[In the following essay, Simonds contends that The Two Noble Kinsmen provides a “sophisticated and amused” analysis of several different kinds of love. Simonds focuses on the play's treatment of Platonic love—the love and spiritual friendship between two males, and the courtly love between a man and a woman—and argues that as tragicomedy the play's ending celebrates the Platonic virtue of temperance in the lawful marriage between a man and woman. At the same time, Simonds highlights the satirical aspects of the dramatists' portrayal of this type of Platonic love.]

The Two Noble Kinsmen by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher is a Renaissance tragicomedy concerned with different kinds of love.¹ Our recognition of the genre is important since it will determine the final objective of the play. For example, the objective of tragedy is the communal celebration of a sacrificial death after some real or imagined fall from the ideal and a final catharsis of guilt for human imperfections. The objective of comedy is a celebration of lust, or that aspect of human irrationality which usually leads to marriage and fertility through the complex social rituals of sexual love. In contrast, the final objective of Renaissance tragicomedy is the controlling of such irrationalities as lust and fury and especially of dangerous melancholy (understood as madness) through a celebration of the Platonic virtue of temperance (Simonds 356-62) and of a lawful marriage between a man and a woman and between a ruler and his or her people. As James J. Yoch, Jr., has correctly argued, “Renaissance tragicomedies illustrated for their audiences right rule of the self, and, by implication, of the body politic” (116). The generic mixture of tragic and comic elements in Renaissance tragicomedy leads the characters to new perceptions of truth, to the actual practice of Christian forgiveness, to the tempering of the unruly passions by reason, and, ultimately, to a happy ending in accordance with the wishes of divine providence. The predominant style of Renaissance tragicomedy is ritualistic, courtly, and philosophical, despite the presence of purely comic scenes that parody and thus reinforce the main plot (see Hartwig). Like the elaborate court masques of the period, such plays are deeply imbued with what Ben Jonson termed the “remou'd mysteries” of Renaissance Platonism.

Inspired by Chaucer's “Knight's Tale,” The Two Noble Kinsmen provides its audience with a sophisticated and amused look at love as it is variously practiced by the characters: love by violent conquest or as the spoils of war but resulting in a civilized marriage (Theseus and Hippolyta); Platonic love as a spiritual friendship between two equal males (Arcite and Palamon, Theseus and Pirithous); Platonic love between man and woman in the form of courtly love (Palamon and Emily); sexual passion in humans as compared to seasonal sexual desire in animals (Arcite, Palamon, and the Jailer's Daughter). The play is set in Athens during the wild and merry month of May, traditionally the month sacred to Venus and to women in general. But, as we soon discover, Maytime desire can lead to melancholy love sickness, insane jealousy between male friends, and even to a final battle to death for the love of a cold but compassionate beauty who would prefer to remain a virgin forever. Since I am primarily interested here in the Platonic aspects of Kinsmen, I shall concentrate on the main plot, reluctantly omitting a discussion of the frenzied love sickness of the Jailer's Daughter that parodies the love sickness of the aristocrats Arcite and Palamon.

The following paragraph from Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy might serve as an appropriate and learned epigram for all that is about to happen in Maytime Athens:

That lovers are mad, I think no man will deny. Amore, simul et sapere (to love and to be wise), ipsi Jovi non datur, Jupiter himself cannot intend both at once. Non bene conveniunt, nec in una sede orantur Majestas et amor. Tully, when he was invited to a second marriage, replied, he could not simul amare et sapere, be wise and love both together. Est Orcus ille, vis est immedicabilis, est rabies insana, love is madness, a hell, an incurable disease; impotentem et insanam libidinem Seneca calls it, an impotent and raging lust.

(Burton 1.114)

Nevertheless, the play opens with an image of ideal Platonic love, the friendship and kinship of two Theban cousins of equal social status who are imprisoned in Athens after a recent war. We are asked to compare and then to contrast their love with the similar Platonic male friendship or amicitia between Theseus and Pirithous. Theseus trusts his friend so completely that he asks Pirithous to be his proxy in his wedding to Hippolyta, while Theseus himself compassionately goes back to Thebes to defeat Creon and bury the dead kings at the request of their widows. According to Hippolyta, the relationship between Theseus and Pirithous is absolute:

                                                            Their knot of love
Tied, weav'd, entangled, with so true, so long,
And with a finger of so deep a cunning,
May be outworn, never undone.

(1.2.41-44)

But the authors of The Two Noble Kinsmen make it their business to puncture the claims of the young Theban cousins to that superior Platonic friendship that is supposedly possible only for aristocratic males through dramatizing the many striking inconsistencies in their attitudes and behavior. At the same time, the Platonic virtues and highest forms of human love, as discussed by Plato in the Phaedrus and The Symposium, remain the ideal throughout the play. All this is far more complex than I make it sound here, however, because of the intrinsically philosophical nature of the tragicomic genre itself. In Aristotle's Ethics, as Barry Weller points out,

Friendship and philosophy are in fact linked; the solution to the riddle of how the desires of friends can converge on the same object without conflict is that the object of their desire is to be ideal and infinite, in other words philosophy (or, in the Augustinian transformation of this kind of friendship, God). Both friendship and contemplation, weaning men away from the problematic goal of public honor, draw them to the margins of society.

(Weller 97)

Plato, of course, wrestled with the same problem in his dialogues, where philosophical discussion or the process of dialectic itself seems to provide an answer.

The prison in which Arcite and Palamon find themselves is a familiar Platonic and Orphic symbol of the body in which the soul is trapped (Plato 497). However, Arcite grandly declares that they should both consider their Athenian prison to be a “holy sanctuary / To keep us from corruption of worse men” (2.2.71-72). This comment immediately suggests that the two princes are insufferable adolescent snobs, probably much like those young men of noble birth in the original audience who were also steeped in barely understood Neoplatonism and filled with a sense of their own importance as men of high birth and fashion. Arcite's only regret is that now they will never marry or sire children. But he is quick to substitute their masculine love for one another as a superior blessing:

                    And here being thus together,
We are an endless mine to one another;
We are one another's wife, ever begetting
New births of love; we are father, friends, acquaintance;
We are, in one another families …

(2.2.78-82)

Although Eugene Waith insists that these are merely the protestations of classical friendship, I am inclined to agree with M. C. Bradbrook that there is a possible suggestion of homosexuality here (239), especially in the light of Palamon's reply: “You have made me / (I thank you, cousin Arcite) almost wanton / With my captivity” (2.2.95-97; my emphasis).²

Casting suspicion on the Platonic pretensions of male love for another male was, of course, fair game during the Renaissance, although Plato took most of the blame. A famous example occurs in the Ragionamento, a 1545 book of advice for young men on the art of seduction by Francesco Sansovino in which we find the following exchange:

Silio.
What people are they who don't appreciate the love of noble or not noble women?
Panfilo.
They are the Platonists, that is the contemplators of the more perfect beauty which they say resides in man, by means of which they rise to divine beauty. But let's forget them, since their actions are suspect.

(Quoted in Nelson 121; emphasis mine)

On the other hand, the committed Renaissance Neoplatonists, such as Marsilio Ficino and his followers, did indeed claim that “male friendship rather than the love of woman remains the basis of moral love” (Ficino 160), and, dismissing homosexuality, they referred to male friendship as intellectual or rational love, as opposed to carnal and thus irrational love. Burton writes that such intellectual love “is proper to men, on which I must insist,” and such love “appears in God, angels, men” (3.16). Mindful of this widespread tradition, Palamon asks his friend, “Is there record of any two that lov'd / Better than we do, Arcite?” When Arcite assures him that there cannot be such, Palamon naively states, “I do not think it possible our friendship / Should ever leave us,” to which Arcite responds, “Till our deaths it cannot / And after death our spirits shall be led / To those that love eternally” (2.2.113-17). The ideal is Platonic, but the reality that we witness in the play is quite the opposite.

The beautiful Emilia enters the garden outside their prison window, and Palamon falls in love with her at first sight. At this point, Shakespeare and Fletcher begin their satirical treatment of Platonic love between a man and a beautiful woman. Her beauty enters through his eyes and pierces his heart, making him into a willing prisoner of love. Petrarch set the style in his sonnet Signor mio caro (Rima 266) with the words,

Carita di signore, amor di dona
son le catene ove con molti affanni
legato son, perch'io stesso mi strinsi …

[Devotion to my lord, love of my lady are the chains where with much labor I am bound, and I myself took them on!]

(Durling 434-35)

Entranced by the sight of the young woman, Palamon exclaims, “Never till now I was in prison, Arcite. … Behold and wonder! By heaven, she is a goddess” (2.2.132-34). When Arcite takes a look out the window for himself, the phenomenon is repeated: “Now I feel my shackles” (2.2.157), he says, and the friendship is over in an instant. “I saw her first” (2.2.159), cries Palamon, enraged at Arcite's daring to love Emilia, too.

This peculiar notion of love at first sight, or “heroic love,” was described by Socrates in the Phaedrus: “when one who is fresh from the mystery and saw much of the vision, beholds a godlike face or bodily form that truly expresses beauty, first there come upon him a shuddering and a measure of that awe which the vision inspired, and then reverence as at the sight of a god, and but for fear of being deemed a very madman he would offer sacrifice to his beloved as to a holy image of deity” (Plato 497). This happens because “sight is the keenest mode of perception” (Plato 497). During the Renaissance, the idea was widely adopted not only by poets but also by those medical doctors hired to treat the love malady in their wealthy patients. Ficino, trained as a physician himself, repeats many traditional medical ideas on love sickness in his discussion of vulgar love or lust, which he calls “enchantment”:

what wonder is it if the eye, wide open and fixed upon someone, shoots the darts of its own rays into the eyes of the bystander, and along with those darts, which are the vehicles of the spirits, aims that sanguine vapor which we call spirit? Hence the poisoned dart pierces through the eyes, and since it is shot from the heart of the shooter, it seeks again the heart of the man being shot, as its proper home; it wounds the heart, but in the heart's hard back wall it is blunted and turns back into blood. This foreign blood, being somewhat foreign to the nature of the wounded man, infects his blood. The infected blood becomes sick.

(Ficino 160)

Another Renaissance medical doctor, Jacques Ferrand, offers a similar explanation in his popular sixteenth-century Treatise on Love Sickness, although the physician is now clearly skeptical of sight's ability to distinguish true beauty from vulgar sexual attraction:

Once love deceives the eyes, which are the true spies and gatekeepers of the soul, she slips through the passageways, traveling imperceptibly by way of the veins to the liver where she suddenly imprints an ardent desire for that object that is either truly lovable, or appears so. There love ignites concupiscence and with such lust the entire sedition begins. … But fearing her own powers insufficient for overthrowing the reason—the sovereign part of the soul—love turns directly upon the citadel of the heart, and once that salient stronghold is made subject, she attacks the reason and all the noble forces of the brain so vigorously that she overwhelms them and makes them all her slaves.

(Ferrand 252)

In any case, Platonism is thoroughly entrenched in the thought of these Renaissance doctors. And the eyes are always the primary culprit, although Ferrand does add that “the liver is the hearth of this fire and the seat of love” (253).

By the seventeenth century we find Burton still referring to the same tradition of love that begins with the first sight of beauty. He quotes Ficino as saying, “Love is a desire of enjoying that which is good and fair” (1.11), adding, however, that “Sensible love is that of brute beasts” (3.16). On the other hand, the love of ideal Beauty itself may begin with the sight of a beautiful woman, although such passion often leads the lover to a sickness known as “love melancholy”:

This comeliness and beauty which proceeds from women, that causeth heroical or love-melancholy, is more eminent above the rest, and properly called love. The part affected in men is the liver, and therefore called heroical because commonly gallants, noblemen, and the most generous spirits are possessed with it.

(Burton 3.40)

This dread disease (in A Midsummer Night's Dream Shakespeare calls it “love in idleness”) of heroic love among the nobility wrecks havoc upon the two imprisoned and thus idle young princes and their eternal love for one another, although we should note that in Boccaccio's version of the story, the first lover relinquishes the woman to the second lover in order to maintain the male relationship above all else. It is significant that our English satirists do the opposite in The Two Noble Kinsmen with wonderfully comic results at first.

Arcite promises that, “I will not, as you do—to worship her / As she is heavenly and a blessed goddess; / I love her as a woman, to enjoy her” (2.2.161-64), thus challenging the Platonic pretensions of his friend. Nevertheless, Palamon still insists that he saw Emilia first and that he alone has the right to court her. The punch-line in the quarrel comes when Arcite, in an adolescent attempt at one-upmanship, abruptly changes his love from the sensible kind to the heroic like that of Palamon: “I love her with my soul; / If that will lose ye, farewell, Palamon” (2.2.176-77). From now on, the two young men are like the two fighting rams depicted in Cesare Ripa's woodcut of “Rivalita” in his Iconologia.

The former friends are parted when the Jailer takes Arcite away from the prison to Theseus. Now even Palamon himself shifts from symptoms of Platonic love to those of ordinary Eros in his contemplations. He looks down at the garden from his window and says, “would I were, / For all the fortune of my life hereafter, / Yon little tree yon blooming apricock! / How I would spread, and fling my wanton arms / At her window!” (2.2.234-38; my emphasis). Palamon's reference to the apricot tree alerts us to the young Platonist's previously hidden sexual desire for the chaste Emilia. Dale B. J. Randall tells us that “in the England of James I the apricot was considered an aphrodisiac” (183), which is why Titania asked her fairies to feed “apricocks” to Bottom (MND 3.1.166). Randall concludes that “though apricots have long been viewed in sexual terms, even as stimulants for sex, and though sometimes they have served specifically as symbols of female sexuality, the Renaissance, anglicized version of their names [apricocks] led some people to think of them as phallic” (189). This should not come as a surprise since the word contains an auditory allusion to both “prick” and “cock.” Thus, if the “apricock” tree under Emilia's window is “wanton,” so is the ardent Palamon who identifies himself with it at this point in the play.

Arcite, freed from prison by Theseus, returns to Athens in disguise and becomes Emilia's servant. Like his former friend, he, too, is torn between the two kinds of love, the sensible and the intellectual. In 3.1., he plays the romantic role of a melancholy lover alone in the woods and thinking about his mistress in the manner of Nicholas Hilliard's portrait in miniature of Essex as a “Young Man amongst Roses.”³

                                                            O queen Emilia,
Fresher than May, sweeter
Than her gold buttons on the boughs, or all
The enamell'd knacks o' the mead or garden! yea
(We challenge too) the bank of any nymph.
That makes the stream seem flowers! thou, o jewel
O' the wood, o' th' world, has likewise blest a [place]
With thy sole presence. In thy rumination
That I, poor man, might eftsoons come between
And chop on some cold thought!

(3.1.4-13)

But, while chopping on such cold (or conventional) thoughts, Arcite suddenly evokes Lady Fortune, who was often conflated in the Renaissance mind with Venus: “Tell me, O Lady Fortune / (Next after Emily my sovereign), how far / I may be proud” (3.1.15-17). He has reason to be proud, of course. Pleased with his service, Emilia has just given Arcite for May Day a brace of horses, Platonic symbols of reason and passion. At this point, however, Palamon—now a wild man living in the woods, although still wearing his shackles—bursts out from behind a bush, and the two rivals are a few scenes later engaged like rutting stags in a brutish battle over the fair Emilia. Since dueling is against the Athenian law, as it was also against Jacobean law, Theseus first condemns them both to death, but then relents to the pleas for mercy of Hippolyta, Emilia, and Pirithous, and allows the former friends to settle their rivalry in a formal, thus controlled, trial by combat. The loser in this ritualized combat between rivals will be executed.

Arcite triumphs in the battle, which takes place off stage. Palamon as the loser obediently places his head on the block in 5.4, but Pirithous then interrupts the execution with the amazing news that Arcite's black horse has just reared up out of control, has fallen over backward, and has crushed its rider. As Jeanne Addison Roberts correctly observes, “The figure of the horse runs like a leitmotif through the play” (142) and alludes, among other things, to “the individual's ability to control passion by reason” (143). Burton also mentions horses in his treatise on love melancholy as the epitome of sexual passion in animals: “Common experience and our sense will inform us how violently brute beasts are carried away with this passion [Love], horses above the rest, furor est insignis equarum” (44). But Plato, although not the only classical source of love as an illness, did invent the myth of the soul as a charioteer driving a brace of horses, one of which represents reason and the other passion:

Now of the steeds, so we declare, one is good and the other is not. … He that is on the more honorable side is upright and clean-limbed, carrying his neck high, with something of a hooked nose; in color he is white, with black eyes, a lover of glory, but with temperance and modesty; one that consorts with genuine renown, and needs no whip, being driven by the word of command alone. The other is crooked of frame, a massive jumble of a creature, with thick short neck, snub nose, black skin, and gray eyes; hot-blooded, consorting with wantonness and vainglory; shaggy of ear, deaf, and hard to control with whip and goad.

(Plato 499-500)

Proud Arcite unfortunately chooses to ride the black horse of passion and vainglory when journeying in triumph through Athens to claim his bride. Frightened by the sparks made by its own hooves on the pavement,

                                                            The hot horse, hot as fire,
Took toy at this, and fell to what disorder
His power could give his will, bounds, comes on end,
Forgets school-doing, being therein train'd
And of kind manage; pig-like he whines
At the sharp rowel, which he frets at rather
Than any jot obeys; seeks all foul means
Of boist'rous and rough jad'ry, to disseat
His lord that kept it bravely.

(5.4.65-73)

Unable to throw Arcite, which it does in the Chaucerian version of the story, the animal rears, falls backward and crushes its rider. Once more the image is borrowed from Plato.

In the Phaedrus, Socrates tells us that the lover approaching the beautiful form of the beloved, or the recollected idea of Beauty, “sees her once again enthroned by the side of temperance upon her holy seat” (Plato 500). But overawed, as was Jupiter at the sight of Ganymede's beauty, the lover then “falls upon his back, and therewith is compelled to pull the reins so violently that he brings both steeds down on their haunches, the good one willing and unresistant, but the wanton sore against his will” (500; my emphasis). Although Plato's mythic lover has the help of the good horse against the fury and squeals of the evil horse, lustful Arcite does not bring reason with him, having chosen to ride the black horse to claim Emilia, and he thus falls prey to passion's deadly desire for wanton pleasure alone.

Arcite's black horse and its behavior are clearly symbolic of the Theban prince's personal inability to curb his sexual lust for the bride he has won through combat against his erstwhile friend Palamon. He, rather than Palamon, is the true wild man. And such a falling backward as Arcite experiences is, following Plato, a traditional symbol of unbridled lust at the sight of beauty. For example, in his study of the Ganymede theme in art, James M. Saslow calls our attention to a print (c.1532-33) by the Master of the Die based on a work by Raphael:

The engraving depicts Jupiter in a cloud-borne chariot, falling backward as if struck in the face and dropping his shield and thunderbolts. Next to him in the sky, a girlish, elaborately coiffed Ganymede rides on the back of the eagle, while below Cupid sleeps in the lap of his mother, who is attended by the three Graces and Mercury. The narrative caption printed below the illustration spells out the connections between the three principals:
Jupiter in his high chariot,
Brandishing his thunderbolt and his mighty shield,
Assaulted Love, who was overcome by a deathlike sleep,
And who had been so cruel to him.
And Love without using arrows or wings,
While sleeping stripped Jupiter of his weapons:
What trials will he aim against mortal men
If Love, while sleeping, can take away Jupiter's weapons?

(Saslow 131-32)

Such unbridled lust, like drunkenness, is obviously antithetical to the cardinal virtue of Temperance, the final goal of Renaissance tragicomedy as a genre. Although Arcite has plenty of Courage, for which Pirithous admires him, the young man cannot attain the other important cardinal virtues—Prudence and Justice—without Temperance. That the authors of The Two Noble Kinsmen wish us to consider these virtues as necessary for the individual and for the state is made evident in this play through their insistence that Emilia gave a brace of horses to Arcite and that the intractable horse was entirely black in color (see 5.3.50-51).

An engraving of four wild horses in Achille Bocchi's Emblem 117 is often reproduced in modern essays as an example of the sexual symbolism of the horse during the Renaissance, but usually without a translation of the accompanying Platonic motto and verse. The Latin motto, which is very relevant to the love sickness theme of the play, is “Semper libidini imperat prudentia” (Prudence always controls desire). The verse reads as follows:

Nil violentum, quod cito idem non sit ruriturum
Quandoquidem proprium est rationis
Humanae interea nunquam requiescere, donec
Ipsa suum ad rectum redeat. quin
Abruptis, vt equi indomiti, duro ore lupatis
Stare loco nequeunt, furibunda
Discursant rapti vsque licentia, et impete vasto,
Dum captos, pressosque capistris
Ad palum innodent, aut ad praesepe magistri,
Daedala sic miserae ambitionis
Atque libidinis insanae Prudential semper
Est correptris, et moderatrix.
[Let nothing be impetuous, if it is not to be quickly ruined,
Since it is characteristic of human reason
Never to rest until it brings things under its control.
Indeed, as wild horses with hard mouths and sharp teeth
Cannot stay put anywhere but run about everywhere in the grip of a furious freedom and with rough violence,
Until, captured and subdued with a halter,
They are tied to a stake or enclosed in a trainer's stall,
So likewise skillful Prudence is always the corrector and controller of unworthy desire and mad passion.](4)

Hence for Bocchi, Prudence, which Arcite lacks, is that cardinal virtue which leads most directly to Temperance in human behavior.

In Kinsmen, Emilia's prayer to Diana that her husband should be the prince who loves her best is answered at the end of the play. Having finally overcome his passion and submitted to the punishment of death for his lawless behavior in the woods, the outwardly swarthy Palamon is revealed as a true lover of Beauty, or the successful Platonic charioteer who controls the wanton horse with the help of the good horse or reason. Arcite dies, after admitting that he has been “false, / Yet never treacherous (5.4.92-93) to his friend, and Theseus comments to the bereaved and now forgiving Palamon,

The powerful Venus well hath grac'd her altar,
And given you your love. Our master Mars
[Hath] vouch'd his oracle, and to Arcite gave
The grace of the contention. So the deities
Have show'd due justice.

(5.3.105-09)

The key word here is “justice,” that social ideal that Athens and all other civilizations forever strive to achieve but of which only the gods seem capable. Plato taught, of course, that true Beauty, Truth, and Justice were really all one and the same.

A final Platonic element in the tragicomedy is the overall theme of discordia concors. The discord in the play has apparently originated in a fundamental disagreement between Mars, Venus, and Diana, each of whom represents a different aspect of human nature. The three young lovers are their worshipers. Arcite enacts the aggressiveness and sexual lust of Mars; Palamon enacts the love and the idealization of women in conjunction with the urge to fertility of Venus; while Emilia enacts the perpetual chastity of Diana, which is why she cannot make up her mind between the two princes, not really desiring either one. Concord or Temperance (from to temper or tune) is achieved in the end by each character winning what he or she most desires. But from the beginning the ideal mature lovers have been Theseus and Hippolyta as a married couple. As F. W. Brownlow points out, Theseus and Hippolyta each have “a dual allegiance to Venus and Mars tempered by reason embodied in the institution of marriage. Their love is really the love of Mars and Venus made lawful” (207). And the love between Mars and Venus is the familiar Renaissance symbol of discordia concors, of a universe in harmony with itself.

Notes

1. For a full discussion of Renaissance Tragicomedy as a genre, see my Myth, Emblem, and Music in Shakespeare's “Cymbeline”: An Iconographic Reconstruction 29-65.

2. See Waith, “Shakespeare and Fletcher on Love and Friendship,” in Patterns, 289-303, and his Introduction to the Oxford edition of the play, 49-56.

3. For a discussion of the topos and the portrait itself, see Strong 56-83.

4. I am indebted to the late Roger T. Simonds for his translation of this emblem.