginning and ending, arguing that it shows the play to be “intellectually respectable” and coherent in design.¹⁴ Yet those, like N. W. Bawcutt in his introduction to the Penguin edition, who find in the ending an assertion of man's nobility in the face of adverse circumstances, an acceptance of an ultimate and just order which governs life though man cannot comprehend its workings, and “Shakespeare's feeling for the mystery of existence” have ignored Shakespeare's altered treatment of his subject matter—a style in dramaturgy that exploits the vacuous excitements of melodramatic reversal and a self-exhibiting verbal manner that mimics Chaucer's style and subverts the consolatory Chaucerian wisdom of Theseus's statements.¹⁵

The last scene presents the stagiest climax in the Shakespearean canon, more peculiar even than the ending of Cymbeline. Palamon is stretched on the executioner's block, the ax presumably raised above him, when a messenger runs in crying “Hold, hold, O hold, hold, hold!” (V.iv.40). A second odd trick follows the melodramatic surprise of the stayed execution. While Palamon and the audience tensely await knowledge of the event that saves Palamon, Pirithous withholds the news of Arcite's fatal fall through thirty lines of elaborate and teasingly digressive narration. Then Arcite is carried on stage, forgives Palamon, relinquishes his right to Emilia, and dies on cue. The reconciliation, usually the focus of final scenes in Shakespeare's last plays, is given short shrift. Finally, the tragic and comic components of this farcical conclusion are neatly balanced in the rhetoric of Theseus's closing speech, the glib reversals of which are emphasized by awkwardly comical rhymes and antimetabole:

                                                            A day or two
Let us look sadly, and give grace unto
The funeral of Arcite, in whose end
The visages of bridegrooms we'll put on
And smile with Palamon; for whom an hour,
But one hour since, I was as dearly sorry
As glad of Arcite; and am now as glad
As for him sorry.

(V.iv.123-30. Emphasis added.)

The paradoxes of joyful sorrow and sorrowful joy are trademarks of Shakespeare's late style, but, like most of his favourite devices, they are susceptible to both authentic and inauthentic statement. Here, as in Claudius's defence in Hamlet of his hasty marriage, there is too much of a rhetorical juggling act about them. But the very virtuosity helps characterize Claudius; here it only undercuts both the speaker's ostensible wisdom and the emotional integrity of the scene. Rhetoric may cleverly join the incongruent moods of the ending, but it merely glosses over the reality of death and obtrudes the silliness of the play's resolution. The questions the play raises are tossed aside, not resolved, by its ending. Theseus's formula for accepting what cannot be changed is an empty consolation if we are to take seriously the conception of life implied by the vicious circle of a play beginning and ending with the juxtaposition of marriage and funeral:

                                                            For what we lack,
We laugh; for what we have, are sorry; still
Are children in some kind. Let us be thankful
For that which is, and with you leave dispute
That are above our question. Let's go off,
And bear us like the time.

(V.iv.131-36)

The final line is a formulaic closing for tragedy. It signals a recognition and restoration of an appropriate decorum, suiting a solemn bearing and formal ceremony to the occasion. But the comical-tragical ending of The Two Noble Kinsmen does not find a decorum or mood that responds to the dilemma it represents. A day of frowns for Arcite followed by smiles for Palamon is a grotesque parody of what it means to “bear us like the time.”

If the style of Theseus's concluding speech presents a problem, Pirithous's account of Arcite's fall is equally puzzling. It is a great set speech in a play too full of set speeches. It seems inserted almost at the expense of its dramatic context. The embroidered description of the horse's mischief is vivid and entertaining, but where a speaker comes in haste with news of tragic loss, the rhetorical method of Pirithous's account seems completely out of place. Ross, in Macbeth, bringing Macduff news of his wife's and children's deaths, does not launch ab ovo into a detailed account of the circumstances leading up to the murders. At first he withholds the information, with the reluctance of a man who feels the horror of the news he brings and dreads the pain he inflicts on his listener. Pirithous withholds the substance of his news to play his story up for all it's worth.

Pirithous's account is comically periodic in effect, suspending its point to the end, though it achieves this effect by a loosely digressive syntax:

                                                            Your cousin,
Mounted upon a steed that Emily
Did first bestow on him, a black one, owing
Not a hair-worth of white, which some will say
Weakens his price, and many will not buy
His goodness with this note—which superstition
Here finds allowance—on this horse is Arcite
Trotting the stones of Athens, which the calkins
Did rather tell than trample, for the horse
Would make his length a mile, if't pleased his rider
To put pride in him.

(V.iv.47-57)

Employing a varient of anacoluthon, a figure of digression, Shakespeare separates the subject so far from its predicate by interposing a pile-up of subordinate clauses that the sentence must be broken off and a subject re-established to form the sentence. The main clause—“on this horse is Arcite / Trotting the stones of Athens”—is buried in the midst of a tangle of secondary clauses. Although its subject is Arcite, the customary role of the main clause as rhetorical focus of a sentence is completely overturned by the distraction of the secondary clauses, and the magnificent horse becomes the main focus of attention. The speaker takes every byway to irrelevant elaboration that his drift affords him. This method resembles the digressive ineptness of such a comic character as Elbow, making his report on Froth's crimes.

In the next sentence, the use of inconsequentiality combines with paralepsis and with mock-heroic diction to produce its comic effect:

                                                            As he thus went counting
The flinty pavement, dancing as 'twere to th' music
His own hoofs made—for as they say from iron
Came music's origin—what envious flint,
Cold as old Saturn, and like him possessed
With fire malevolent, darted a spark,
Or what fierce sulphur else to this end made,
I comment not.

(V.iv.57-64)

Paralepsis, which achieves comic emphasis by seeming to pass over what it pointedly says, is a favourite Chaucerian trope. An incredibly elaborate and lengthy account of the preparations for Arcite's funeral in The Knight's Tale begins with this device:

But how the fyr was maked upon highte,
No eek the names that the trees highte,
As ook, firre, birch, aspe, alder, holm, popler,
Wylugh, elm, plane, assh, box, chasteyn, lynde, laurer,
Mapul, thorn, bech, hasel, ew, whippeltree,—
How they weren feld, shal nat be toold for me.

(ll. 2919-24)¹⁶

The sentence wanders on seemingly without end, each new clause being introduced by the disclaiming “Ne how. …” The story, together with the humorous narrator's enthusiasm, always spills over the boundaries he professes to contain it within. So Pirithous comments where he professes to “comment not.” The speaker is completely caught up in his own performance, allowing, Polonius-like, his picture of the horse dancing to the music of its own hoofs to wander into a parenthetical speculation on “music's origin.” The syntax and diction are mock-heroic when Pirithous goes on to explain how a spark frightened the horse, causing it to rear. A personal epithet attributes malicious intent to the flint, an epic simile compares its qualities to Saturn's, inverted phrasing—“fire malevolent”—imparts a heroic grandeur, the solemn weighing of two possible accounts—“what envious flint … Or what fierce sulphur else”—attaches a ludicrous importance to the trivial circumstance. Finally, only when the whole history of the horse's provenance, colour, value, reputation, temperament, stride, training, exasperation, and rebellion has been delivered, Arcite's plight is revealed.

The mock-heroic diction, the reprise of a favourite Chaucerian trope, the displacement of attention from man to dancing horse: the virtuosity of Shakespeare's style is here apparently deployed to “let fall the nobleness” of Chaucer's story and to “shake the bones of that good man” (Prologue.15, 17). The ending's drastic compression of its source seems calculated to a similar effect—to obtrude the rhetorical contrivance of Theseus's “wisdom.” In Chaucer's tale, Arcite's death is lamented through 156 lines and through “lengthe of certeyn yeres” (2967). No mention of Palamon's victory by default is made; the time is given over to “Infinite … sorwes and … teeres” (2827). At the end of this ample period of mourning, Theseus delivers a speech of consolation for death and persuades Palamon and Emily to make virtue of necessity and to marry. The language of paradox enters toward the conclusion of Theseus's speech in Chaucer:

What may I conclude of this long serye,
But after wo I rede us to be merye,
And thanken Juppiter of al his grace?
And er that we departen from this place
I rede that we make of sorwes two
O parfit joye, lastynge everemo.

(3067-72)

However, this paradox does not make the artificial demands on the emotional reflexes of the survivors that Shakespeare's Theseus makes with his peculiar recipe for one day's sadness, one day's smiles. In Chaucer the argument of time works together with rhetorical persuasion to transform the mood from sorrow to rejoicing; in Shakespeare the argument of time renders the rhetoric ludicrous.

Bawcutt, without taking into account the element of travesty in the last scene or considering the incongruity of the things joined, argues that “Shakespeare's feeling for the mystery of existence shows itself verbally in his increased use of the language of paradox.”¹⁷ If the language of the ending creates a mystery, it is a mystery not about existence, but about the tone and intention of the ending, and of the play. Shakespeare's verbal fluency is deployed to contradictory effects at the beginning and the end of the play: the opening relies on stylistic ornament to conceal a failure of substance, and invites serious presentation; the finale relies on stylistic ornament to reveal a failure of substance, and invites send-up. One might speculate about whether problems involved in collaborating with Fletcher contribute to the collapse from a beginning in heroic drama to an ending in farce—or to an ending whose irony is parasitical upon the magisterial conception of the opening. One cannot always determine whether the Fletcherian ridiculous is a calculated or an unconscious effect, but it is difficult to imagine the saccharine prettiness of the loving hatred between the noble kinsmen as they arm one another for combat or the sentimentality of the Athenians' round of praise for Arcite's noble qualities (“You are perfect.”—“Upon my soul, a proper man.”—“He is so.” [II.iv.15-16]) played for anything but laughs. Fletcher's part in the play certainly exhibits that curious fragmentation into self-contained effects that seems to come from a breakdown in underlying point of view—the fragmentation that characterizes many of his collaborations with Beaumont. The self-exhibiting and self-consuming verbal devices of the finale may be Shakespeare's attempt to salvage at least some entertainment from a collaboration without common purpose.

Notes

1. The 1986 theatre season was an exception, with two productions of the play: one in the new Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, the other at the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival.

2. De Quincey's commentary appeared in a note to an essay printed in Blackwood's, 24 (1828), 896-97; rpt. in Paul Bertram, Shakespeare and The Two Noble Kinsmen (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1965), p. 263.

3. Quoted in Bertram, p. 200.

4. Una Ellis-Fermor, “The Two Noble Kinsmen,” in Shakespeare the Dramatist, ed. Kenneth Muir (London: Methuen, 1961), pp. 177-86. See pp. 182, 179.

5. Ellis-Fermor, p. 180.

6. The working assumption of this paper is that Shakespeare wrote most of I.i-iii, III.i, V.i, iii-iv, and probably I.iv-v, II.i.1-59. On the authorship question see W. Spalding, “A Letter on Shakespeare's Authorship of ‘The Two Noble Kinsmen’” (Edinburgh, 1833; The New Shakspere Society's Publications, ser. 8, 1 [London: Trübner, 1876]); S. Hickson, “The Shares of Shakspere and Fletcher in The Two Noble Kinsmen,” Westminster and Foreign Quarterly Review, 92 (1847; rpt. The New Shakspere Society's Transactions, ser. 1, [London: Trübner, 1874], 25-61); Alfred Hart, “Shakespeare and the Vocabulary of The Two Noble Kinsmen,” Review of English Studies, 10 (1934), 274-87; Marco Mincoff, “The Authorship of The Two Noble Kinsmen,” English Studies, 33 (1952), 97-115; Kenneth Muir, Shakespeare as Collaborator (London: Methuen, 1960), pp. 98-147; Cyrus Hoy, “The Shares of Fletcher and his Collaborators in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon (VII),” Studies in Bibliography, 15 (1962), 71-90. Bertram, Shakespeare and The Two Noble Kinsmen, provides little convincing evidence for his claim that Shakespeare was the sole author.

7. William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, The Two Noble Kinsmen, ed. Clifford Leech (New York: New American Library, 1966). All subsequent quotations are from this edition.

8. Mincoff, p. 105.

9. Clifford Leech, ed., The Two Noble Kinsmen, p. 188.

10. Ellis-Fermor, p. 183.

11. E. A. J. Honigmann, “Shakespeare's ‘Bombast,’” in Shakespeare's Styles: Essays in Honour of Kenneth Muir, ed. Philip Edwards et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 151-62.

12. William Shakespeare, Othello, ed. M. R. Ridley, Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1958).

13. Honigmann, p. 161.

14. See, for example, Philip Edwards, “On the Design of The Two Noble Kinsmen,” Review of English Literature, 5 (October 1964), 89-105; p. 90.

15. N. W. Bawcutt, ed., The Two Noble Kinsmen, New Penguin ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), pp. 37-46.

16. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Knight's Tale, is quoted from The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957).

17. Bawcutt, p. 37.