SOURCE: Introduction to The Two Noble Kinsmen, by John Fletcher and William Shakespeare, edited by Lois Potter, The Arden Shakespeare, 3^rd edition, Thomas Nelson and Sons, Ltd., 1997, pp. 40-59.

[In the following excerpt, Potter reviews the sources from which Shakespeare and Fletcher drew in penning The Two Noble Kinsmen, focusing on the use the dramatists made of Chaucer's The Knight's Tale. Additionally, Potter comments on Chaucer's source material.]

THE THEBAN STORY BEFORE CHAUCER

The history of Thebes is mythical. Its walls rose to the sound of music; its people sprang up from the ground when its founder Cadmus sowed the teeth of a dragon. The dragon-offspring immediately began killing each other, and fratricide and incest continued to dominate Theban history to the point where it became an archetype of the evil city. The story of Oedipus, which combines virtually all the great tragic themes, was the gods' revenge on the whole house of Cadmus. When Oedipus went into exile, his sons Eteocles and Polynices agreed to share the rule of the kingdom by turns. At the end of the first year, seized by the lust for power, Eteocles refused to give up the throne. Polynices made war on him, at the head of an army from Argos. At the siege of Thebes, he and all his allies were killed, as was Eteocles. Oedipus' brother Creon succeeded.

All three of the great Greek dramatists wrote plays on the Theban story, usually in order to contrast Creon's tyranny with the enlightened Athenian civilization embodied, as often in Greek drama, in the figure of Theseus. The structure of Euripides' Suppliants, in particular, is remarkably close to Act 1 of The Two Noble Kinsmen. A chorus of women, supported by Theseus' mother Aethra, plead with Theseus to intercede for them with Creon. He at first refuses, then gives in to his mother's persuasions. A debate between Theseus and Creon's herald follows, corresponding to the defiance that has apparently taken place between the first and second scenes of The Two Noble Kinsmen, and after the Chorus has called on the gods for help a messenger enters to relate the victory over Thebes. In the final scene, the women lament their husbands; then their sons enter in procession carrying the urns with their fathers' ashes.

Euripides' Phoenissae, which deals with the mutual defiance of the brothers before the attack on Thebes, was, as Emrys Jones points out, one of his most popular plays in the Renaissance (Jones, Origins, 92). Seneca adapted it and The Suppliants, with other Greek plays, to make an even better known Latin tragedy, adding an episode which, although apparently unfinished, had a powerful influence on the Renaissance imagination: Jocasta, mother of the warring brothers, kneels to them and begs them to spare their country. Coriolanus is the most striking development of this motif. The most influential classical retelling of the legend was Statius' epic, the Thebaid, which develops both the rivalry between the brothers and the relationship between the exiled Polynices and the exiled Tydeus, who fight at their first meeting and then become sworn friends. (This friendship becomes still more important in the medieval version called the Roman de Thèbes.) Statius' gruesome depiction of war, and his evident compassion for the sufferings of the weak, gave rise to a belief (expressed by Dante in Purgatorio 22.90) that he had been a secret Christian. Chaucer mentions him in the same breath as Virgil, Ovid, Homer and Lucan (Troilus and Criseyde, 5.1792).

Boccaccio's Teseida, probably completed in the late 1340s, turned the Thebaid into romance by transforming the war of two brothers over a city into the fight of two cousins over a woman. The great war epics of the past had made cities and women interchangeable—Helen causes the fall of Troy; Lavinia will eventually give her name to the first city built by Aeneas. Just as Statius had imitated Virgil, so (it has been argued) Boccaccio followed his example in an episode-by-episode imitation of Statius (Anderson, 50). Both Palemone and Arcita recognize that they are reliving the story of Eteocles and Polynices (see, for instance, Teseida, 5.13). Arcita's exile and wanderings, which follow his release from prison, make him a counterpart of the exiled Polynices. When Polynices is thrown from his chariot during a competition halfway through the poem, Statius exclaims that if Polynices had indeed died at this point he would have been remembered as a hero, not a traitor to his country (108-12). As David Anderson points out, this ‘alternate ending’ may have suggested the fate of Arcita in Boccaccio's poem (72, 107).

CHAUCER AND BOCCACCIO

Chaucer may have read the Teseida on one of his journeys to Italy in the 1370s. He must have known it well, as he made extensive use of it in other works before finally retelling its central story. In particular, he returned several times to the descriptions of the temples of Mars and Venus, and his unfinished Anelida and Arcite (before 1380) makes Creon's Thebes the setting for a story of a forsaken woman. R. A. Pratt (604-5) may be right in saying that Chaucer would never have given the name Arcite to a character who wins and then abandons a woman if he had intended at that stage to write a poem with a hero of the same name, but, once Chaucer's works had been collected into a single volume, readers might have been influenced by the existence of what Speght's 1602 text calls the tale ‘Of Queene Annelida, and false Arcite’. In The Two Noble Kinsmen, Palamon insists on the word ‘false’ in connection with Arcite, and Arcite acknowledges his falseness in his final speech.

Chaucer's most extended tribute to Boccaccio's poem survives as The Knight's Tale, usually thought to date from the mid-1380s. … It is about one-third the length of the Teseida. By contrast with Boccaccio, Chaucer seems to have wanted to remove the links with classical literature. Theseus' defeat of Hippolyta, which occupies the first book of Boccaccio's poem, is dealt with in one line. There is no mention of Oedipus, Eteocles or Polynices, and the mourning women exist simply to inspire Theseus' campaign. Neither Palamon nor Arcite is concerned with Juno's wrath. Emilia is much less interesting, much more purely symbolic, than in Boccaccio.

Moreover, Chaucer alters the balance between the two heroes. Boccaccio, who is thought to have portrayed himself as Arcita, not only makes him the first to see Emilia but gives him three times as many lines as Palemone and an extremely protracted and moving death (Pratt, 603). Chaucer makes Palamon the first to see Emilia, and has him insist on a prior commitment of sworn brotherhood that Arcite is betraying. Whereas both young men in Boccaccio are full of reverence towards the childlike Emilia, Chaucer discriminates between them: Palamon takes her for a goddess, whereas Arcite desires her as a woman.

The reduction of scale extends to the handling of space, though not of time (in both versions, the events take about ten years). Boccaccio's Teseo makes the site of Arcita's funeral pyre the grove in which he had sung his love songs to Emilia, and Palemone commemorates him by building a temple to Juno on the same site; Chaucer locates the tournament lists there as well and places the oratories to Mars, Venus and Diana in the tournament amphitheatre itself. The sense of crowding parallels the construction of the plot, which seems designed to create as many dilemmas as possible: which young man ‘hath the worse’—Palamon, who is in prison but able to see Emilia, or Arcite, who is free but banished? Who deserves Emilia more—the man who prays for victory or the one who prays to have her? Much criticism of the Tale, like subsequent criticism and performance of the play, has done little more than take sides in these debates.

THE MAIN PLOT AND ITS SOURCES

Like Pericles, but unlike any other Shakespeare play, The Two Noble Kinsmen openly acknowledges its chief source at the start. Its debt to The Knight's Tale is made clear both in the Prologue and in the Epilogue's reference to the play as a ‘tale’. Though the Prologue gives no indication that Chaucer was indebted to others for his story, the dramatists would certainly have known the Thebaid, if only because of John Lydgate's Siege of Thebes, a retelling of Statius, which was first added to Chaucer's Works in Stowe's edition of 1561 and reprinted by Speght in his 1598 edition (revised in 1602).

They might also have known Boccaccio's poem, though it had been forgotten in England by the end of the seventeenth century, when Dryden could only speculate on the possibility of an Italian source for The Knight's Tale. Francis Thynne's Animadversions on Speght's Chaucer (1599) states correctly that The Knight's Tale was taken ‘out of the Thesayde of Bocas’ (Kinsley, 4.2061). There were two sixteenth-century French translations of the Teseida, both of which attributed it correctly. At least one of these, a condensed prose version of 1597 by someone known on the title page only as le Sieur D.C.C., might have been known to one or both of the dramatists. Though Melchiori thinks that Shakespeare knew only Chaucer's version (6.xlviii), there are times when the dramatists seem closer to the Teseida than to The Knight's Tale. The opening scene, where the request of the three queens creates a conflict of love and duty not present in Chaucer, could have been inspired by Teseida 2.2-5, where Teseo, on his honeymoon, sees a vision of his friend Peritoo, who urges him to return to his duties in Athens. Palamon's brief ubi sunt passage in the play's prison scene (2.2.6-8) echoes both Arcita's three-stanza lament over the ruins of Thebes (Teseida, 4.14-16) and the death speech in which he lists the worldly pleasures that he leaves behind him: ‘Omè, dove lascio io i cari amici? / Dove le feste e il sommo diletto? / Ove i cavalli, omai fatti mendici / del lor signore?’ [Ah me, where do I leave my dear friends? Where the feastings and the supreme delight? Where the horses, impoverished now, without their lord?] (10.108). The three prayers to the gods in 5.1 occur in the sequence of the Teseida, whereas in the Tale it is Palamon who speaks first, followed by Emilia, then Arcite. (Perhaps, however, as Ann Thompson suggests (199), the order is that of Chaucer's descriptions of the three temples, which lie behind much of the language of the prayers.) Arcite's death, in The Knight's Tale, results from his being pitched forward when his horse stumbles; in the Teseida, as in The Two Noble Kinsmen, the horse comes over backward on top of him. The French translator, like the dramatists, omits the classical Fury sent by Boccaccio and Chaucer, making Arcite's horse go wild for no apparent reason.

If Boccaccio's portrayal of the kinsmen was weighted towards Arcite, and Chaucer's towards Palamon, the dramatists seem to have attempted to differentiate them yet retain a balance of sympathy. The character distinction does not begin until 2.2, but thereafter both Shakespeare and Fletcher seem to envisage them in terms of the conventional but effective contrast between a calm man (Arcite) and a passionate one (Palamon). This later becomes a contrast between the influences of Mars and Venus, comparable to what one finds within Othello or the Antony of Antony and Cleopatra. Emilia's role, inevitably, needed more extensive reworking, since Chaucer makes her speak only once, in her prayer to Diana. It may, then, be only coincidence that she sometimes sounds like Boccaccio's heroine, who also laments the effects of her beauty (8.97), fears that future ages will curse her for all the unnecessary deaths in the tournament (8.100) and says that she is incapable of choosing between the two men (8.104-5). The French translation, ‘ne sçaurois-ie iamais faire de choix ny d'election’ [I could never make either choice or election] (Theseyde, 115^v) is slightly closer to Emilia's ‘I / Am guiltless of election’ (5.1.153-4) than Boccaccio's ‘io non so qual di lor m'eleggesse’ [I do not know which one of them I would choose] (8.105). In both Boccaccio and Chaucer, she is present at the tournament; but Chaucer depicts her from the outside, presenting her affection toward the winner as typical female opportunism, whereas Boccaccio analyses her feelings in sympathetic detail. Her varied reactions to the cries of the supporters of the two contestants (8.107) may have made the dramatists decide to depict the offstage events of 5.3 through her eyes. Boccaccio's Emilia sees herself as a fatal influence because, while still a child, she was engaged to a cousin of Theseus, who died young (10.69); perhaps this is the origin of the childhood friendship with Flavina, described in 1.3 of the play.

It is usually assumed that the most famous Chaucerian dramatization, Richard Edwards' Palamon and Arcite, could not have influenced the Jacobean dramatists because it was never printed: Edwards died within a month of its highly successful premiere, which he directed himself at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1566, before an audience that included Elizabeth I. The queen spoke enthusiastically of the actors and gave presents of money to the boys who played Hippolyta and Emilia. Fortunately, because of the queen's presence, several eye-witnesses left detailed accounts. These show that the play featured a very large cast, a hunting scene, a tournament, and a funeral pyre for Arcite (Durand, 511; Elliott, 221, 224). Since its one surviving fragment, a song that Emilia sings after the death of Arcite, can be found in a seventeenth-century manuscript (Rollins, ‘Note’, 205), it is possible that more of the play, or at least its music, was still known in 1613; some of the original cast had been in their early teens in 1566 and had every reason to remember the occasion. One of Edwards' incidents, as described by a spectator, may explain a small puzzle in the final scene of The Two Noble Kinsmen. When Palamon is called down from the scaffold by Pirithous, he asks bemusedly, ‘Can that be, / When Venus, I have said, is false?’ (5.4.44-5). He has said nothing of the sort, unless off stage. But in Edwards's play Palamon, after his defeat, does reproach Venus, ‘saying that he had served her from infancy and now she had neither desire nor power to help him’ (Durand, 511). Perhaps, as R. M. Clements suggests (72), Fletcher and Shakespeare were also thinking of Edwards's one surviving play, Damon and Pithias (1565). As Pithias, who has remained as hostage for his friend Damon, is about to die in his place, Damon rushes in and pushes the sword aside, calling, ‘Stay, stay, stay, for the kinges aduantage stay’ (Edwards, Damon, 2028-9). The breathless entry, first of the Messenger, then of Pirithous, and their repeated cries of ‘Hold’ (5.4.40-1), may recall this dramatic moment.

The play's subplot may also have been influenced by the Teseida. In The Knight's Tale Palamon's escape from prison is explained by the simple statement (1467-74) that, with a friend's help, he drugged his jailer. In the Teseida, he pretends to be ill, sends his servant for a friendly doctor, and then, after the supposed consultation, leaves prison with the doctor, disguised as his own servant. Perhaps this combination of a doctor and changing clothes lies behind the bizarre events of The Two Noble Kinsmen, 5.2.

THE JAILER'S DAUGHTER

The dramatists' decision to complicate the Chaucerian story with a subplot may have resulted as much from their difficulty in turning Chaucer's Emilia into a central figure of the play as from the necessity of filling in the gaps in a story that requires so many lapses of time. Though the subplot has no obvious source, the woman who falls in love with her father's prisoner is a thoroughly traditional character. Mopsa in Sidney's Arcadia is a comic version of the type (see Thompson, ‘Jailers'’). Indeed, Miranda in The Tempest is a Jailer's Daughter in relation to Ferdinand in 3.1; although her disobedience consists only in letting Ferdinand know her name, she has been seen as part of a line that goes back at least to Medea (Black, 30). A still closer parallel occurs in the complex legend of Theseus, which contains within it many of the motifs that are dispersed among the other characters of the play. Chaucer's The Legend of Good Women combines his story with material from that of Palamon and Arcite: Ariadne and Phaedra overhear Theseus complaining in prison, and not only help him overcome the Minotaur but, with the help of his jailer (a character new to this version), enable him to escape with them. The story of Theseus' subsequent abandonment of Ariadne, who had helped him find his way in and out of the labyrinth, had many literary versions. In Catullus' poem on the nuptials of Peleus and Thetis, the coverlet of the marriage bed is described (rather ominously) as woven with the story of Ariadne, whose lament is given at length. Her lament also inspired what was probably the most popular of all Ovid's Heroides: imaginary letters from women to their absent lovers, which became models for Renaissance poems of complaint. Like the Jailer's Daughter, Ovid's Ariadne finds herself alone, on an island, with the ship of her lover vanishing in the distance. Cold, desperate, afraid of being devoured by wolves (81-4), unable to return to the kingdom where she betrayed her father for love of Theseus, she pleads, ‘turn about your ship, reverse your sail, glide swiftly back to me!’ (149-51).

Although Monteverdi's opera Arianna, first produced in Mantua in 1608, was the most famous Renaissance interpretation of Ariadne's story, Julia, in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, had already described herself as having played the part of ‘Ariadne passioning / For Theseus' perjury and unkind flight’ (4.4.167-8)—and she is playing it even as she speaks, since her own lover has been false to her. Fletcher seems to have been equally attracted to the story. Catullus' description of the Ariadne coverlet probably inspired the famous scene in The Maid's Tragedy, where Aspatia, deserted by her lover, offers to be the model for an embroidery of the deserted Ariadne, attempting at the same time, as Jonathan Bate says (263-4), to rewrite the story of Theseus:

Does not the story say, his Keele was split,
Or his masts spent, or some kind rock or other
Met with his vessel? …
                                                            It should have been so.

(Bowers, 2: 2.2.46-9)

In her madness, the Daughter imagines the rock and makes the shipwreck occur, though she imagines that Palamon's death has been caused by wolves. She also harps on the idea that her father will die as a consequence of her actions.

As Clements (193-5) and Waith (Oxf¹, 29) have pointed out, there are many resemblances between the Daughter and Viola in Beaumont and Fletcher's The Coxcomb, though this part of the plot is thought to be the work of Beaumont (Bowers, 1.263). Viola leaves home to elope with her lover, who misses their rendezvous because he gets drunk with friends. She is left helpless and alone, too proud to awaken her father ‘to see his daughter's shame’. Her comment, ‘if hee deceive mee thus, / A woman will not easily trust a man’ (1.6.7-14), may echo Ariadne's words as quoted by Catullus: ‘Nunc iam nulla viro iuranti femina credat’ [Henceforth let no woman believe a man's oath] (Catullus, p. 106, line 143); the Jailer's Daughter uses much the same language:

                                                            Sure he cannot
Be so unmanly as to leave me here;
If he do, maids will not so easily
Trust men again.

(2.6.18-21)

Though Viola's father is a Spanish aristocrat, not a jailer, the play also contains a comic subplot about a jailer whose prisoners escape and who is briefly threatened with hanging even though the escapees are only a tinker and his wife. The Coxcomb was popular enough to be performed at court before Elizabeth and Frederick and would have been fresh in Fletcher's mind in 1613.

Viola does not go mad as a result of her sufferings (she is duly reunited with her chastened lover), but mad scenes, for both men and women, were to become something of a speciality of Fletcher's. The madness can be real or feigned, and how seriously it is taken seems to depend on context rather than gender. The middle-aged soldier Memnon, in The Mad Lover (c.1616), thinks himself in the Elysian fields, like the Daughter in 4.3, while the heroine of The Wild Goose Chase (c.1621), pretending to have gone mad for the hero's love, sounds exactly like the genuinely mad Daughter of 4.1:

I must be up to morrow, to go to Church:
And I must dress me, put my new Gown on,
And be so fine to meet my Love: Heigh ho!
Will not you tell me where my Love lies buried?

(Bowers, 6:4.3.62-5)

The Jailer's Daughter, of course, is not betrayed by Palamon, only by her own fantasies. Her ballads … create a role for her which can end in happiness (‘Child Waters’, ‘Young Beichan’) or in disillusionment (‘The Fair Flower of Northumberland’). She thus shares with Ophelia the habit of what Carol Neely has called ‘quoted discourse’ (324). Even in her final scene she is speaking the language of proverbs, asking directions to the end of the world (where damsels in romance go with their lovers) and, to the Wooer's offer of a hundred kisses, adding a formulaic twenty.

Doctors and poets alike compare the disturbed human mind to a ship tossed in a tempest (for example, in the popular medical work, The Touchstone of Complexions (Lemnius, A3 and A8^v). Having first observed the ship from a distance, as she goes mad (3.4), the Daughter in 4.1 forces her family and friends to become part of its imaginary crew. Falling in with her fantasies, they instinctively follow the same path that the Doctor later recommends on the grounds that ‘It is a falsehood she is in, which is with falsehoods to be combated’ (4.3.93-4). Though one reviewer of the 1928 Old Vic production found the Doctor ‘a surprisingly modern forerunner of Dr. Freud’ (Horsnell), his methods are essentially those recommended in Renaissance treatises on lovesickness. For medieval writers, Amor Hereos (a term of mysterious origin) was a heroic malady that afflicted only men. Chaucer describes Arcite, during his exile from Athens, as suffering from near-madness: ‘Nat oonly lik the loveris maladye / Of Hereos, but rather lyk manye, / Engendred of humour malencolik’ (Chaucer, Riv, 1373-5). This ‘knights melancholie’ (Laurentius, 89) was still meaningful to sixteenth-century physicians, but in his edition of 1602 Speght could make no sense of the Chaucerian passage; he emended hereos to Eros.

Only in the sixteenth century, Mary Wack argues, did lovesickness become a condition specifically identified with women rather than men (176). Although the Daughter's madness has been called, by comparison to male madness, ‘“pretty” discourse rather than a soul-ravaging disorder’ (Charney, 457), she is more complex than most theatrical madwomen (including the pathetic, endlessly singing Constance of Richard Brome's Northern Lass (1629), who was probably inspired by her). An innocent and rather colourless presence in her first scene, she is transformed by love and madness into a singer, a dancer, a person of vivid imagination and even, like Hamlet, something of a social satirist (in 4.3 at least). Her fantasies of Palamon's death and her father's execution can easily be explained as the product not only of grief, but of an anger that she has not previously been licensed to express.

The early literature on lovesickness (some of it from Arabian physicians) states frankly that the best cure for this condition is coitus (Wack, 11-12). The danger of frustrated sexuality was a commonplace from the time of Hippocrates, who is supposed to have warned that if husbands were not provided for girls of marriageable age they might hang or drown themselves (Ferrand, 96-7). As a ballad-writer put it, in ‘Dr Do-good's Directions’ (c. 1633-52),

If a mayd be infected with the falling away,
Which proceeds from a longing desire, some say,
If she will be preserved and kept from decay,
She must get her a husband without all delay.

(Roxburghe Ballads, 1.235-8, quoted Wiltenburg, 120)

Andreas Laurentius (André du Laurens), after devoting several chapters to the kind of melancholy that ‘commeth by the extremitie of loue’, concluded that ‘There are two waies to cure this amorous melancholie: the one is, the inioying of the thing beloued: the other resteth in the skill and paines of a good Phisition’ (117-21). Some, however, rejected this first remedy altogether, arguing that ‘vice cannot be driven out by vice’ (Ferrand, 334). When the patient was a woman, the moral issue became particularly acute.

It is for this reason that the Jailer's Daughter is introduced in 2.1 as a young woman with a fiancé. Except in the astonishing lyrical speech in 4.1, the Wooer is notable chiefly for his silence. Depending on the director's interpretation, he can be either stupid or shy. The part may have been deliberately underwritten to keep him an unknown quantity until the doctor's stratagem forces him into the unfamiliar role of Palamon. Perhaps a change is suggested even before this, when the devoted but practical young man who was discussing dowries with the Jailer in 2.1 tells the Doctor in 4.3 that he would give half his estate to be on the same terms with the Daughter again—even after she has told everyone about her love for another man.

As one might expect, it is with regard to this part of the play, with its almost exclusive focus on sexual desire, that the greatest change in critical opinion has taken place. While Seward found the Daughter a ‘charming Character’ (10.5), and the introduction to an edition attributed to Sir Walter Scott called the progressive development of her madness ‘at least as touching’ as Ophelia's abrupt appearance as a madwoman (Scott, l.iii), most nineteenth-century readers saw her as a degradation of Ophelia and her final scene with the Doctor and Wooer as ‘disgusting and imbecile in the extreme’ (Spalding, 51). A. F. Hopkinson, who edited The Two Noble Kinsmen in 1894, declared that ‘the marriage of the Gaoler's daughter ought to have taken place after her reason had returned, or the conclusion should have been rounded by her seeking death by her own hand’ (Hopkinson, 3.xxxiv). As late as 1947, John Masefield, a sensitive critic of the play, wondered whether a staging of 5.2 would be acceptable to a modern audience. ‘If you give your care to it, much of this scene of Doctor, Wooer and Jailer's Daughter can be made most touching, most tender. Still, even so???’ (201).

These readers were not merely objecting to the fact that the Wooer and Daughter, still unmarried, are clearly going offstage to have sex at the end of 5.2—an act that could be explained by reference to the ambiguous status of the betrothed woman in the Renaissance. More disturbing is the deception practised on her, which could be taken to make the Wooer's action little better than rape. It has been argued that the Doctor's use of the bed-trick is ‘not intended as a means of maintaining the illusions of the jailor's daughter but of helping her to accept the realities of love and marriage by working through those illusions’ (Desens, 86-7). In some productions, this therapeutic aspect has been stressed effectively. In New York (1993) and Ashland (1994), the Wooer in Palamon's clothes looked surprisingly like Palamon. Indeed, at Ashland, the Daughter's tentative ‘Are not you Palamon?’ and the Wooer's ‘Do not you know me?’ (5.2.82) showed both his reluctance to lie to her and her sense that perhaps he had been Palamon, or Palamon had been the Wooer, all along. At least one director, Julian Lopez-Morillas (Berkeley, 1985), felt that the Daughter must to some extent be aware of the real identity of her Palamon. One might compare the end of Fletcher's Wild Goose Chase, in which the hero, apparently tricked into marriage with the heroine while she is impersonating a rich lady, says (to save face?), ‘and yet perhaps I knew ye’ (5.6.81). The Daughter's final lines to the Wooer, ‘But you shall not hurt me. / … If you do, love, I'll cry.’ (5.2.110-11), touchingly suggest that her apparent eagerness for sex may have been masking fear—of sex itself, or of the betrayal that might follow it. ‘This’, Kenneth Tynan wrote in 1950, ‘is to kill with something more than kindness—with the bitterest of compassion’ (223). Audiences usually find the ending happy; it sometimes receives spontaneous applause. But some directors are reluctant to treat the deception as benign or to let the Daughter's story end so easily: in several recent productions …, she has reappeared, still mad, at the end of the play.

COURTLY LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP LITERATURE

The relation of The Two Noble Kinsmen to the ethos of courtly love and friendship is complicated by Chaucer's own ambivalence towards the courtly-love tradition and by the complexity of the friendship literature inherited by the Jacobean writers. Chaucer's Parliament of Foules, which Shakespeare clearly knew when he wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream, makes much of the contrast between the gentyl birds and the lewd, or lower-class ones, who are unable to see unselfish, unrequited love as anything but absurd. Reactions to The Knight's Tale, likewise, are often motivated by a desire to take sides with either the gentyl or the lewd. Thomas Wyatt's satire, ‘Mine own John Poyns’, puts the author firmly on the side of the gentyl when he says that he cannot ‘Praise Sir Thopas for a noble tale / And scorn the story that the knighte told’ (lines 50-1). He must mean not only that he regards Chaucer's story as noble but also that some of his contemporaries found it absurd. There is no indication that any Renaissance reader took the Tale to be a satire on chivalry, or on the knight himself, as Terry Jones (passim) has argued. Yet the Chaucerian tale most frequently echoed by Spenser is not The Knight's Tale but the one that Wyatt presents as its opposite, the burlesque Sir Thopas (Burrow, 146). Even before Don Quixote reached England (some time in the early seventeenth century, although Shelton's translation of Part 1 was published only in 1611), the literary attitude toward chivalry and courtly love was as ambivalent as that displayed in Chaucer. Beaumont and Fletcher read Don Quixote early; they apparently used a French translation as a source for The Coxcomb (1608-10) and Fletcher went on to make use of Cervantes in thirteen other plays (McMullan, 259). Yet Don Quixote did not destroy the courtly-love tradition. Massinger, Field and Fletcher used a question d'amour from Boccaccio's Filocolo as the basis of the plot of The Knight of Malta (c. 1618). Like Seneca's Controversiae, which Waith has shown to be the source of several Beaumont and Fletcher plays (86-98), these questions pose dilemmas about love for the listeners to debate. Hardly changed, they re-emerged in French précieux literature, which Fletcher also read assiduously, borrowing from the highly influential Astrée (1610), by Honoré D'Urfé, for his comedy Monsieur Thomas (c.1610-13). Much as Counter-Reformation Catholicism responded to Protestant austerity by making the most of the miraculous and emotional aspects of religion, the romance tradition responded to Cervantes by embracing exaggeration and improbability. The perception that the most idealized sentiments are potentially the most ridiculous is vital to many plays of the period.

The mixed setting of The Two Noble Kinsmen—supposedly classical Greece, but based on an acknowledged medieval source—parallels its conflicting attitudes to friendship. As L. J. Mills summarizes them, such classical idealizations as Cicero's De Amicitia emphasize the importance of social, intellectual and moral equality between friends; by definition there can be no true friendship between dishonest people (10-14). Conflicts between friends, then, must be conflicts of generosity (as between Damon and Pithias, Orestes and Pylades in Euripides' Iphigeneia in Tauris, or Theseus trying to save Hercules who ‘saved me from Hades’ (Euripides, The Madness of Hercules, line 1170).) On the other hand, medieval culture was hierarchical and the chivalric code emphasized relations between man and woman more than those between men (Mills, 16-17). As against idealized friendship—a product of leisure and civility—Mills cites examples of sworn brotherhood, which sometimes (as in the tale of Amis and Amelion) emphasize the almost identical appearance of the two men, also hinted at in the common plot device of one friend fighting in another's armour. The tale of Titus and Gysippus emphasizes interchangeability to the point where one man can marry the heroine in place of the other.

Montaigne's famous essay on his friendship with La Boétie was clearly in Shakespeare's mind at the time when he wrote The Two Noble Kinsmen, but, interestingly enough, he drew on it, not in the relationship of Palamon and Arcite, but in Emilia's dialogue with Hippolyta in 1.3. Waith (Oxf¹, Introduction) has pointed out the importance of this essay; I would add that Shakespeare gives Hippolyta not only the sentiments but even the rhythms of John Florio's translation of Montaigne when she speaks of Theseus and Pirithous:

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

(1.3.41-4)

Montaigne had similarly described male friendship as ‘the pulling of a knot so hard, so fast, and so durable’ (Florio, 1.27, 200) and the way in which two people ‘entermixe and confound themselves one in the other, with so universall a commixture, that they weare out, and can no more finde the seame that hath conjoyned them together’ (202). (He may have been paraphrasing De Amicitia (xxi), which says that when friendships are broken off they should be dissuendae magis quam discendendae [unravelled rather than rent apart].) Emilia's account of her childhood friendship with Flavina is an implicit reply to Montaigne's contention that women's minds are not strong enough to tie such a knot as he describes. While the reference to ‘fury’ (1.3.79) is difficult to understand, the speech as a whole seems to recall Montaigne's adaptation of Plato's concept of same-sex love: ‘the first furie, enspired by the son of Venus in the lovers hart, upon the object of tender youths-flower … in his infancie, and before the age of budding’ (201). Indeed, the oxymoron of ‘fury-innocent’ may perhaps express something of the period's dual attitude: the idealization of male friendship was combined with what Alan Bray argues was ‘extreme hostility’ to homosexuality in the abstract but a refusal to recognise it ‘in most concrete situations’ (Bray, 77).

The two most highly respected English Renaissance writers, Sidney and Spenser, depicted examples of idealized male friendship, but in neither the Arcadia nor The Faerie Queene does the friendship seriously clash with love. Shakespeare, however, frequently depicts such a clash, as in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and also shows in Sonnet 42 how the notion of interchangeability can allow disloyal friendship to be portrayed as extreme loyalty:

Loving offenders, thus I will excuse thee:
Thou dost love her because thou know'st I love her …
But here's the joy, my friend and I are one;
Sweet flattery! then she loves but me alone.

(Son 42: 5-6, 13-14)

Arcite uses the same disingenuous arguments to justify his rivalry with Palamon:

                    am not I
Part of your blood, part of your soul? You have told me
That I was Palamon and you were Arcite …
Am not I liable to those affections,
Those joys, griefs, angers, fears, my friend shall suffer? …
Why then would you deal so cunningly,
So strangely, so unlike a noble kinsman,
To love alone?

(2.2.187-94)

In the light of this sophistry, it is hard to see Palamon and Arcite as ideal friends in the same sense as Sidney's Musidorus and Pyrocles in the Arcadia, except in so far as their friendship is based on shared excellence in sporting and military competitions. While they are still trying to console each other on their life imprisonment, Arcite makes the common claims for friendship:

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;
I am your heir and you are mine.

(2.2.79-83)

But this is after he has lamented that they will die in prison, ‘And, which is heaviest, Palamon, unmarried’ (2.2.29). The ideal of perfect, all-inclusive friendship is only constructed afterwards, as a replacement. Moreover, whereas Damon and Pythias or Orestes and Pylades argue over who shall die for the other (Cicero describes a now-lost Orestes play in which this scene brought the audience to its feet with cheers (7.24)), the kinsmen not only try to kill each other but, when Theseus is about to sentence them, Palamon actually asks to see his friend die first, ‘That I may tell my soul, he shall not have her’ (3.6.179). At such moments, one is tempted to see the play as a parody of friendship literature.

Yet other scenes seem to draw on that very literature. The depiction of the friendship is often genuinely touching, especially in the scenes where the men expect to say farewell to it forever: before the fight in 3.6 and at their parting in 5.1. The strange final scene, which is the dramatists' own conception, may be explained with reference to the philosophy of friendship. Realistically speaking, Theseus' requirement that the losers of the tournament must be beheaded, his assumption that they will want this to happen as soon as possible after their defeat, and his decision not to be present, are either absurd or sadistic. The effect of this series of decisions—apparently considered important enough to justify all the improbabilities—is to make Arcite's victory contingent on Palamon's execution and Palamon's life contingent on Arcite's death. Palamon's unexpected response, as he lifts his head from the block—‘What / Hath waked us from our dream?’ (5.4.47-8)—may simply be an allusion to the sleep of death. But it recalls an equally surprising episode in Book 4 of The Faerie Queene, in which Spenser literalizes the topos of One Soul in Bodies Twain (the title of Mills' book). Triamond, twice apparently killed in a fight, springs up again from the ground (‘As one that had out of a dream been reard’ (4.3.31)), because he now possesses the souls of his two dead brothers. As Theseus says to Palamon, immediately after Arcite's death, ‘your day is lengthened and / The blissful dew of heaven does arrose you’ (5.4.103-4). It is as if his friend's death had indeed given Palamon new life.

LITERARY REINCARNATION

Since the story of Triamond is part of Spenser's continuation of Chaucer's unfinished Squire's Tale, his poem not only describes but enacts reincarnation, as well as a display of friendship across the centuries. That Renaissance writers thought in these terms is clear from the often-quoted remarks of Francis Meres in 1598: ‘As the soule of Euphorbus was thought to liue in Pythagoras: so the sweete wittie soule of Ouid liues in mellifluous and honytongued Shakespeare’ (Riv, 1844). Sidney and Spenser might well have seemed to live again in the second decade of the seventeenth century: Sidney's collected works had their fourth edition in 1613; Spenser's were first published in 1611. The Arcadia, unfinished like both The Squire's Tale and The Faerie Queene, was imitated by Gervase Markham in continuations published in 1607 and 1613. In 1610 Fletcher's cousin, Giles Fletcher the younger, brought out Christ's Victory and Triumph, homage to Spenser with frequent evident borrowings from The Faerie Queene. Fletcher's friends Drayton and Browne were conscious followers of Spenser and he himself quotes directly from The Faerie Queene in The Woman's Prize (1.3.27-8) and possibly in The Two Noble Kinsmen (4.2.33). Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, acted 1613-14, also echoes the Arcadia several times.

The Prologue to The Two Noble Kinsmen shows that the authors saw themselves in the tradition of other adapters and continuers of earlier literature, and that they recognized the riskiness of the enterprise. The speaker hopes that their tribute to Chaucer will not result in audience hissing that will ‘shake the bones’ of the dead poet (17)—that is, as one might say now, make him turn in his grave—and force him to ‘cry from under ground’ at hearing his work so badly imitated. The reference to bones is not purely comic. In The Duchess of Malfi Antonio, standing in a ruined cloister, considers the ironic deception of the men buried there, who ‘thought it should have canopy'd their bones / Till doomsday’ (5.3.16-17) but are now exposed to the harshness of the weather; the same obsession makes the queens in 1.1 of The Two Noble Kinsmen harp on the dead bodies lying in the ‘foul fields of Thebes’. Whoever wrote the lines carved on Shakespeare's gravestone three years later represented the poet as sharing this common view: ‘Bleste be y^e man y^t spares thes stones, / And curst be he y^t moves my bones’ (Riv, 1834). In the context of the play's intense consciousness of its relationship to its source, and to Chaucer's ‘bones’, one might perhaps see in this epitaph a fear not only of physical exposure but also of literary desecration. …