SOURCE: “Crises of Male Self-Definition in The Two Noble Kinsmen,” in Shakespeare, Fletcher and The Two Noble Kinsmen, University of Missouri Press, 1989, pp. 133-44.

[In the following essay, Roberts maintains that the way in which the males in The Two Noble Kinsmen define themselves is threatened by female virginity and lasciviousness, represented by Emilia and the jailer's daughter, respectively. These threats, states Roberts, are subdued by marriage.]

The appearance of an Amazon in the scenario of a classical or Renaissance tale is an infallible clue to an area of male anxiety, a signal of threatened erosion to a systematically constructed patriarchal world view.¹ As a virginal or only rarely sexual (and then exclusively for procreation) female, the Amazon is impervious to male charms; living without men, she fights them as their equals or superiors; as horsewoman, archer, and hunter, she impinges on and sometimes invades male domains, threatening even such strongholds of civilized (patriarchal) sanctity as Athens itself.² For the Greeks she was an intriguing and terrifying male nightmare. For the Elizabethans, the Amazonian image was revivified by the real presence of a queen whose formidable virginal power conjured up but never completely coincided with memories of the classical myth. Although it surely hovered in the background, the identification of Elizabeth with the Amazon was rarely overt, and some distinction seems to have evolved between Amazons and warrior women.³ Elizabeth was in any case regarded as exceptional. Most Elizabethan Amazons, like their classical antecedents, were designed either to be seduced and subdued or to be destroyed.⁴

The Middle Ages may have had fewer problems with Amazonian women, accepting them as mythical constructs from alien antiquity. Boccaccio in book 1 of the Teseida lingers with apparent pleasure over his descriptions of the Amazons and their fortress, but the certainty of the impending subjugation of the females by Theseus prevents titillation from escalating into alarm. For Chaucer in The Knight's Tale, the Amazonian threat seems safely contained from the start.⁵ As the tale begins, Theseus, with “his wysdom and his chilvalrie,” has already “conquered al the regne of Femenye” and “weddede the queene Ypolita” (865-68); although her sister Emelye loves “huntynge and venerye” and prefers “to walken in the wodes wilde, / And noght to ben a wyf and be with childe” (2308-10), Ypolita is docile and conventional in accepting her marital fate. Chaucer never elaborates on the Amazonian past of the two sisters. Similarly, in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hippolyta's past, glimpsed perhaps in her description of the moon as a “silver bow / New bent in heaven” (1.1.9-10), elicits only the momentarily troubling reference by Theseus to his wooing her with his sword and winning her love by doing her injuries (1.1.16-17). It might be argued that the quarrel between Oberon and Titania with its passing remembrance of Oberon's flirtation with the “bouncing Amazon” (2.1.20) and of Titania's having incited Theseus to “break his faith” with the Amazonian Antiopa (2.1.80)—a quarrel that has precipitated major confusions and reversals in the natural order of seasons—is in fact a covert manifestation of the convulsive effects of a union contracted in defiance of cultural expectations; but, if so, the subtext is securely buried under the relatively smooth surface of the festive comedy.⁶

In The Two Noble Kinsmen,⁷ however, the threat to male definition posed by Hippolyta before her subjugation to Theseus is clearly spelled out by the second widowed Queen, who addresses her descriptively:

                                                                                Honored Hippolyta,
Most dreaded Amazonian, that hast slain
The scythe-tusk'd boar; that with thy arm, as strong
As it is white, wast near to make the male
To thy sex captive, but that this thy lord,
Born to uphold creation in that honor
First Nature styl'd it in, shrunk thee into
The bound thou wast o'erflowing, at once subduing
Thy force and thy affection …

(1.1.77-85)

There are, furthermore, repeated reminders of the barbaric background of the Scythian Queen. Proposing that Hippolyta kneel to enlist Theseus's aid in recovering their husbands' bodies, the Second Queen offers, presumably as a palliative appropriate to her addressee, a grotesquely violent comparison: “But touch the ground for us no longer time / Than a dove's motion when the head's pluck'd off” (1.1.97-98). Even more shocking to conventional expectations of women is Hippolyta's savage account of the effect of her war experiences:

We have been soldiers, and we cannot weep
When our friends don their helms, or put to sea,
Or tell of babes broach'd on the lance, or women
That have sod their infants in (and after eat them)
The brine they wept at killing 'em.

(1.3.18-22)

In addition to Theseus's bride, the presence of her sister Emilia, absent in A Midsummer Night's Dream, here compounds the unsettling effect of the alien women. Clearly disturbed by Emilia's resolution never to “Love any that's called man,” the newly “civilized” Hippolyta says:

If I were ripe for your persuasion, you
Have said enough to shake me from the arm
Of the all-noble Theseus, for whose fortunes
I will now in and kneel …

(1.3.91-94)

Primacy in the affections of Theseus is to be Hippolyta's compensation for her capitulation, and she finds this preeminence called into question by Emilia's reminder of the “knot of love” between Theseus and Pirithous. In a non sequitur that suggests the urgency of her need to believe in her reward, she quickly resolves to reject her earlier uncertainty about “which he loves best” and asserts, without further evidence, her “great assurance / That we, more than his Pirithous, possess / The high throne in his heart” (1.3.94-96). From this point on Hippolyta dwindles into a conventional wife, conforming to male expectation; but Emilia remains a problem.

A story told about both Thales and Socrates implies that the Hellenes defined themselves as human Greek males, conceiving the rest of the world in terms of otherness: a human was a creature not animal, not barbarian, not female, and not divine.⁸ Such a definition provided a stable center to Greek culture (as it probably has to most cultures), but contrasting Others lurked dangerously around this central core. The threatening erosion of the boundaries of human definition is signaled by the ubiquity of such peripheral hybrids as satyrs and centaurs; by the man-animal metamorphic shapes of Teiresias, Callisto, and many others; by partially assimilated aliens such as Medea; and by such semi-divine heroes as Hercules and Achilles. Amazons rank with hermaphrodites as forms of male-female hybrid. According to legend, they usurped such male prerogatives as horseback riding, fighting, and the rejection of orderly monogamous marriage. Usually associated with distant outposts like Scythia, they qualified as “nonhuman” aliens as well as “nonhuman” women. In Greek legend and literature Amazons appear at moments of cultural crisis—always on the wrong side. Hippolyta/Antiope is implicated in an invasion of Athens and subdued by Theseus in a short-lived marriage that eventuated in the catastrophic destruction of their son Hippolytus.⁹ Penthesilea surfaces fighting along with a centaur, the “dreadful Sagittary,” for the Trojans. She is killed by Achilles, who, ironically, falls in love with her as soon as she is safely dead and no longer threatening.

Both Boccaccio and Chaucer seem to have been able to adapt the story of Theseus and Hippolyta by using the two characters as received legendary figures with recognizable values and suppressing disturbing overtones. Boccaccio says he wants to celebrate the “toils endured for Mars” (12.10.84-86), and Chaucer seems to want to demonstrate the admirable but limited philosophy available to the highest pagan society. According to V. A. Kolve, Theseus was to the Middle Ages “a man seeking consciously to embody the highest chivalric ideals of his civilization.”¹⁰ In The Knight's Tale Hippolyta is so much the gracious, docile aristocratic lady as hardly to evoke any memory of her origins. Most of Chaucer's characters have relatively stable, almost allegorical significance, and Kolve has worked out a precise and consistent Christian interpretation of the tale.¹¹ Allegory, like ritual, serves to repeat and reinforce accepted cultural norms.

Allegory, like ritual, was also breaking down in the England of Shakespeare and Fletcher. The hierarchy of male/female attributes had become blurred, and the struggles between Venus and Mars, and Venus and Diana, were shadowed with ambiguities. Allegorical affinities certainly remain in The Two Noble Kinsmen, but they are shifting, inconsistent, and disturbing rather than reassuring. In this climate the Amazonian presence comes to life again as a signifier of marginal territory in the definition of the “human.”

The first dilemma of Theseus is set up with dazzling clarity at the beginning of the play with the conjunction of unconsummated marriage and impending funeral. His crisis is a peculiarly male one: Theseus is torn between Venus and Mars. His heart is with Mars. Chaucer makes his loyalty more overt than does Shakespeare—describing his white banner emblazoned with “The rede statue of Mars, with spere and targe” (975)—but the play also repeatedly emphasizes the King's devotion to battle and to the service of his “master Mars” (5.4.106). In order to subdue Hippolyta and produce death-defying progeny, however, Theseus must marry. His extraordinary description of marriage as “This grand act of our life, this daring deed / Of fate in wedlock” (1.1.163-64) and his insistence that “This is a service, whereto I am going, / Greater than any war; it more imports me / Than all the actions that I have foregone, / Or futurely can cope” (1.1.171-74) show his sense of the magnitude of the act and suggest some reluctance. His willingness to be diverted from his purpose by the grieving Queens is rewarded by their promise that his deed will earn him a deity equal to or even greater than that of Mars (1.1.227-28). The god of war is inevitably linked with death, and the discordant reminders of the grim reaper multiply with the appearance of the widowed Queens at the marriage festival.¹² Their black veils, their memories of the stench and “mortal loathsomeness” of the rotting corpses of their lords (1.1.45-47), their imagined vision of Theseus's own corpse lying “i' th' blood-siz'd field … swoll'n / Showing the sun his teeth, grinning at the moon,” and their rapid imagistic alternation between the marriage bed and the death bed of “rotten kings” (1.1.139-40, 175-82) effectively cancel out the elevated ceremonial mood of the initial Hymeneal procession. Theseus, going off to fight Creon as proof of his “humanity” and affirming that “As we are men / Thus should we do, being sensually subdu'd / We lose our human title” (1.1.232-34), leaves his nuptials.

Immediately following these words of Theseus, we are presented with Palamon and Arcite, similarly concerned that “Widows' cries / … have not / Due audience of the gods” (1.2.79-81). They describe the perils of peace—the forgotten soldier and the dissolute city “where every evil / Hath a good color; where ev'ry seeming good's / A certain evil” (2.1.38-40) and where men are monsters. Lamenting Mars's “scorn'd altar,” Palamon wishes that Juno would stir up trouble enough to start a new war. Their response to their revulsion from the corruption of Creon is to plan to leave his court, until they are reprieved in fact by a new war. At this point Palamon and Arcite are scarcely distinguishable. If anything, Palamon is more concerned than Arcite with Mars and his soldiers, and more determined to be “forehorse in the team” or none. As the children of two sisters, Palamon and Arcite are essentially undifferentiated adolescents fearful of sullying their “gloss of youth” with “crimes of nature” (1.2.3-5). They are enamored of war and eager to escape the unknown perils (probably venereal) of the peaceful city. They are younger versions of Theseus and Pirithous, who have “Fought out together where death's self was lodg'd” and woven a “knot of love” that, it seems, “May be outworn, never undone” (1.3.40-44).

Viewing their hearse-drawn bodies, Theseus reveals that he has instantly recognized Palamon and Arcite as kindred spirits when he saw them in battle like “a pair of lions smear'd with prey,” adding “I fix'd my note / Constantly on them; for they were a mark / Worth a god's view” (1.4.18-21), and concluding, “their lives concern us / Much more than Thebes is worth” (1.4.32-33). He fears them and would rather have them dead than free. However, he adds, “But forty thousand fold we had rather have 'em / Prisoners to us than death” (1.4.36-37). Fearing and cherishing them, he confines them to prison, and from this point on Palamon and Arcite act out almost emblematically the Venus-Mars struggle in Theseus's mind and in the male progress toward adulthood.

Together in a narcissistic prison, Palamon and Arcite think wistfully of war and women. Palamon remembers the two of them in battle, “like twins of honor” enjoying the feeling of their “fiery horses / Like proud seas under” them (2.2.18-20); and Arcite yearns self-absorbingly for “The sweet embraces of a loving wife” (2.2.30) who might furnish him with a kind of immortality by providing him with a replica of himself to memorialize him in victorious combat. The two find consolation, however, in regarding their prison as a “holy sanctuary” to keep them from the “corruption of worse men” and the menace of seductive women (2.2.71-72). They resolve, with ludicrously shortsighted assurance, to be content to be “one another's wife” and heir (2.2.80-83). Immediately there appears the figure of Emilia, plucking, appropriately enough, the Narcissus flower and remarking of its namesake, “That was a fair boy certain, but a fool / To love himself” (2.2.119-21). Like Actaeon's confrontation with Diana, the vision of Emilia results in a second male crisis, a fragmentation of the identity of her viewers that dominates the rest of the play. It is a curious but psychologically acute fact that in Renaissance mythologizing the sight of the naked virgin goddess Diana transforms the male viewer into a victim of Venus, pursued and ultimately torn apart by the hounds of desire.¹³ Other-directed passion fractures the narcissistic self-absorption of Palamon and Arcite; and in transferring their affection from each other to Emilia they recapitulate Theseus's earlier progression from Pirithous to Hippolyta. As in the case of Theseus, their newfound recognition of Venus remains weak and ineffectual; they are torn in this crisis between conflicting goals.

In a patriarchy, the male cherishes the female's virginity, which certifies her as his inviolate possession; but he also depends on her fecundity for the propagation of his species.¹⁴ Divided between Diana and Venus, he resents and depends on the presence of other males. Theseus has faced one side of this problem, accepting belatedly, in a bow to Venus, the responsibilities of marriage; but he imprisons his younger “rivals” who may challenge his proprietary interest in his sister-in-law. Male rivalry (the arena of Mars) is at least as powerful as heterosexual lust (the arena of Venus) in this play. The fractured friendship of Palamon and Arcite reflects both the Mars-Venus and the Venus-Diana conflict. The kinsmen's instant Venus-induced enmity propels them toward martial conflict, while their contrasting attitudes toward the lady reveal the Diana/Venus dilemma posed by women. Palamon perceives Emilia as a goddess to be worshiped (Chaucer says as Venus, but the play's lack of specificity makes the symbolically more apt connotation of Diana available), whereas Arcite sees her “as a woman, to enjoy” (1.2.163-64). In both cases, however, their passion begins and remains a distant infatuation; and we suspect its roots are firmly fixed in the violent male rivalry suggested by Palamon's threat to nail Arcite to the window and Arcite's reciprocal vow, “I'll throw my body out, / And leap the garden, when I see her next, / And pitch between her arms to anger thee” (2.2.215-17, italics mine).

In a neatly constructed allegory we might expect the fragmented psyches of Palamon and Arcite, reflections of Theseus's own divided mind, to define themselves as they will appear at the end—as servants respectively of the goddess of love and the god of war. To some extent this does occur, but the distinction is never absolute or clear-cut, and the situation is complicated by the Diana/Venus polarization. Male self-definition is not simple in this play. Although the knights are not fully rounded characters, neither are they merely emblems. Theseus, perhaps betraying his own predilection for Mars, frees Arcite to return to Thebes,¹⁵ and the languishing Palamon immediately fantasizes his rival's reappearance as a victorious warrior. Arcite, on the other hand, imagines Palamon winning Emilia through seductive speech because “he has a tongue will tame tempests, / And make the wild rocks wanton” (2.3.16-17). Palamon is subsequently freed from prison by love, and the amorous devotion of the Jailer's Daughter secures for Palamon a more central position than Arcite's in the unfolding of the drama. Of the two knights Palamon is the gentler, the sadder, the more passive. After desire has seized him, he reveals a bizarre imagination that repeatedly identifies him with the feminine. He wants to be a blooming apricot tree that will fling wanton arms into Emilia's window and bring her fruits to make her even more divine than she already seems to him (2.2.234-39). He fancies that if free he would do such deeds that “This blushing virgin, should take manhood to her / And seek to ravish me” (2.2.258-60). Whereas Arcite's tournament companion looks like a “heated lion” and has eyes that show fire within, Palamon's follower has “a face far sweeter,” colored with “The livery of the warlike maid … / … for yet no beard has blest him” (4.2.81-82, 95, 105-7). It has been remarked that Palamon's puzzling prayer to Venus sounds more as if it should be addressed to Diana.¹⁶ Indeed, in the polarization between Venus and Diana, Palamon seems almost as close to the latter as to the former.

Arcite is on the whole more active, more aggressive, and more masculine. He prides himself on being “a man's son” (2.2.182) and compares his wooing to a battle charge (2.2.195). He takes the initiative in disguising himself and seizes the opportunity to win running and wrestling matches so brilliantly that Theseus says he has not seen “Since Hercules, a man of tougher sinews” (2.5.2). He glories in the challenge of riding a rough horse so that he won't “Freeze in [his] saddle” (2.5.48). Theseus is so taken with Arcite that he advises Emilia to make him her master (2.5.62-64) and proposes prophetically that the jealous gods will want him to “die a bachelor, lest his race / Should show i' th' world too godlike” (5.3.117-18). Indeed, as the feats of Mars are inextricably linked with death, Arcite's victory in the tournament proves to be sterile.

It is notable that from the moment of their separation and fragmentation, the young men are constantly referred to (like Petrarch's Laura) as parts.¹⁷ Arcite worries about Palamon's tongue; we hear of Arcite's sinews; the Jailer's Daughter fancies that Palamon has been torn to pieces by wolves; Emilia thinks of Arcite's face, eye, figure, and brow (grotesquely comparing it in smoothness to Pelops's shoulder),¹⁸ and of Palamon's eyes, face, body, and brow, concluding of her suitors, “Were they metamorphis'd / Both into one … there were no woman / Worth so compos'd a man” (5.3.84-86).

If the first male conflict in the play epitomized by Theseus and played out by Palamon and Arcite is between Venus and Mars, the second conflict, projected chiefly onto the females, is between Venus and Diana. The women of the play represent the standard Renaissance stereotypes—maid, wife, and widow. The widows vanish early, and Hippolyta, as wife, gets relatively short shrift—her wedding is upstaged by the war with Thebes, and her resolution to believe herself dearer to Theseus than Pirithous is mustered with suspicious alacrity and carried out with an arbitrary decision to repress doubts. Pirithous doesn't help matters when he begs Theseus to show mercy, conjuring him anticlimactically “By all our friendship, sir, all our dangers, / By all you love most—wars, and this sweet lady—” (3.6.202-3).

The Amazonian Emilia comes closer to being a simple allegorical figure than any of the men. Like Hippolyta she remains curiously static, seeming more a projection of a male problem than an interesting dramatic character. Although her portrait is not as uncomplicated as that of Chaucer's Emelye, who never expresses any erotic interest in either of her suitors and prefers right up to the end of the tale to remain a maid, Emilia is throughout most of the play clearly the servant of Diana. Somewhat ironically, in view of her subsequent dismissal of Narcissus as a fool for loving himself, she proclaims her own narcissistic attachment to her childhood alter ego Flavina, asserting that she will never love any man as she has loved her friend (1.3.84-86). In gathering flowers, although she chooses the equivocal rose, which will later become for her the emblem of Diana's concession to Venus, as well as the univocal narcissus, her desire is to preserve the flowers' springlike beauty with the art of embroidery rather than to enjoy their living presence.

Emilia repeatedly identifies with women, defining herself as “a natural sister of our sex” (1.1.125), invoking “The powers of all women” (3.6.194), and thinking of others in terms of their mothers. On seeing Arcite she supposes his handsome face inherited from his mother, and she asks Theseus's mercy on the two knights because of “The goodly mothers that have groan'd” for them (3.6.245). She tries to choose between them for the sake of “their weeping mothers” (4.2.4) and thinks of them as their mothers' joy (4.2.63). This concern with maternal feelings may suggest Diana's embodiment as Lucina (specifically included by Chaucer in his description of Diana's temple), but more important to Emilia is the virginal aspect of the goddess. Like Diana, patron of Amazons, Emilia hunts, and she apparently keeps a stable since she is able to provide Arcite with a brace of horses fit for kings (2.6.19-21). She thinks of herself as a “female knight” (5.1.140). Initially, she embodies one facet of the female threat to male-dominated society—the unavailable woman protected by female solidarity. The image, however, projected through a male lens, begins to blur—the unattainable female cannot be allowed to exist. Unlike Emelye, Emilia grows increasingly interested in her two suitors. Although most often she finds them interchangeable, she confesses in one speech that she is “sotted, / Utterly lost” and that her “virgin's faith hath fled” her (4.2.45-46). Her prayer to Diana is not, like Emelye's, just a request to remain a maid but includes the alternative of being won by the suitor who loves her most. As Palamon moves closer to Diana, Emilia moves closer to Venus; but, whatever passion she may feel, she shows no joy on Arcite's victory and speaks not at all to Palamon after she is awarded to him by default. The final transaction is still between Palamon and Arcite.

The true exemplar of Venus in the play is the Jailer's Daughter. It is she who sees, pities, and loves Palamon in spite of the equal charms of Arcite, who knows that she “would fain enjoy him” (2.4.30), who frees him from his prison of arrested development, pursues him into “Dian's wood,” and, finally, subdued by her father and the Wooer, agrees to marry Palamon's double. Her venereal freedom and boldness are welcomed happily by the rustics as part of the May Day saturnalia, but in the sober postfestive view of the Jailer and the Wooer such excess is alarming, or “mad.” As the Amazonian frigidity of Emilia has been warmed by desire, so the equally menacing specter of voracious feminine appetite must be curbed. At the advice of the doctor, her father confines her to a small room with a dim light in order to dupe her into a suitable marriage that will control her “extravagant vagary.” For these males, she embodies the fantasy of unbridled female sexuality—a sexuality that is a necessary evil, but one that demands the “bridaling” enacted in wedlock.

At the end of the play, Diana and Venus find a compromise acceptable to the males in the union of Palamon and Emilia and that of the Jailer's Daughter and her surrogate Palamon. Fertility is both restricted and provided for. Mars is not so easily dealt with because his deadly shadow looms darkly over all. As the action has begun with mirth and funeral, so it concludes. Although both Theseus and the younger generation have yielded to the power of Venus, Theseus continues to claim Mars as his master and to focus attention on Arcite's funeral (5.4.106). The refrain of the widowed Queens hangs hauntingly in the memory: “This world's a city full of straying streets, / And death's the market-place, where each one meets” (1.5.15-16). A measure of the distance between Chaucer and the Renaissance is suggested by the modification of this image. In Chaucer the world is a “thurghfare” from which wandering pilgrims are released by death (2847). In the drama, death is the heart of the mystery.

As I have suggested earlier, both Palamon and Arcite can be seen as spiritual offspring of Theseus. He admires both and fears both, wishing to keep both imprisoned under his control. Later the two fight each other in Theseus's armor (3.6.54), but we sense that Arcite is closer to Theseus's own self-image. Theseus releases him freely, without ransom, while at the same time confining Palamon even more strictly than before. Arcite is more successful as a warrior than a lover. Even though he has been in close proximity to Emilia as her servant, while Palamon has never met her, Arcite has not won her unequivocal love. His fate is oddly premonitory of that of Hippolytus, the unborn son of Theseus and Hippolyta, who is similarly destroyed by his own horses, frightened by a monster sent by Poseidon at the behest of Aphrodite. In both cases death is the result of failure to come to terms with the goddess of love.

The figure of the horse runs like a leitmotif through the play. Palamon and Arcite remember with pleasure their fiery steeds under them in battle (2.2.18); Arcite prides himself on his horsemanship; the two of them recall the good bright bay (3.6.76-77) that Arcite rode in the war against the three kings; and Arcite boasts of the brace of fine horses given him by Emilia. In the subplot, horses are a source of frequently coarse humor. The countrymen speak of tickling work out of “the jades' tails” after their day of maying. The mad Jailer's Daughter sings of a lover who will give her “a white cut … to ride” (3.4.22) and later declares that Palamon has given her an extraordinary horse, which can dance, read, and write and is beloved by the Duke's mare (5.2.45-65). A human hobby horse, along with the Bavian, is a usual part of the morris dance. These mergings of man and animal, like the presence of the Amazons, suggest the erosion of conventional “human” boundaries in the world of the play.

Skillful horsemanship is an image of success in war and of the individual's ability to control passion by reason; it is also frequently an image of matrimony—with “female” passion controlled by “male” reason. In each case the rider is conventionally presumed to be male, although the mounted Diana is tolerated as image of the hunt. The horse-rider figure thus links Diana, Mars (the equestrian warrior), and Venus (the promoter of amorous conjunctions). Generally speaking, a woman in the saddle, like an unbridled horse, is profoundly disturbing. It is surely no accident that, in the play, Arcite is killed by Emilia's horse. In Chaucer's tale, Arcite is fatally wounded, while parading under the eye of Emilia. He is thrown on his head by his horse, which has been frightened by an infernal fury sent by Pluto at Saturn's request to placate Venus. The drama, perhaps elaborating on the brief description in the Teseida, introduces an extraordinary modification (the merest shadow of Saturn remains in a simile). Arcite is injured because, in spite of almost superhuman efforts, he cannot control Emilia's horse. The description is grotesquely detailed and almost explicitly sexual (5.4.70-83). The horse, excited by a spark from its own hoof and enraged by the spur, whines like a pig and thrashes wildly in the effort to unseat his rider. When, in spite of all, Arcite still keeps his steed between his legs, the horse upends the rider and falls backward, crushing him. The “natural” order has been overturned. Arcite, the professed servant of Mars, has been confused by Venus and defeated by Diana. Proud of his equestrian skill in battle, he succumbs to his failure to subdue the unruly spirit embodied in the horse of his Amazonian mistress. Whether the instigator is Venus or Diana is not so clear as in Chaucer. In effect the two have joined against Mars. Disruptive female forces have temporarily unsettled patriarchal order.¹⁹

Theseus may have succeeded in wooing Hippolyta with his sword and winning her love by doing her injuries, but the Amazonian Emilia remains beyond Mars's power. The gentler, sadder Palamon, who has eschewed horses when fighting in the forest (3.6.59; this may have been dictated by stage convenience), and who adhered, albeit somewhat reluctantly, to Venus, and who has perhaps been secretly favored by Emilia (she wore his picture near her heart [5.3.73-76]) will inherit her. This final crisis resolves, at least for the moment, the problem of Theseus and his society. The beloved rivals merge in a way that neutralizes the menace of male aggression and yet secures potency for posterity. Theseus himself retains the power of Mars. Patriarchy has been shored up; the threatening Amazon will be safely married off; and the new generation will have Theseus's blessing, if not an enthusiastic one. All this has been played out not in terms of subtle character distinctions but emblematically. However, as the simpler allegorical figures of Boccaccio and Chaucer have blurred and even merged, the struggle to clarify male identity is heightened. We see that male boundaries threatened by the inroads of both females and their surrogate horses have been temporarily shored up. Social definitions survive, but the embattled beachhead remains insecure and unstable.

The sense of instability is reinforced by the unconventional generic form of the play. Although the Stationers' Register identifies it as a tragicomedy, the play does not conform to the definition set out by Fletcher in his preface to The Faithful Shepherdess.²⁰ The play's very structure reflects the erosion of boundaries. Palamon and Arcite are repeatedly brought near death and reprieved; yet the progress toward a festive culmination in marriage and the triumph of a new generation is continually frustrated by the realization that one of the lovers must be eliminated in order to effect such a conclusion. Instead of wanting, like the audience of comedy, to hurry the action toward consummation, here the audience's desire is similar to that aroused by tragedy—the desire to retard the relentless progress of the plot.

The end is a disturbing compromise. It allows for neither catharsis nor satisfying social reintegration. Diana and Venus have been brought to an uneasy truce: the dual female threats of virginity and lasciviousness have been tamed by matrimony. Similarly, Mars and Venus are both in some sense victorious: following Arcite's victory, death claims center stage, but it is the death of the follower of the death-dealing Mars. The victory of Venus through Palamon does at least promise new generations, though Mars, as embodied in Theseus, still remains a controlling presence. The comic and the tragic have been momentarily balanced rather than resolved. The Duke's conclusion is exceedingly apt: “For what we lack / We laugh, for what we have are sorry” (5.4.132-33).

In attempting to encompass new realities, tragicomedy, like allegory, has moved beyond the bounds of received definitions into a confusing maze like the “city full of straying streets.” The struggle to possess the Amazonian Emilia, to confine the female eroticism of the Jailer's Daughter, and to reconcile the conflicting male impulses of Palamon and Arcite both mirrors and reenacts the effort of art to build an orderly vision of the universe on the shifting sands of Stuart England. The play's “order” inevitably represents a male vision, although the artist's empathy with many sorts of humanity may sometimes seem to transcend the boundaries of his gender. We are only now beginning to discover what might be the outlines of a female world view. An important step is understanding the workings of patriarchal worlds, and for this purpose The Two Noble Kinsmen is a profoundly illuminating text.

Notes

1. Extensive discussions of the significance of Amazons in classical Greece may be found in Page duBois, Centaurs and Amazons: Women and the Pre-History of the Great Chain of Being (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1982), and William Blake Tyrrell, Amazons: A Study in Athenian Mythmaking (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984). For a survey and discussion of Amazons in Elizabethan literature, see C. T. Wright, “The Amazons in Elizabethan Literature,” Studies in Philology 37 (1940): 433-56, and Simon Shepherd, Amazons and Warrior Women (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester, 1981).

2. Many descriptions of Amazons were available to Elizabethans. The account of the Amazon attack on Athens is recorded in Thomas North, trans., [Plutarch's] Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (London, 1579). A full narration of Theseus's war with the Amazons is to be found in Giovanni Boccaccio, Teseida delle Nozze d'Emilia, trans. Bernadette Marie McCoy as The Book of Theseus (New York: Medieval Text Association, 1974), 1 (further references to The Book of Theseus are to this edition and will be made parenthetically in the text). Boccaccio also furnishes a gloss (p. 48) describing Amazons as women dedicated to war, who have killed their males and cut off their right breasts to facilitate the shooting of bows. He adds (p. 21) that, though liberated, they are unable to remain free.

3. The distinction is epitomized by Radigund and Britomart in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (in Poetical Works, ed. J. C. Smith and E. de Selincourt [London: Oxford University Press, 1948], book 5, canto 7). Although Britomart brutally destroys Radigund, it is notable that she too disappears from the story after this feat. Winifred Schleiner, “Divina virago: Queen Elizabeth as an Amazon,” Studies in Philology 75 (1978): 163-80, outlines the limited identification of Elizabeth with Amazons; Louis Adrian Montrose, “Shaping Fantasies: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture,” Representations II (1983): 61-94, traces the extreme ambiguity of Elizabethan male feelings toward their sovereign.

4. Penthesilea, celebrated in Ben Jonson's The Masque of Queens (London, 1609) is the most famous example of the Amazon killed in battle. Her valor is described at some length in William Caxton, trans. The Recuile of the Histories of Troie by Raoul Le Fevre (London, 1553), 3.25-29. Thomas Heywood, The Exemplary Lives and Memorable Acts of Nine of the Most Worthy Women of the World (London, 1640), describes examples from both categories: Penthesilea in Exemplary Lives is the woman killed, and a digression in his Troia Britanica (London, 1609), 307-77, deals with a typical seduction. Beaumont and Fletcher's The Sea Voyage recounts a similar conquest of Amazons. The Masque of Queens vividly illustrates the uneasy balance of anxiety and titillation in the representation of extraordinary women. In a masque celebrating the virtues of Queen Anne, Jonson devotes considerably more than half of his attention to the monstrous figures of witches.

5. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Knight's Tale, in Complete Works, ed. F. N. Robinson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1933). Further references to The Knight's Tale are to this edition and will be made parenthetically in the text by line number.

6. Plutarch notes the confusion of Hippolyta and Antiopa in his sources. Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night's Dream clearly chooses to regard them as separate women. If Theseus/Oberon and Hippolyta/Titania were played by the same actors, obviously any reverberation between their roles would be reinforced.

7. Although I am inclined to accept the assignment of the play to Shakespeare and Fletcher, I have chosen not to deal here with the authorship question. The play seems to me coherent enough to justify discussing it as an artistic unit representative of its age. I have focused primarily on the main plot not because I reject the subplot but because a thorough analysis of it would take me beyond the scope of this paper.

8. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, trans. R. D. Hicks (London: Loeb Classical Library, 1925), 1:33. See also duBois, Centaurs and Amazons, for an extended discussion.

9. North, trans., [Plutarch's] Lives, 14-15.

10. V. A. Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984), 101. D'Orsay W. Pearson, “‘Unkinde’ Theseus: A Study in Renaissance Mythography,” English Literary Renaissance 4 (1974): 276-98, notes the many negative aspects of Theseus's career as described in Seneca's Hippolytus and Plutarch's Lives, arguing that by 1590 the image of the noble Theseus had begun to tarnish.

11. Kolve, Chaucer and Imagery, 156-57.

12. Chaucer's description of the temple of Mars (1981-2040) makes the association of death with the god detailed and explicit.

13. See especially Twelfth Night 1.1.17-22.

14. Tyrrell, in Amazons: A Study, explains the significance of the classical Amazon as an expression of the patriarch's fear of what his daughter, whom he wants to preserve intact as his own possession, may become if he does not secure for her a husband, thereby giving up his control of her for the sake of progeny.

15. It is true that Theseus does this at the instigation of Pirithous, but it still reveals a greater willingness to free the spirit of Mars than to free that of Venus. Paula S. Berggren, “‘For what we lack, / We laugh’: Incompletion and The Two Noble Kinsmen,” Modern Language Studies 14:4(Fall 1984): 3-17, suggests that Arcite seems to be the wrong victim and that his end shows that the gods punish unfairly. Gods have, of course, always seemed unfair in tragedy. Arcite belongs, I believe, in the company of Hippolytus, Pentheus, and Shakespeare's Adonis (Seneca locates Hippolytus's death wound, like Adonis's, in the groin), all of whom have slighted passionate gods—Venus or Dionysius. Arcite has, quite literally, “backed” the wrong horse.

16. See Hallett Smith, “Introduction” to The Two Noble Kinsmen in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. B. Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 1641.

17. See Nancy J. Vickers, “Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme,” Critical Inquiry 8 (1981): 265-79, for a discussion of the fragmentation of Laura in Petrarch's sonnets.

18. John Milton, “Elegia Prima,” in Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey, 1957), 9, line 57, makes a similar comparison, with a similarly unsettling effect.

19. Natalie Zemon Davis, “Women on Top,” in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), 124-51. Davis discusses provocatively whether folk images of “women on top” serve to reinforce or undermine the established order.

20. John Fletcher, The Faithful Shepherdess (London, 1610): “A tragicomedy is not so called in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect it wants deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy, yet brings some near it, which is enough to make it no comedy.” The preface is omitted in the second, revised edition of 1629, which may suggest that the definition no longer seemed relevant or adequate.