SOURCE: “The Composition of the Play,” in Shakespeare and The Two Noble Kinsmen, Rutgers University Press, 1965, pp. 264-82.

[In the following excerpt, Bertram surveys the arrangement of the play and contends that contrary to common assumption, the play possesses a controlled organization and is consistently developed.]

THE ARRANGEMENT OF THE STORY

The story itself has evidently given trouble to some critics, Theodore Spencer for example:

The story of Palamon and Arcite, whether told by Boccaccio, Chaucer, or Shakespeare and Fletcher, is intrinsically feeble, superficial, and undramatic. For there is no real difference between Palamon and Arcite; they are both noble individuals, and the only reasons Palamon, rather than Arcite, wins the lady whom they both love are (a) that he saw her first and (b) that he had the sense to pray for success to Venus rather than to Mars.¹

Spencer goes on to suggest that “these reasons … may have been more forceful in Chaucer's day … than they were in Shakespeare's,” but a reply to his objections had better not fuss over history: an audience in Chaucer's, Shakespeare's, or our own day might well be less interested in the final score than in the progress of the game. Two young men, equally gifted with every aristocratic grace, fall in love with the same woman—beautiful as a goddess in the poem, but in the play possessing also “Those best affections that the heavens infuse / In their best-temper'd pieces” (I.iii.11)—and during the ensuing conflict one of the lovers must die. One would think that this set of circumstances, which requires that we never be allowed to sympathize much more strongly with one protagonist than with the other, would be “intrinsically” capable of development into more poignant drama than, say, the story of a young man who plans to avenge the murder of his father; in any case, unless we are willing to try out the dramatic hypothesis that attracted Chaucer and Shakespeare, we are not likely to be able to see whatever virtues occur in its realization, and this is perhaps sufficient reason for giving it at least a provisional assent.

As far as the reasons for Palamon's final victory are concerned, for the moment it will have to suffice to say that he wins Emilia because Arcite is killed in an accident. Other reasons, if reasons are necessary, may appear as we continue with the play. No reasons that we might construct are any more readily found, supinely waiting for us in the text, than are the reasons constructed by Spencer. It seems strange that, given a rich variety of available alternatives, men should choose to construct reasons that restrict rather than enlarge their experience; probably they do so in the traditional belief that they are somehow engaged in a search for “ultimate” reasons—a problem with which the story of Palamon and Arcite is itself quite explicitly concerned.

The action of the play may be seen as falling into three movements—the war against Creon (Act I), the May Day contests (Acts II and III), and the final tournament (Acts IV and V).² The predominantly solemn first act, framed within the ceremonial formality of two processions, establishes Theseus as the arbiter of his subjects' destinies and introduces us to the heroism of Palamon and Arcite. The kinsmen appear almost to have lost their lives in their loyal service to Thebes:

                                                            Had they been taken
When their last hurts were given, 'twas possible
They might have been recover'd …

(I.iv.29-31)

Theseus orders his best surgeons to tend them, but the closing of Act I is funerally dark: “Death's the market-place, where each one meets.”

The second movement is a curious blend of festive and romantic comedy; its postwar world is warmer and more human than that of Act I. The two cousins, as if reborn, treat their prison as an Arcadian retreat; both of them, to the Daughter, are a “holiday” to look upon; the garden by the prison, to Emilia, “has a world of pleasures in't.” The foolishness of May runs through all the episodes, although it is seldom left untouched by apprehensiveness or foreboding. Even the stiff-necked Gerrold has evidently been a creature of impulse (“the matter's too far driven between him and the tanner's daughter to let slip now”). But the natural vitality that finds its expression in the country sports, the Daughter's infatuation, Palamon's escape, the pursuit of Emilia, the cousins' drinking scene, the episode of the stag-hunt, leads more often to conflict and pain than it does to order and fulfillment: the Daughter abandons father and lover, Arcite flouts Theseus' decree of banishment and must disguise his identity, the hunting party is separated, the quarrelling cousins are always in peril of discovery, Palamon fails the Daughter and “is gone after his fancy,” and Cicely—“that scornful piece, that scurvy hilding”—breaks the oath she had sworn (III.v.48:) “by wine and bread” (!), and the Daughter must therefore be made to take her place in the morris dance. Comic or serious, promises and oaths and appointments, broken or kept, pervade the dialogue and action of all twelve scenes. Only one minor action is fully resolved in this part of the play—the episode of the Countrymen:

Duke, if we have pleas'd thee too,
And have done as good boys should do,
Give us but a tree or twain
For a Maypole, and again,
Ere another year run out,
We'll make thee laugh, and all this rout.

(III.v.148-153)

(This clumsy verse will later be memorably echoed in Theseus' own Epilogue to his play.) Gerrold and the Countrymen, after they are generously rewarded, are never to appear again, and only a few later lines (IV.iii.10-13) refer directly to any of them. Their final scene also gives us our last glimpse in Act III of the Jailor's Daughter. (“And are you mad, good woman?” Gerrold asks her; “I would be sorry else,” she replies.) But after the dance she merely disappears, left as usual to go her own way, alone. The other episodes of Acts II and III are brought to a tentative and precarious resolution by Theseus' arrangements for the final tournament and by the conditions and oaths he imposes on the contestant knights.

The third movement is more complex in its internal structure than those which preceded. The final two acts progress through ever more sharply contrasted scenes and cross-rhythms. Poised against the intensification of conflict in IV.ii, V.i, and V.iii, the story of the Daughter is gradually resolved in IV.i, IV.iii, and V.ii (although the plots are so interlinked that the Jailor is called to the field of combat in V.ii and Palamon's knights on their way to execution give their purses to piece out the Daughter's dowry in V.iv). The cast of the play is augmented in these acts by the Jailor's Brother and two Friends, the Doctor, the Executioner, Palamon's and Arcite's Knights, Emilia's Servant, the Daughter's Maid, and a stream of Messengers and Attendants. Not every one of them is vital to the action, and there are other minor characters (such as the fishermen referred to by the Wooer in IV.i) kept wholly out of the action, but this crowding contributes to what Sir Edmund Chambers in another connection has called “the effect of solidity, as if life were passing on all the time behind the stage.”

Palamon and Arcite are kept offstage for a long interval prior to the dénouement,³ returning in Act V, as if from far away and long ago, grown in dramatic weight and stature; virtually all the dramatis personae in Act IV meanwhile comment upon or describe them. Act IV develops what Moulton would call the “passion-strain” of the play, juxtaposing as it does the crises of Emilia and the Daughter.

The latent eroticism of the original tale is made explicit in the central scene of Act IV, in which Emilia, to her own growing distraction, praises both of the knights as she tries to decide between them. She had once been certain that she would “never … love any that's called man” (I.iii.97); and although her attitude had softened by the time of the garden dialogue (II.ii.130-184), when Arcite entered her service she still thought herself “too wise” to fall in love (II.v.84); now she feels compelled at last to follow the advice of Theseus (III.vi.327-343) and make a choice, but in the warm comparisons of her soliloquy before their portraits, and in rhythms and accents strongly reminiscent of the lovesick Daughter's earlier soliloquies, she learns only that she is hopelessly in love with both:

                              I am sotted,
Utterly lost. My virgin's faith has fled me,
For if my brother but even now had ask'd me
Whether I lov'd, I had run mad for Arcite;
Now if my sister, more for Palamon …
                              What a mere child is fancy,
That having two fair gauds of equal sweetness,
Cannot distinguish, but must cry for both!

(IV.ii.45-49, 52-54)

She is deprived of the power of choice from without as well as from within when she is brought news that the knights have arrived for the tournament:

Emilia.
To end the quarrel?
Gentleman.
Yes.
Emilia.
Would I might end first!
What sins have I committed, chaste Diana,
That my unspotted youth must now be soil'd
With blood of princes?

(IV.ii.58-63)

As Theseus and his companions enter, they and Emilia are treated by Pirithous and a Messenger to a gallery of verbal portraits of the princes and other “sons of honor” who “must … die too” (lines 83-159)—an episode contributing to the action as much momentum as dramatic cunning can derive from the idea of human sacrifice. This scene as a whole is transitional between III.vi and V.ii; the vows sworn in the former give rise to the prayers delivered in the latter, but the religious character of the tournament (expressed in the opening speeches of V.i) is already emergent in the language of IV.ii, appearing even in casual oaths (as at line 160) as well as the language of Emilia as she contemplates “the loves and fights / Of gods and such men near 'em.”

Act IV had begun with the Jailor fearful he would be punished for allowing Palamon to escape; his fears are set to rest when he is told of the pardon that Palamon has secured for him from Theseus, and his anger at his Daughter is softened by the Wooer's account of her attempt at suicide. A fully “rounded” character, the Jailor in his later scenes behaves with less and less of his initial surliness toward the Wooer and with continuously more conspicuous kindness toward his Daughter. After the girl is brought home by her uncle, the Jailor joins his friends in humoring her by taking part in her sea-fantasy. Her earlier vision of a ship wrecked in a tempest started her on an imaginary journey whose destinations include the land of Pygmies (III.iv.15), the domains reached by Charon's ferry (IV.iii.20), and the end of the world (V.ii.97). The Doctor is brought in to cure her in IV.iii, and his plan for the Wooer to disguise himself as Palamon is put into motion before the opening of V.ii, where we learn that it has begun to take effect—to “reduce what's now out of square in her into their former law and regiment” (IV.iii.89). The marriage to which her Wooer looked forward in Act II came to appear less and less likely as the action unfolded (cf. IV.iii.56-63), but in the last scene of the play, as Palamon is being led to execution, we hear that she has been cured and is to be married shortly. Which is to say, the underplot has a shape, and it is more or less round.

The rough sketch of the action drawn in these pages is still incomplete, and parts of it no doubt more closely resemble a hymarx synopsis than Aristotle's chalk outline. Yet perhaps it is sufficient to refute the common assumption that the play lacks any controlling organization or consistent development—that some scenes are “easily detachable” from the rest. We might now look more closely at particular features of the play that indicate a single imagination at work.

THE WEDDING SYMBOLISM

Among the members of the bridal procession who appear at the very beginning of the play, we encounter

a Nymph, encompass'd in her tresses, bearing a wheaten garland; … two other Nymphs with wheaten chaplets on their heads; then Hippolyta, the bride, … and another holding a garland over her head (her tresses likewise hanging); after her, Emilia …

Later in the first scene Theseus speaks to Capaneus' widow:

                                                            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 thresh'd nor blasted; Fortune at you
Dimpled her cheek with smiles …

(I.i.65-70)

The marriage symbolism is conventional. The flowing tresses are associated with virginity; the wheaten wreath (which the bridegroom lifts from the bride's head during the wedding ceremony) is a symbol of fertility.

As the wedding procession entered at the beginning of the scene, a boy robed in white sang Roses their sharp spines being gone, the first two stanzas of which made emblems of the wedding flowers strewn by the boy. The rose, for example, is (as Emilia says at II.ii.163) “the very emblem of a maid.”

The final episode in the opening scene of Act V takes place at the altar of Diana. Attended by nymphs more colorful than Hippolyta's, Emilia enters

in white, her hair about her shoulders, a wheaten wreath; one in white, … her hair stuck with flowers; one before her carrying a silver hind, in which is convey'd incense and sweet odors …

Emilia.
… Most modest queen,
He of the two pretenders that best loves me
And has the truest title in't, let him
Take off my wheaten garland; or else grant
The file and quality I hold I may
Continue in thy band.

Here the hind vanishes under the altar, and in the place ascends a rose tree, having one rose upon it.

See what our general of ebbs and flows …
With sacred act advances: but one rose!
If well inspir'd, this battle shall confound
Both these brave knights, and I, a virgin flow'r,
Must grow alone, unpluck'd.

Here is heard a sudden twang of instruments, and the rose falls from the tree.

The flow'r is fall'n, the tree descends. Oh mistress,
Thou here dischargest me. I shall be gather'd …

In explaining the expressive significance of the flowers or the flowing tresses or the wheaten garland, many editorial notes give cross-references between I.i and V.i (though not to Emilia's garden dialogue in II.ii). Both of these widely separated scenes are accepted as Shakespeare's (even by Clifford Leech), and the closely similar symbolism in their stage directions and dialogue has apparently been recognized as an element of conscious design.

Although no editor or critic has suggested a connection, the passages just cited also recall several details from the Wooer's narrative in IV.i …. The boy spoke of the Daughter's love for Palamon:

                                                            Rings she made
Of rushes that grew by, and to 'em spoke
The prettiest posies—‘Thus our true love's tied,’
‘This you may lose, not me,’ and many a one …

These lines allude, as Skeat's note says,

to a common practice, especially among the lower orders, of celebrating mock-marriages. The ring used in such ceremonies was a rush ring, or one made of some equally common and fragile material.

As the Daughter imagines her own rude wedding-arrangements, she is described in images that contrast fittingly with the symbolism of the formal processions and dialogues of Act I and Act V:

                                                            Her careless tresses
A wreath of bulrush rounded …

As the girl dreamed of saving Palamon from the wrath of Theseus, she thought of herself attended by

                                                            ‘a bevy,
A hundred black-eyed maids that love as I do,
With chaplets on their heads of daffadillies,
With cherry lips and cheeks of damask roses …’

… The Wooer's narrative has been widely regarded as an imitation by Fletcher of the description of Ophelia's death. But that description did not envision flowing tresses, or a mock wedding-wreath, or a virgin rose, or a procession of attendant nymphs whose hair was “stuck with flowers.” If Fletcher wrote IV.i, his ability to “imitate” the descriptions of Ophelia in language which is at the same time so precisely relevant to the other scenes in The Two Noble Kinsmen—to produce those verbal resemblances to Hamlet while establishing these relationships to the imagery of his collaborator—would certainly be a prodigious achievement. The conclusion that all these scenes were written by Shakespeare is surely more reasonable.

THE DOCTOR'S SCENES

The Doctor appears in only two scenes of the play, IV.iii and V.ii. These are the two scenes of which Hickson said, “the tone and moral effect … are so different … that the case of anyone who can … believe them to be by the same writer, we must give over as hopeless.” Littledale singled out the characterization of the Doctor as particularly strong evidence of divided authorship. The kindly Doctor who tells the Wooer to approach the Daughter “stuck in as sweet flowers as the season is mistress of” (IV.iii.77-78) was observed by Littledale to resemble Cornelius, Cerimon, and the Doctors in Macbeth and King Lear; but the “despicable pandar” who urged the Wooer to lie with the Daughter and “please her appetite” (V.ii.50) no more resembled the Doctor of the earlier scene than Boult resembled Marina. To most of the critics who believe in dual authorship, these two scenes still seem to provide razor-sharp contrasts; and of all the inconsistencies of characterization these critics allege to occur in the play, none has been held to be more obvious than those in the role of the Doctor. But the allegations are as usual wholly inaccurate. In neither scene is the Doctor either a ministering angel or a pimp.

Littledale himself noted a curious point about the “good” Doctor of the earlier scene. As the Daughter says she will “come where the blessed spirits … pick flowers with Proserpine” and “make Palamon a nosegay,” the Doctor observes: “How prettily she's amiss! Note her a little further” (IV.iii.26). Littledale remarked on this “small outbreak of professional enthusiasm with a good ‘case’” and compared it to “that ‘professional habit of mind,’ which characterizes Shakespeare's medical men; or, as Dr. Bucknill … defines it further: that ‘sidelong growth of mind which special training impresses.’” Littledale stopped with the example cited, but other manifestations of that “sidelong growth of mind” occur in the speeches of the Doctor:

Do it home; it cures her ipso facto the melancholy humor that infects her …

(V.ii.51-52)

They may return and settle again to execute their preordain'd faculties, but they are now in a most extravagant vagary …

(IV.iii.65-67)

Here and elsewhere in both scenes this cool professional lapses into a jargon that, if considered apart from its dramatic context, would make of him a satiric figure. He is of course more than that, and his jargon is simply a part of his professional equipment—his means of intimidating his clients into accepting his prescriptions. His plan for curing the Daughter, moreover, is no different in the earlier scene—even if it is necessarily less explicitly expressed—than it is in the later; he tells the Wooer to disguise himself as Palamon, slip into the darkened room where the girl is to be confined,

crave her, drink to her, and still among, intermingle your petition of grace and acceptance into her favor …

(IV.iii.82-84)

It is hard to tell what sense Littledale made of these lines, since it is clear that he refused to allow them any sexual overtones.⁴ As for the more explicit advice of the Doctor in the later scene, one need hardly appeal to the Jacobean attitudes towards permissible behavior between an engaged couple (or cite the early birthdate of Susanna Shakespeare) to clear it of the Victorian imputation of prurience; one has only to read it:

Doctor.
… You should observe her every way. … If she entreat again, do anything; lie with her if she ask you.
Jailor.
Hoa there, Doctor!
Doctor.
Yes, in the way of cure.
Jailor.
But first, by your leave, i'th'way of honesty.
Doctor.
That's but a niceness. Ne'er cast your child away for honesty. Cure her first this way; then if she will be honest she has the path before her … Pray bring her in and let's see how she is.
Jailor.
I will, and tell her her Palamon stays for her, but Doctor, methinks you are i'th'wrong still.
Doctor.
Go, go! You fathers are fine fools. Her honesty? And we should give her physic till we find that—
Wooer.
Why, do you think she is not honest sir? …
Doctor.
She may be; but that's all one, 'tis nothing to our purpose …

(V.ii.19, 23-32, 34-41, 44-45)

Matter-of-fact wisdom is usually coarse; the blunt Doctor is a good foil to the worrisome father and the worried fiancé, and his peculiar blend of cynicism and practicality is consistent throughout both his scenes.

The part of the Daughter in these scenes is also alleged, naturally, to show inconsistency—and worse. A typical critic is Kenneth Muir, who complains of “the artificiality and unreality of the mad speeches” in the scenes he gives to Fletcher, as well as “the way in which the madness is used to arouse laughter.”⁵ A non-academic critic with a wider knowledge of Jacobean drama and greater critical perception, on the other hand, reads these scenes as they have seldom been read since the play was divided a century ago; Kenneth Tynan observes that “her mad scenes are exquisite, and better written, I think, than Ophelia's”; the passage beginning “How far is't now to th'end o'th'world, my masters?” (V.ii.97), he adds, “is one of the tenderest in any language, and must go to disprove the legend that for the Elizabethans madness was a comic thing.”⁶ If the play is read with the kinds of intelligent respect readers normally bring to Shakespeare, these judgments will hardly cause surprise.

“THE TWO BOLD TITLERS”

Shortly after the cousins begin to quarrel over Emilia, this interchange takes place:

Palamon.
You shall not love at all.
Arcite.
… Who shall deny me?
Palamon.
I that first saw her; I that took possession
First with mine eye of all those beauties
In her reveal'd to mankind! If thou lov'st her,
Or entertain'st a hope to blast my wishes,
Thou art a traitor, Arcite, and a fellow
False as thy title to her! …

(II.ii.205, 207-213)

Arcite then swears, “if the lives of all my name lay on it,” he has “as just a title to her beauty” as any “that is a man's son.” This simple metaphor from law is elaborated in most of the later scenes of the quarrel—for example, as Arcite is called to Theseus' banquet:

Palamon.
Sir, your attendance
Cannot please heaven, and I know your office
Unjustly is achiev'd.
Arcite.
I've a good title;
I am persuaded this question sick between's
By bleeding must be cur'd. I am a suitor
That to your sword you will bequeath this plea
And talk of it no more.

(III.i.124-131)

Or as Palamon reveals to Theseus that the banished Arcite “follows thy sister, … the fair Emilia,”

Whose servant (if there be a right in seeing
And first bequeathing of the soul to) justly
I am …

(III.vi.185-187)

And it reappears several times in Act V—for example, when Emilia, “the victor's meed” who must “crown the question's title” (V.iii.19-20), prays that the knight who “has the truest title in't” may “take off my wheaten garland” (V.i.165-166).

If there is significance in these recurrences, part of it derives from two passages spoken by Theseus in Act I. When Theseus agreed to delay his wedding and attack Creon at once, the grateful Queens flattered him:

First Queen.
Thus dost thou still make good the tongue o'th'world.
Second Queen.
And earn'st a deity equal with Mars—
Third Queen.
If not above him, for
Thou being but mortal makest affections bend
To godlike honors; they themselves, some say,
Groan under such a mast'ry.
Theseus.
As we are men
Thus should we do. Being sensually subdued
We lose our human title. …

(I.i.253-261)

“They themselves” are the gods, hence “men” is emphatic; Theseus prefers “our human title.” And in his victory scene, after describing Palamon and Arcite in battle as “a mark / Worth a god's view,” Theseus is told by his Herald that their wounds were almost fatal—

                              Yet they breathe
And have the name of men.
Theseus.
Then like men use 'em.
The very lees of such, millions of rates,
Exceed the wine of others. …

(I.iv.31-35)

—which is to say that he again moves past a comparison between men and gods to place a singularly high valuation on “the name of men,” “our human title.” (The most frequent noun in this play is man, but then man is the most frequent noun in Shakespeare.) The major tournament in the final act is to be a contest over this title.

The solemn sport of that tournament is rehearsed more than once earlier in the play. The wedding festivities and the war against Creon in Act I are both “sports … craving seriousness and skill.” A profusion of references to chivalric contests and to lovers' games contributes to the texture of virtually every scene. In Act II Palamon and Arcite in prison describe nostalgically the various “games of honor” in which they can no longer engage. Arcite departs for the May “pastimes” to the Countryman's skeptical “He wrestle? He roast eggs!” and returns soon after, cubits taller, to Theseus' “I have not seen / Since Hercules, a man of tougher sinews, / … the best … that these times can allow.” Theseus' own hunting expedition is a “solemn rite,” a “ceremony” continuing throughout Act III (“May the stag thou hunt'st stand long / And thy dogs be swift and strong”).

Even the morris entertainment in III.v is a contest for the exhibition of intellectual judgment, athletic prowess, and courtly grace—a funhouse mirror held up to nature and art. It will begin, Gerrold tells us, when the Duke appears:

I meet him, and unto him I utter learned things, and many figures. He hears, and nods, and hums, and then cries ‘Rare!’ … Then do you, as once did Meleager and the boar, break comely out before him like true lovers, cast yourselves in a body decently, and sweetly, by a figure, trace and turn, boys.

And he advises the Bavian:

Be sure you tumble with audacity and manhood.

The actor Gerrold addresses is probably carrying his baboon-head under his arm, but he must already be wearing the costume “with long tail, and eke long tool”:

My friend, carry your tail without offense or scandal to the ladies …

And in Gerrold's brief moment alone as the dancers go off to prepare, we find that he is reflective and, indeed, religious:

Give me some meditation … Pallas inspire me!

Gerrold, “the rectifier of all” (III.v.115) who presents the morris dance, is in more than one respect like Theseus, the “purger of the earth” (I.i.51) and “the true decider of all injuries” (III.vi.191) who arranges the final tournament. The “dainty Duke, whose doughty dismal fame” (III.v.120) is praised by the “dainty Domine” (II.iii.43), admirably incorporates in himself, by parody as well as parallelism, the attributes of his subjects.

The games continue beyond the May Day scenes. In Act IV we meet the Wooer for the first time after he has been deserted by the Daughter. Alone, he has been “patiently … attending sport, … angling / In the great lake that lies behind the palace”; hearing the girl nearby, “I then left my angle / To his own skill. …” The Daughter herself later imagines that she will “go to barley-break”; this game is also known as “last couple in hell” (because those who are “it” are said to be “in hell”), and it is this lovers' game that presumably leads her to imagine herself being placed in a lovers' hell (“I were a beast and I'd call it good sport”). So too in Act V. The final scene with the Daughter gives us (among other games) the Wooer's invitation to the girl to come to dinner, “and then we'll play at cards.” At the same time, the Jailor is summoned to the field of combat; the Doctor eagerly hastens to join him because he “will not lose the fight.” The spectators expect a magnificent show; “Nature now / Shall make and act the story,” says Theseus, “the belief / Both seal'd with eye and ear.”

The anthropologist who studies the most venerable cultures (as Huizinga has shown) often finds it difficult to draw the line between the permanent social order and the province of play. Shakespeare's acute sense of the analogies between these two realms is no doubt responsible for the frequent stage/world metaphors we find in most of his plays. Nowhere else, however, are these analogies more central to the dramatic design than in the play of Palamon and Arcite. The final tournament gathers together the values associated with the games that precede it. Perhaps this can best be seen by tracing the development of the two heroes.

The stage-by-stage development of the contest between the cousins is humanly the most interesting part of the play and (but this is a tautology) thematically the most important. Angry outbursts between the cousins diminish in frequency as the play progresses, “gods” are brought increasingly to the fore, the conflict itself is gradually elevated and generalized. The nature of the transformations may be measured in the large differences in tone between episodes which occur at different stages of the quarrel. From the boyish assertiveness of their earlier outbursts, for example, they proceed to the more deeply settled rivalry of the duel scene:

Palamon.
… I shall quit you.
Arcite.
Defy me in these fair terms, and you show
More than a mistress to me. No more anger, …
We were not bred to talk, man; when we are arm'd
And both upon our guards, then let our fury
Like meeting of two tides, fly strongly from us,
And then to whom the birthright of this beauty
Truly pertains (without upbraidings, scorns,
Despisings of our persons, and such poutings
Fitter for girls and schoolboys) will be seen …
                    Your person I am friends with,
And I could wish I had not said I lov'd her,
Though I had died; but loving such a lady
And justifying my love, I must not fly from't.
Palamon.
Arcite, thou art so brave an enemy
That no man but thy cousin's fit to kill thee …

(III.vi.28-30, 32-38, 43-48)

The gallantries of this dialogue (and the ensuing episode in which the cousins arm each other) are intermediate between their angriest interchanges and the calmly elevated declarations at the beginning of the altar scene—during which each of the cousins speaks not merely for himself but both literally and figuratively as the commander of a larger force:

Palamon.
The glass is running now that cannot finish
Till one of us expire. Think you but this,
That were there aught in me which strove to show
Mine enemy in this business, were't one eye
Against another, arm oppress'd by arm,
I would destroy th'offender; coz, I would,
Though parcel of myself. Then from this gather
How I should tender you.
Arcite.
I am in labor
To push your name, your ancient love, our kindred,
Out of my memory; and i'th'selfsame place
To seat something I would confound. So hoist we
The sails that must these vessels port even where
The heavenly Limiter pleases.
Palamon.
You speak well.
Before I turn, let me embrace thee, cousin;
This I shall never do again. …

(V.i.20-36)

The composure of these lines, remarkable in itself, seems the more impressive for engaging and developing so much of the language that precedes it; in the prison scene, for example, the cousins complained they would “never … again … feel our fiery horses / Like proud seas under us”; in the duel scene Arcite spoke of the depth of natural force, “like meeting of two tides,” in the “fury” he and his cousin were learning to contain; and here Arcite's comparison of himself and his cousin to proud ships about to make their final voyage “even where / The heavenly Limiter pleases” becomes the appropriate expression of the effortless formal poise and equanimity that the combatants have achieved at the time of their return to Athens.⁷

The quarrel between Palamon and Arcite, which began as a young man's question over “title” to Emilia, is developed throughout Acts II and III into a contest embracing every chivalric virtue. When the kinsmen dedicate their fortunes to Emilia near the end of Act III they present themselves as the representative champions of all lovers, all soldiers (III.vi.339-342). The descriptions in the portrait scene of those qualities which “nature … sows into the births of noble bodies” (IV.ii.9) raise heroic expectations among the auditors:

Theseus.
Now as I have a soul I long to see 'em.
Lady, you shall see men fight now.
Hippolyta.
I wish it,
But not the cause, my lord. They would show
Bravely about the titles of two kingdoms …

(IV.ii.160-164)

Later, before the altars of Mars and Venus, it is clear that it is “two kingdoms” for which Arcite and Palamon contend. And when in the final combat “The two bold Titlers at this instant are / Hand to hand at it” (V.iii.95-96), they have become the embodiment of “Those best affections that the heavens infuse / In their best temper'd pieces” (I.iii.11-12); they are proving their “title” to “the name of men.”

The meaning of the contest, in effect, consists of the viewer's entire experience of the play, his sense of the heroic and human values arising from all the lesser conflicts and confrontations in the preceding acts, his sense of the cumulative gathering of these values and of the way in which they are drawn together in the final act. The source of these values lies in the stream of comparisons—between men and gods, men and other men—which runs through the action and dialogue of the entire play. While the one unqualifiedly bad character in the play, Creon, “only attributes / The faculties of other instruments / To his own nerves and act” (I.ii.74-76), the other characters continuously create value as they observe, admire, and seek to emulate one another. Theseus' warm admiration for the valor of Palamon and Arcite is perhaps the central fact that emerges from the Theban episode; since Theseus himself “earns a deity equal with Mars,” he might be thought less in need of a model than other men, but he nevertheless tells us after the battle that the kinsmen were so impressive “a mark / Worth a god's view” that “I fix'd my note / Constantly on them.” Admiration-turning-to-emulation is the pattern which in I.iii links Hippolyta's account of the friendship between Theseus and Pirithous with Emilia's beautiful narrative about her childhood love for Flavina—a narrative concerning imitation at its simplest and most innocent: “On my head no toy / But was her pattern; her affections … I follow'd / For my most serious decking” (I.iii.81-84). Her lines treat imitation as the given condition for action, taking it to the very limits of explanation:

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

(I.iii.69-74)

The excellence of Palamon and Arcite, each “an endless mine to one another” (II.ii.86), is similarly imagined throughout as a consequence of emulation—for example, in the episode in which they arm each other, as they think back to the battle that took place before the opening of Act I:

Palamon.
Methinks this armor's very like that, Arcite,
Thou wor'st that day the three kings fell, but lighter.
Arcite.
That was a very good one, and that day,
I well remember, you outdid me, cousin;
I never saw such valor. …
                    You outwent me,
Nor could my wishes reach you; yet a little
I did by imitation.
Palamon.
More by virtue;
You are modest, cousin.
Arcite.
When I saw you charge first,
Methought I heard a dreadful clap of thunder
Break from the troop. …

(III.vi.92-96, 103-110)

This “imitation” is the cause of Theseus' dilemma when he tries to express to Emilia what he saw in the tournament:

                    I have heard
Two emulous Philomels beat the ear o'th'night
With their contentious throats, now one the higher,
Anon the other, then again the first,
And by-and-by outbreasted, that the sense
Could not be judge between 'em. So it far'd
Good space between these kinsmen. …

(V.iii.141-147)

“The sense could not be judge between 'em”; the figure of the nightingales suggests the mixed pain and pleasure of the beholder who, without recourse to vulgar distinctions between appearance and reality (their absence is a mark of the late Shakespeare), would attempt to distinguish between such extravagant excellences.

Theseus' difficulty is much like Emilia's in the portrait scene:

                    What a mere child is fancy,
That having two fair gauds of equal sweetness,
Cannot distinguish, but must cry for both!

Moved by the most admirably selfless intentions, Emilia had tried to invent reasons for preferring one knight above the other; but her muddle only grew worse. The ability to see different things as different may be the source of all our knowledge (as the Greek schoolmaster said), and comparison may be the source of all the standards we make up or inquire into, but rare occasions do arise on which one set of excellences is so equally poised against another that no criteria present themselves to support a strong preference for one or the other. There are certainly no rational or moral or esthetic grounds for preferring one knight above the other in their contest (preferences for Venus over Mars notwithstanding), and Arcite's victory, and his later mortal accident as well, are presented so entirely as matters of chance that only the most arrant sophistry could succeed in rationalizing them.

The general likeness of Palamon and Arcite to one another is obviously deliberate. Sometimes one of them is even given lines that resemble lines given elsewhere to the other (compare, for example, II.ii.289-291 with II.iii.8-10 or III.vi.132-133 with V.i.35-36). Over a century ago Charles Knight observed that “the two friends are energetic alike: we do not precisely see which is … the more daring, the more resolved, the more generous.” Many critics from Knight to the present day have complained that they are therefore not sufficiently distinguished from each other. The grounds for this complaint, however, lie in the critical search for distinctions in energy, daring, resolution, generosity, and so forth. Apart from physical and temperamental differences (Palamon is the more languorous, Arcite the more fiery), the heroes are quite effectively distinguished in the play, and the distinction is one that anyone beholding the play on stage would apprehend immediately, whether he were capable of articulating it in words or not. Experience is always more difficult to describe than to apprehend. Despite the careful and necessary balance in sympathy, there is no question but that we are made to take greater interest in Palamon. Apart from subtler distinctions in their roles, there is an immediate disparity in focus; the cousins are “twins of honor” when they appear together, but almost everywhere else our attention is directed primarily toward Palamon. For example, we observe Arcite in his soliloquies (in II.iii and III.i) speak more of Palamon than Palamon in his soliloquies (II.ii and III.vi) does of Arcite. Palamon's part, too, is longer than Arcite's (and in fact the longest in the play). Much more important, the whole of the Daughter's underplot is oriented about Palamon: “By him, like a shadow, / I'll ever dwell.” The Daughter and Arcite both look up to Palamon, Palamon looks up only to the gods. An audience consciously reflecting on the moral character of the cousins might be hard put to decide on its preference; the dramatist meanwhile ensures that Palamon absorbs far more of its attention. And if Palamon is implicitly the protagonist in the first four acts, he is explicitly so in Act V—where he is given the richest speeches in the play, the prayer to Venus in V.i and the farewell speech as he is led to execution in V.iv. Many of Shakespeare's young heroes start out by being mainly interested in themselves and are then gradually forced to see themselves in relation to more and more of their fellow men—to learn that “I” and “we” are a mere verbal distinction, so to speak—and thus it is with Palamon; his speech on being led to execution (“There's many a man alive that hath outliv'd / The love o'th'people …”) shows how Shakespeare uses breadth of social reference to enhance, indeed to create, individual human dignity. By the time Arcite has become the apparent victor, Palamon has become the obvious hero.

In a recent note on The Two Noble Kinsmen, Frank Kermode has decided that “although he probably wrote a great deal of the play Shakespeare had nothing to do with its plot.”⁸ (To write “a great deal” of a play but have “nothing” to do with its plot? Surely this argues a strange conception of plot!) As reasons to “support this view” Kermode lists the following:

The failure to distinguish Palamon from Arcite (Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Professor Muir calls them) and the weak conception of Emilia; the absence of any attempt to develop, as Shakespeare would once have done, Chaucer's potent conclusion:
Thanne may men by this ordre well discerne
That thilke Moevere stable is and eterne—

Shakespeare probably had everything to do with the plot, but whatever he might “once have done” with the tale, Kermode is quite right about the absence of Christian homily; every trace of it is carefully expurgated in the this-worldly wisdom of Theseus' final speech before the Epilogue:

                                                                                Never fortune
Did play a subtler game: the conquer'd triumphs,
The victor has the loss; yet in the passage
The gods have been most equal. …
                                                                                Oh you heavenly charmers,
What things you make of us! 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. Flourish. Exeunt.

Notes

1. MP, XXXVI, 256. Spencer adds, however, that Chaucer makes the story “very appealing,” and he observes that “the extension of … [the cousins'] personal quarrel into a quarrel that involves the gods” must have looked to Shakespeare “like good dramatic material” (p. 257).

2. Several Jacobean plays written for presentation at Blackfriars seem to have been designed with some such three-movement structure in mind, and there is historical evidence (e.g. in Knight's specification of longer intervals after Acts I and III than after Acts II and IV in the prompt-book of Believe as You List) that they were performed accordingly.

3. The same point was noted earlier of Henry VIII and is true also of Romeo, Hamlet, Pericles, and many other Shakespearean heroes; on this constructional peculiarity of Shakespeare's, cf. W. J. Lawrence, Speeding up Shakespeare (1937), pp. 39-51.

4. His adoption of the 1679 Folio misprint carve for the Quarto crave hardly made things better.

5. Muir, Shakespeare as Collaborator (1960), p. 132.

6. Tynan, He That Plays the King (1950), p. 223. Cf. also pp. 222 & 251; Tynan calls TNK “the last of the great plays of the time,” but says nothing of its authorship.

7. A point about authorship might be inserted here. It concerns second-person pronouns. Observation of their dramatic use is more rewarding than the usual tabulation of their numbers without attention to context. In both the dialogues (from III.vi and V.i) cited above, Palamon begins by addressing Arcite as you, but is moved by Arcite's impressive replies then to adopt the intimate thou. We must assume an artist, not e.g. a compositor, was responsible. And if this assumption leads us to examine all the dialogues between the two cousins—filling most of I.ii, II.ii, III.i, III.iii, and parts of III.vi, V.i, V.iv—we find such surprising consistency in the transitions between thou, thy, and thee on the one hand and you and your on the other that they can be reduced to a few rules. The reader is urged to turn to these dialogues and check the following points for himself (it takes only a few minutes). The usual form is you. It is used consistently throughout I.ii, and in II.ii until the start of the quarrel. Thou and thee are of course ambiguous and may register contempt as well as unusual warmth. Shortly after Emilia's entrance in II.ii Palamon adopts thou in his first speech expressing outrage at Arcite (cf. p. 273); thereafter he uses whichever form best accords with his feelings at the moment (there is nothing circular in this assertion, since in each case his feelings are easily inferred from the context without reference to the pronoun). Most of his uses of thou and thee are contemptuous, but there are rare occasions on which they are quite the opposite—on which they follow you with as telling an effect as in the dialogues cited from III.vi and V.i. Any of the cousins third-act scenes, for example, illustrates a sequence in which Palamon first adopts thou expressing hostility, then you, and finally thou expressing warmth. Arcite on the other hand almost constantly keeps to you; and his attempts to maintain a certain respectfulness toward his cousin break down only twice, when particularly sharp remarks by Palamon (II.ii.264-266 & III.vi.161-162) provoke him to reply in kind; equally rare (only at III.vi.133 & V.iv.105) is his use of the affectionate form. To generalize in this way about such changes of tone is admittedly odd, but the reasons for doing so must be clear. These generalizations account for hundreds of pronouns spread throughout the text, and the five exceptional instances in which the cousins address one another with ye are too few to be worth the bother of writing or reading the explanations. No compositor or transcriber could have done much tampering with such a text. He who would argue that the sprinkling of ye's in the play is evidence of the unconscious linguistic habits of Fletcher, furthermore, cannot argue at the same time that two authors came to conscious agreement about the consistent practices adopted, or that Fletcher changed his stripes, or that one author corrected the other, or that some scribe or printer took out Fletcher's missing ye's!

8. Kermode, Shakespeare: The Final Plays (1963), p. 51. (But a more constructive discussion of structural elements in the play has also recently appeared: Philip Edwards, “On the Design of The Two Noble Kinsmen,” Rev. of Eng. Lit., Vol. V [1964], no. 4, pp. 89-105.)