SOURCE: Stewart, Alan. “‘Near Akin’: The Trials of Friendship in The Two Noble Kinsmen.” In Shakespeare's Late Plays: New Readings, edited by Jennifer Richards and James Knowles, pp. 57-71. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999.

[In the following essay, Stewart investigates the nature of the failure of Palamon and Arcite's idealized male friendship depicted in The Two Noble Kinsmen, suggesting that the relationship was doomed because of the conflict between humanist and chivalric notions of male friendship, and the realities of male relations and kinship bonds in Jacobean England.]

Critics have never been happy with The Two Noble Kinsmen.¹ It has traditionally been regarded as an unsatisfactory play, compromised, in Ann Thompson's words, by ‘many tensions and inconsistencies’;² to at least one critic, it remains ‘that most distressing of plays’.³ Despite its use of an archetypal story of two male friends brought into conflict over a woman, already tried and tested by Boccaccio (in the Teseida) and Chaucer (Knight's Tale), its telling here has seemed less than successful. Theodore Spencer went so far as to complain that the story of Palamon and Arcite ‘is intrinsically feeble, superficial, and undramatic’.⁴ The characters themselves have been ‘dismissed as virtually interchangeable emblems of Platonic love and chivalric courtesy—Tweedledum and Tweedledee as Kenneth Muir once called them’.⁵ Some have attributed this to the inherent contradictions of the play's genre, tragicomedy.⁶ Some have attributed it to its collaborative authorship by Fletcher and Shakespeare, as if each playwright wrote in solitary ignorance of his partner's work, and the play necessarily betrayed that process.⁷ This approach makes possible, for example, the argument that Shakespeare composed the first exchange between Palamon and Arcite, but that Fletcher was responsible for their apparently contradictory quarrel in the prison scene.⁸

I prefer to follow the approach of Richard Hillman, who has argued that ‘it is … possible, especially in a post-modern critical climate, to take the play's internal jars, whatever their origin … as integral to the text we have, not as blocking the text that might have been’.⁹ I shall argue that, rather than being a failed attempt at a play about idealised male friendship, The Two Noble Kinsmen is rather a play about a failed attempt at idealised male friendship. In turn, I shall suggest, this failure derives from the juxtaposition of both classical-humanist and chivalric modes of male friendship with the realities of social relations, and a particular form of kinship, in Jacobean England.

The Two Noble Kinsmen contains a proliferation of variations on that classical and then humanist theme of amicitia, the idealised male friendship celebrated in such key Renaissance pedagogical texts as Cicero's De amicitia and De officiis and Seneca's De beneficiis.¹⁰ First, Theseus and Pirithous present an established example of amicitia, a legendary male couple revered alongside Orestes and Pylades, Damon and Pythias, and Scipio and Laelius. Pirithous operates to Theseus as alter ipse, another himself, to the extent that he stands in as Theseus at his friend's wedding to Hippolyta, because Theseus is honour-bound to avenge the deaths of the husbands of the three queens. In Emilia's words ‘The one of th'other may be said to water / Their intertangled roots of love’ (I, iii, 58-9).

Second, we encounter the female friendship of Emilia and Flavina. Emilia tells of her love for the innocent ‘play-fellow’ (I, iii, 50) of her childhood who died young:

What she liked
Was then of me approved; what not, condemned—
No more arraignment. The flower that I would pluck
And put between my breasts (then but beginning
To swell about the blossom), oh, she would long
Till she had such another, and commit it
To the like innocent cradle, where phoenix-like
They died in perfume.

(I, iii, 64-71)

This intense female friendship, located in early pubescence and now irretrievably lost, occupies the same elegiac space as those in earlier Shakespeare plays: Rosalind and Celia in As You Like It, and Helena and Hermia in A Midsummer Night's Dream, for example.¹¹

But the central friendship is that of Palamon and Arcite. As they are imprisoned together, Arcite gives one of the most passionate friendship speeches in English literature:

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;
I am your heir and you are mine. This place
Is our inheritance; no hard oppressor
Dare take this from us; here, with a little patience,
We shall live long and loving.

(II, ii, 78-86)

Palamon answers, ‘Is there record of any two that loved / Better than we do, Arcite?’, to which Arcite affirms, ‘Sure there cannot.’ ‘I do not think it possible’, continues Palamon, ‘our friendship / Should ever leave us’. ‘Till our deaths it cannot’, declares Arcite, ‘And after death our spirits shall be led / To those that love eternally’ (II, ii, 112-17). The tale of Palamon and Arcite as told in this play thus echoes that quintessential humanist fiction of the two male friends, temporarily rent asunder by the intrusion of a woman, who then go on to make up, usually with one of them marrying the woman, and the other marrying his friend's sister. Perhaps the most famous example is the story of Titus and Gisippus, told by Boccaccio in his Decameron, and then Englished by Thomas Elyot, and placed centrally in his influential Boke Named the Gouernour.¹² The moral of such tales is that, despite the claims of family and marriage, male friendship will emerge as the supreme affective force in the lives of the two men.

This superabundance of friendships should, I suggest, raise our suspicions from the start, as couple after couple are introduced displaying apparently textbook adherence to the model. As Theodore Spencer wrote incisively in 1939, ‘[o]ne of Shakespeare's favourite dramatic devices in his mature work is to establish a set of values and then to show how it is violated by the individual action which follows’.¹³ Here, these three instances are introduced precisely to point up the relative failings of two of them. In the case of Emilia and Flavina, the elegiac tone points to the futility of a female version of amicitia, always already lost. But more importantly, in Palamon and Arcite something is terribly wrong. From the declaration just quoted, the eternal friendship of Palamon and Arcite lasts exactly two more lines, by which time Palamon has caught sight of Emilia, and Arcite has to urge him (unsuccessfully) to ‘forward’ with his speech. Their subsequent quarrel over Emilia, leading to an illegal duel, and ultimately to the strange death of Arcite—rather than to the usual double marriage—indicates clearly that all is not well in this telling of their friendship.

The reason for this, I shall suggest, is that in Pala mon and Arcite we see a literary, humanist template sitting uncomfortably on a particular Jacobean social reality. The story of Palamon and Arcite is subtly nuanced in each of its retellings. As Eugene Waith notes, in Boccaccio's Teseida, it is ‘basically a tale of lovers’; in Chaucer's Knight's Tale, the relationship is a ‘chivalric bond of blood-brotherhood’.¹⁴ In Shakespeare and Fletcher's version, I suggest, Palamon and Arcite are, first and foremost, as the title makes quite clear, kinsmen, and as they constantly reiterate, cousins. In this chapter, I shall argue that we can make far more sense of The Two Noble Kinsmen if we stop thinking of it as a play about friendship, and approach it instead as a play about the problems of kinship, and specifically the problems of cognatic cousinage.¹⁵

The Two Noble Kinsmen operates, as much of Jacobean England operated, within a culture where women (and figuratively, their virginity) were passed between families in marriage for financial gain; in the upper middling classes and above, these transactions were often complex and lengthy affairs, as befitted such important exchanges of lands, goods and cash. From the first words of the prologue, The Two Noble Kinsmen situates itself centrally within such a culture:

New plays and maidenhead are near akin:
Much followed both, for both much money gi'en,
If they stand sound and well. And a good play,
Whose modest scenes blush on his marriage day
And shake to lose his honour, is like her
That after holy tie [the wedding] and first night's stir
Yet still is Modesty and still retains
More of the maid, to sight, than husband's pains.

(Prologue, II. 1-8)

The action of the play is inserted into an interrupted marriage (once again, as in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Theseus and Hippolyta have to wait!); the action is concluded when Emilia is exchanged between her new brother-in-law Theseus and the surviving kinsman, Palamon. (Although Arcite appears to give Emilia to Palamon with his dying breath—‘Take her. I die’ (V, iv, 95)—in fact it is Theseus who endorses the match). Even the Jailor's Daughter becomes marriageable because Palamon, in gratitude for her actions in springing him from gaol, gives ‘a sum of money to her marriage: / A large one—a gift, of course, not directly to the woman, but to her father, in order that he might marry her to the advantage of both father and daughter (IV, i, 21-4). When Palamon and Arcite are imprisoned, they first bewail the fact that they must remain bachelors; as Arcite puts it:

here age must find us
And, which is heaviest, Palamon, unmarried.
The sweet embraces of a loving wife,
Loaden with kisses, armed with thousand Cupids,
Shall never clasp our necks; no issue know us;
No figures of ourselves shall we e'er see,
To glad our age, and like young eagles teach 'em
Boldly to gaze against bright arms and say,
‘Remember what your fathers were, and conquer!’

(II, ii, 25-36)

Much critical work has been done to illuminate this commodification of women in marriage, most notably Gayle Rubin's reworking of the anthropological work of Claude Lévi-Strauss to uncover the ‘traffic in women’, and Eve Sedgwick's combining of this with René Girard's triangular formulation to reread male rivalry over women as the prime feature of male homosociality.¹⁶ In her study of quattrocento and cinquecento Florence, Christiane Klapisch-Zuber has shown how these abstract structures operated in practice. ‘In Florence’, she writes, ‘men were and made the “houses”. The word casa designates … the material house, the lodging of a domestic unit … But it also stands for an entire agnatic kinship group. ‘These houses, and kinship in general, were ‘determined by men, and the male branching of genealogies drawn up by contemporaries shows how little importance was given, after one or two generations, to kinship through women’. She illustrates graphically how, as they married, women moved between houses—both lineage groups and the physical buildings—demonstrating both the stability of the house, and the radical discontinuity of the lives of the women exchanged between them:

In these case, in the sense of both physical and the symbolic house, women were passing guests. To contemporary eyes, their movements in relation to the case determined their social personality more truly than the lineage group from which they came. It was by means of their physical ‘entrances’ and ‘exits’ into and out of the ‘house’ that their families of origin or of alliance evaluated the contribution of women to the greatness of the casa.¹⁷

Although the importance of kinship in the English middling classes is thought to have been diminishing during this period, in the upper classes it still held sway. As Keith Wrightson writes, ‘[i]t is undoubtedly true … that both the titular aristocracy and the upper gentry were deeply preoccupied with ancestry and lineage and that they tended to recognise a wide range of kinsmen’,¹⁸ indeed Anthony Fletcher has asserted that in Sussex county society ‘kinship was the dominant principle’.¹⁹ Mervyn James writes that the deepest obligation in any man's life was:

to the lineage, the family and kinship group. For this, being inherited with the ‘blood’, did not depend on promise or oath. It could neither be contracted into, nor could the bond be broken. For a man's very being as honourable had been transmitted to him with the blood of his ancestors, themselves honourable men. Honour therefore was not merely an individual possession, but that of the collectivity, the lineage. Faithfulness to the kinship group arose out of this intimate involvement of personal and collective honour, which meant that both increased or diminished together. Consequently, in critical honour situations where an extremity of conflict arose, or in which dissident positions were taken up involving revolt, treason and rebellion, the ties of blood were liable to assert themselves with a particular power.²⁰

Viewed in this English social context, rather than in its humanist literary context, the play reads rather differently. The first words uttered by Arcite put in place a competition between affective and familial links: ‘Dear Palamon, dearer in love than blood / And our prime cousin’ (I, ii, 1-2). The ‘love’ that Arcite feels for Palamon is greater than the claim of ‘blood’, the fact that they are first cousins. Yet they refer to themselves constantly in kinship terms (at least thirty-eight times in the course of the play): ‘cousin’, ‘coz’, ‘noble cousin’ (II, ii, 1), ‘gentle cousin’ (II, ii, 70 and III, vi, 112), ‘fair cousin’ (III, vi, 18), ‘sweet cousin’ (III, vi, 69), ‘Clear-spirited cousin’ (I, ii, 74), ‘My coz, my coz’ (III, i, 58), ‘kinsman’ (III, vi, 21), ‘noble kinsman’ (II, ii, 193 and III, vi, 17).²¹ Even when the two are estranged during their competition for Emilia, they are ‘Traitor kinsman’ (III, i, 30) and ‘base cousin’ (III, iii, 44) and Palamon can punningly answer Arcite's ‘Dear cousin Palamon’ with ‘Cozener Arcite’ (III, i, 43-4), reminding us that the root of ‘cozening’ is the cozener's claim to be his victim's long-lost cousin.²²

‘Cousin’, like ‘kinsman’, is a deliberately vague term in early modern English, one that can refer to any loose family connection: Anthony Fletcher writes that in Sussex, ‘stress on cousinage in correspondence and account keeping became a mere mark of courtesy. The tight circles of intimate friendship, which were more significant for the dynamics of country affairs, ran within the wider circles of blood’.²³ But these men are not merely ‘kinsmen’: they share a very particular relationship—to Theseus, they are ‘royal german foes’ (V, i, 9), implying a close cousin relationship, and in the Herald's words, ‘They are sisters’ children, nephews to the King’ (I, iv, 16). This echoes the Chaucerian source, where they are described as being ‘of the blood riall / Of Thebes, and of sistren two yborne’ (II. 1018-19).²⁴ This point is reiterated strikingly as Palamon and Arcite go through the ritual motions before their attempted duel: Palamon asserts:

Thou art mine aunt's son
And that blood we desire to shed is mutual,
In me thine and in thee mine.

(III, vi, 94-6)

In other words, their blood relationship derives from the female line—in Roman or Scottish law terms, their kinship is cognatic, rather than agnatic (through the male line). Palamon and Arcite are an example, therefore, of what we might call ‘cognatic cousinage’.

There is no doubting of course that the kin relationship of cousins german, or first cousins, is extremely close, so close that if one were male and one female, then their right to marry each other would be disputed. However, seen in terms of a culture that exchanges women between patriarchal houses, cousins german whose kinship is cognatic occupy a strangely distant relationship: they are necessarily born into different houses, because their mothers married into different houses. This means, then, that the connection between the two cousins is not necessarily mutually beneficial—what benefits one need not benefit the other.

The peculiarity of this particular kinship relationship—its intense affective claims belied by its signal lack of practical utility—can be glimpsed in the tortuous interactions of two contemporary cousins german: Sir Robert Cecil and Francis Bacon. Cecil was the son of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, by his second wife Mildred Cooke; Bacon was the son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper, by his second wife Anne Cooke. Mildred and Anne were sisters, two of the renowned and learned daughters of Sir Anthony Cooke, and thus Robert and Francis were first cousins, an instance of cognatic cousinage. But this apparently close family connection was put under great strain after the premature death of Francis's father in February 1579. Left without adequate provision by his father, and unable to call on his estranged elder half-brothers after a dispute about the will, Francis naturally turned to his uncle, Lord Burghley. Throughout his correspondence of the 1580s and early 1590s there are unveiled hints that Burghley might want to become a surrogate parent to his poor nephew. Instead, however, Francis was to be consistently disappointed by his uncle, who put his energies behind his own son, and other protégés. Francis in turn was forced to look for support beyond his immediate family, and turned in 1588 to Elizabeth's new young favourite, Robert Devereux, the second earl of Essex.²⁵

Essex backed Francis in his bid to become Attorney-General in 1593 and 1594. It soon became clear, however, that Burghley and Cecil were backing another candidate, Edward Coke. This situation produced some highly charged encounters between Bacon's supporters (including Essex and Bacon's mother) and Coke's supporters (Burghley and Cecil). Such an encounter is recorded for us by one of Essex's intelligencers, Anthony Standen, to whom Essex related the anecdote.²⁶ At the end of January 1593, in the privacy of a shared coach, Sir Robert asked Essex who his candidate was for the vacant post of Attorney-General. Essex affected astonishment, declaring that he ‘wondered Sir Robert should ask him that question, seeing it could not be unknown unto him that resolutely against all whosoever for Francis Bacon he stood’.

Sir Robert affected amazement. ‘Good Lord’, he replied, ‘I wonder your Lordship should go about to spend your strength in so unlikely or impossible a matter.’ It was out of the question, he continued, that Francis Bacon should be raised to a position of such eminence, since he was simply too young and inexperienced (Francis was thirty-three at the time). Essex readily admitted that he could not think of a precedent for so youthful a candidate for the post of attorney. But he pointed out that youth and inexperience did not seem to be hindering the bid by Sir Robert himself (‘[a] younger than Francis, of lesser learning and of no greater experience’) to become principal secretary of state, the most influential of all government posts. Cecil retaliated immediately:

I know your lordship means myself. Although my years and experience are small, yet weighing the school I studied in and the great wisdom and learning of my schoolmaster, and the pains and observations I daily passed, yet I deem my qualifications to be sufficient. The added entitlement of my father's long service will make good the rest.

Unconvinced, Essex passionately reaffirmed his support for Bacon. ‘And for your own part Sir Robert’, he concluded, ‘I think strange both of my Lord Treasurer and you that can have the mind to seek the preferment of a stranger before so near a kinsman as a first cousin.’

This exchange demonstrates vividly both the symbolic and the practical implications of various relationships between kinsmen. It testifies to the real practical value of the closest kin relationships: Cecil's career is quite explicitly acknowledged as his birthright, because of his father's success. Cognatic cousinage, however, is more complex. On the one hand, we see here the social expectations of the relationship, and of its powerful affective pull (‘strange [that] you … can have the mind to seek the preferment of a stranger before so near a kinsman as a first cousin’). On the other, we witness the ineffectiveness of this claim in practical terms: Burghley and Cecil are never swayed to support Bacon (Bacon was not to reach public office for another twelve years, and his career only took off following Cecil's death in 1612). Although the situation was thought unfair by many, Bacon had no legal or moral claim on his cognatic relatives.

The Two Noble Kinsmen is not about either of the cousins' attempting to use the other in any practical sense. As Jeffrey Masten has pointed out, their similarity, a standard trope of amicitia literature, is indeed deployed to suggest that they will inevitably enter into competition:

ARCITE
                                                            … am not I
Part of your blood, part of your soul? You have told me
That I was Palamon, and you were Arcite.
PALAMON
                                                            Yes.
ARCITE
Am not I liable to those affections,
Those joys, griefs, angers, fears, my friend shall suffer?

(II, ii, 187-91)²⁷

However, the futility of their kinship is signalled throughout the play by a skilfully maintained figurative representation. As the chapters in this collection by Helen Hackett and Gordon McMullan amply illustrate, the late plays return insistently to figures of maternity and manliness. These two sisters' sons, who, as we have already seen, describe themselves as their aunts' sons, are constantly referred to in terms of their mothers. When asked what she thinks of Arcite, Emilia answers that ‘Believe, / His mother was a wondrous handsome woman; / His face, methinks, goes that way’ (II, v, 19-21) (although Hippolyta then contends that ‘his body / And fiery mind illustrate a brave father’ (II, v, 212)). Later Emilia describes Palamon as being ‘swart and meagre, of an eye as heavy / As if he had lost his mother’ (IV, ii, 27-8). Together, she insists, ‘Two greater and two better never yet / Made mothers joy’ (IV, ii, 63-4).

When Palamon berates the kind of men who boast of their sexual conquests, those ‘large confessors’, he ‘hotly ask[s] them / If they had mothers—I had one, a woman, / And women ‘twere they wronged’ (V, i, 105-7). To Palamon the image of womanhood is his mother.

Firmly established as mothers' boys, the masculinity of both Palamon and Arcite is steadily chipped away throughout the play by a number of analogies, several with Ovidian overtones: as Jonathan Bate argues, ‘[c]ollaboration with Ovid is one of the marks of Fletcher and Shakespeare's collaboration with each other’.²⁸ When they are in prison, delineating their amicitia, Arcite exclaims that ‘We are one another's wife, ever begetting / New births of love’ (II, ii, 80-1). Two classical archetypes of passive male sexuality, Narcissus and Ganymede, are reiterated. Immediately after Arcite and Palamon assert their status as wives to each other, Emilia picks some narcissus from the garden, asserting that ‘That was a fair boy certain, but a fool / To love himself. Were there not maids enough?’ (II, ii, 120-2), referring of course to the myth of Narcissus dying while longing for his own reflection, having rejected the women who loved him. The connection is made explicit when Emilia later compares pictures of her two suitors—Palamon may be to Arcite ‘mere dull shadow; / … swart and meagre, of an eye as heavy’:

As if he had lost his mother; a still temper;
No stirring in him, no alacrity;
Of all this sprightly sharpness, not a smile.
Yet these that we count errors may become him:
Narcissus was a sad boy, but a heavenly.

(IV, ii, 26-32)

As the work of James Saslow, Leonard Barkan and Bruce R. Smith has shown, Ganymede had become by the Renaissance a standard figure for sodomitical, and specifically passive sodomitical, identification.²⁹ In the same speech, Emilia compares Arcite to Ganymede, one of the ‘prettie boyes / That were the darlinges of the gods’. In Golding's words:

The king of Gods [Jupiter] did burne ere while in loue of Ganymed
The Phrygian, and the thing was found which Iupiter that sted,
Had rather be then that he was. Yet could he not beteeme
The shape of any other bird than Eagle for to seeme:
And so he soring in the ayre with borrowed wings trust vp
The Troiane boy, who stil in heauen euen yet doth beare his cup,
And brings him Nectar, though against Dame Iunos wil it bee.(30)

Emilia declares:

What an eye,
Of what a fiery spark and quick sweetness,
Has this young prince! Here Love himself sits smiling;
Just such another wanton Ganymede
Set Jove afire with, and enforced the god
Snatch up the goodly boy, and set him by him,
A shining constellation. What a brow,
Of what a spacious majesty, he carries,
Arched like the great-eyed Juno's, but far sweeter,
Smoother than Pelops' shoulder!

(IV, ii, 12-21)

We move from the beautiful shepherd boy Ganymede snatched up to become Jove's cupbearer in the heavens, to Jove's own wife Juno, to the ivory shoulder that replaced the shoulder of Pelops served up by his father Tantalus (and as ever, we are not sure here whether the smooth shoulder is the succulent one eaten, or the ivory replacement).³¹ Palamon and Arcite are led through a serious of analogies that cast them as women, or as passive male bodies eaten by men or made love to by men, or as men in love with their own reflection. These images multiply through the play, and no amount of recognition for Arcite's potential prowess as a wrestler is going to shake them off.

What effect might this have on a reading of The Two Noble Kinsmen? I return to the speech I quoted earlier, where Palamon and Arcite pledge eternal friendship. It is indeed a remarkable and passionate speech, but we need to see it in context. It comes during the couple's imprisonment: at the beginning of the scene (II, ii), Palamon bewails their situation (‘Oh, cousin Arcite, / Where is Thebes now? Where is our noble country? / Where are our friends and kindred?’ (II, ii, 6-8)) and Arcite agrees that their ‘hopes are prisoners with us’ (II, ii, 26), lamenting the fact that they will never marry, nor have children, nor hunt again. It is only then that Arcite exclaims:

Yet, cousin,
Even from the bottom of these miseries,
From all that Fortune can inflict upon us,
I see two comforts rising, two mere blessings,
If the gods please: to hold here a brave patience
And the enjoying of our griefs together.
While Palamon is with me, let me perish
If I think this our prison!

(II, ii, 55-62)

Palamon replies:

Certainly,
'Tis a main goodness, cousin, that our fortunes
Were twined together; 'tis most true, two souls
Put in two noble bodies, let 'em suffer
The gall of hazard, so they grow together,
Will never sink; they must not, say they could.
A willing man dies sleeping and all's done.

(II, ii, 62-8)

It is then that they go on to ‘make this prison holy sanctuary / To keep us from corruption of worse men’ (II, ii, 71-2), and go into their passionate speech of friendship. As this preamble shows, however, the speech is a set piece, arrived at only after despair has cast them down, and as a pragmatic response to their dire situation. Friendship in the classic Ciceronian mould is only an option once imprisonment takes away their social agency. It does not stand up to comparison with the successful friendship of Theseus and Pirithous, or with the elegaic friendship of Emilia and Flavina, which have been carefully set up before precisely to demonstrate the failings of Palamon and Arcite's friendship; the first oblique comment on their declaration of friendship is Emilia's discussion of Narcissus. And even within the speech just quoted we can sense something awry: these two friends are ‘two souls / Put in two noble bodies’ (II, ii, 64-5), when the classic formulation of friendship is a single soul in two bodies. The hyperbole of being each other's wife, family, heir is merely a response to the deprivation of social agency; the minute that a way back into the real world is spied (in the form of Emilia, marriage to whom will ensure not only freedom but social success in Athens) the eternal friendship is shelved.

While the influence of Ciceronian amicitia is evident throughout, the play's immediate source requires that the authors also deal with the male friendship associated with chivalric codes. Here again, all is not as it might be. Chaucer's Knight's Tale has an ending which can still been seen as happy within the expectations of its genre: one knight wins his lady in honourable chivalric contest, but dies in an accident; after a suitable period, the lady is granted to the honourable loser. Much has been written about the chivalric elements of The Two Noble Kinsmen: it has been seen as linked to a neo-chivalric movement associated with Prince Henry;³² it has even been read as a roman à clef of international politics, with Arcite as Henry, who has to die before his sister Elizabeth (Emilia) can marry her betrothed Frederick (Palamon).³³ In The Two Noble Kinsmen, the elements are similar to Chaucer's, but their treatment is noticeably different, and the end result unsettling: as Philip Finkelpearl has written, ‘[a]lthough the knightly code may originally have been designed to curb uncivilized instincts, here it sanctions and dignifies the urge of revenge, murder, and suicide’.³⁴

Richard Hillman sees the fundamental contradictions as suggestive of an unbridgeable gap between medieval and Jacobean notions of chivalry: ‘[p]recisely by endlessly trying and failing to measure up to the inherited images of romance perfection, these pale Jacobean imitations deconstruct the very business of image-making. They are trapped by their own attempted appropriation of a medieval past’.³⁵ The kinsmen's ‘failure to measure up’ is, moreover, treated harshly, even callously. The chivalric contest now carries a death penalty for the loser, and there is virtually no time lost between the winner's death and the loser's marriage. The death of one knight, an incidental detail in Chaucer (since it does not matter who marries the lady), here becomes essential to the happy ending. Significantly, a successful conclusion can only come at what Palamon calls the ‘miserable end of our alliance’ (V, iv, 86), the accident in which Arcite is fatally injured. Even here, the nature of his death—Arcite is left hanging upside down from his mount, after the horse rears away from a spark from the cobbles (‘Arcite's legs, being higher than his head, / Seemed with strange art to hang’ (V, iv, 78-9))—suggests something less than chivalric. As Richard Abrams notes,’ [b]y the play's end, disabused of The Knight's Tale's heroic mystique, we recognise the strangeness of a world where a question of love-rights is automatically referred to a determination of which kinsman is the stronger fighter’.³⁶

Arcite must die for Palamon to win: as Palamon laments, ‘That we should things desire, which do cost us / The loss of our desire! That nought could buy / Dear love, but loss of dear love’ (V, iv, 110-12). The Two Noble Kinsmen demonstrates, and demands, highly developed understanding of concepts of friendship and kinship, developed enough to accommodate both parody and sincerity about such concepts. The friendship of Palamon and Arcite is no more than a game to while away long hours of incarceration; their constantly reiterated claims to kinship dissolve in the face of a prize (Emilia) that might benefit them as individuals and their immediate family groups; the play's happy ending necessitates the dissolution of their ‘alliance’. Fletcher and Shakespeare indulge their audience in the comfortable humanist myth of amicitia, and the reliable codes of chivalric courtship, only to force that audience to accept the fact that ultimately these are no more than myths and codes, and that they cannot thrive together. We are faced with the sobering fact that artistic closure is not always compatible with social reality: to secure our desired happy ending, there may be fatalities.

Notes

1. For the limited critical bibliography to 1990 see Proudfoot, ‘Henry VIII’, pp. 391-2. The only monograph devoted to the play is Bertram, Shakespeare and ‘The Two Noble Kinsmen’.

2. Thompson, Shakespeare's Chaucer, p. 166.

3. Donaldson, The Swan at the Well, p. 50.

4. Spencer, ‘The Two Noble Kinsmen’, p. 256.

5. Wickham, ‘The Two Noble Kinsmen’, p. 168.

6. See The Two Noble Kinsmen, ed. Potter, ‘Introduction’, pp. 2-6.

7. Spencer, ‘The Two Noble Kinsmen’, p. 255. See also The Two Noble Kinsmen, ed. Potter, pp. 24-34. The ‘collaboration’ argument is also used to explain away the problematic Jailer's Daughter subplot, but my focus here is on the Palamon and Arcite story.

8. Waith, ‘Shakespeare and Fletcher’, pp. 239-42; Hillman, ‘Shakespeare's romantic innocents’, p. 73.

9. Hillman, ‘Shakespeare's romantic innocents’, pp. 70, 71.

10. The classic survey of male friendship in Renaissance English literature remains Mills, One Soul in Bodies Twain.

11. For a discussion of this genre see Miller, Stages of Desire, Ch. 5.

12. See Elyot, Boke Named the Gouernour (1531); for the importance of this story, see Hutson, The Usurer's Daughter, Ch. 2.

13. Spencer, ‘The Two Noble Kinsmen’, p. 270.

14. Waith, ‘Shakespeare and Fletcher’, p. 236.

15. The importance of kinship rather than friendship in The Two Noble Kinsmen is stressed in Mills, One Soul in Bodies Twain, pp. 322-3, but he does not address the particular nature of this kinship.

16. Rubin, ‘The traffic in women’; Sedgwick, Between Men.

17. Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family, and Ritual, pp. 117-18.

18. Wrightson, English Society, pp. 44-51, p. 47.

19. Fletcher, A County Community, p. 48.

20. James, Society, Politics and Culture, p. 325.

21. For other use of ‘cousin’ and ‘coz’ see II, ii, 4; II, ii, 63; II, ii, 96; II, ii, 107; II, ii 126; II, ii, 131; III, i, 43; III, i, 69; III, iii, 1; III, iii, 20; III, iii, 23; III, vi, 1; III, vi, 44; III, vi, 47; III, vi, 53; III, vi, 61; III, vi, 73; III, vi, 82; III, vi, 117; III, vi, 262; III, vi, 299;V, i, 23;V, i, 31;V, iv, 93;V, iv, 109.

22. Similarly, ‘cousinage’ can refer to the writ whereby a legal claim for land is made by one claiming to be a cousin to the deceased.

23. Fletcher, A County Community, p. 48.

24. References are to The Riverside Chaucer.

25. See Jardine and Stewart, Hostage to Fortune.

26. See Anthony Standen to Anthony Bacon, 3 February 1593/4, Lambeth Palace Library MS 650, fols 80-2 (art. 50). This incident is discussed at greater length in Jardine and Stewart, Hostage to Fortune, pp. 11-17.

27. Masten, Textual Intercourse, p. 49.

28. Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid, p. 265.

29. See Saslow, Ganymede in the Renaissance; Barkan, Transuming Passions; Smith, Homosexual Desire, Ch. 3.

30. Golding, The XV Bookes (1603), sig. Q8^v (Book X, 11.155-61).

31. For Pelops, see Golding, The XV Bookes, sig. K8^v (Book VI, ll. 515-25).

32. See for example Hillman, ‘Shakespeare's romantic innocents’, p. 79; Finkelpearl, ‘Two distincts, division none’, pp. 184-99.

33. Wickham, ‘The Two Noble Kinsmen’, passim.

34. Finkelpearl, ‘Two distincts, division none’, p. 191.

35. Hillman, ‘Shakespeare's romantic innocents’, p. 71.

36. Abrams, ‘Gender confusion’, p. 75.

Bibliography

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