[In the following essay, Frey examines the issue of collaboration in The Two Noble Kinsmen, arguing that the play exhibits a strategy designed to deflect the audience's attention away from the nature of the authors' collaboration (with each other and/or with their source material) in order to direct attention to the more important collaboration between the producers of the play and the audience.]

Collaborate has two main meanings for us: (1) to work with another on a project to be jointly accredited; and (2) to cooperate with the enemy. If Shakespeare collaborated in the writing of The Two Noble Kinsmen (as the title page of the Quarto tells us he did), then to what degree should the project be “jointly accredited”? “Hardly at all” has been the main modern response to this question, for most of the scholarly energy, if not total human energy, devoted to this play has been concerned with separating out the respective contributions of the collaborators. This very effort not to “jointly accredit” suggests that the coauthors are in some crucial way dissimilar. The presumed collaborator of Shakespeare's is often described as a wretched contriver of vastly inferior verse and drama. As a typical commentator in the nineteenth century put it: “In The Two Noble Kinsmen, the degradation of Shakspere's work by the unclean underplot of Fletcher is painful, and almost intolerable.”¹ Such description renders Fletcher tantamount to Shakespeare's enemy. Shakespeare, at least, is often treated as if he risked severely tainting his own labor by joining it to another's.

It is amusing that the precise seams between Shakespeare's work and that of his presumed collaborator are often unrecognizable in the sense that, after more than a century of effort, scholars still cannot agree as to which author or authors wrote which parts of The Two Noble Kinsmen. Some say Shakespeare wrote all of it; some say he wrote none of it; many divide the play between Shakespeare and Fletcher, but few agree as to the precise division. And whether the two presumed authors would have kept their fingers or suggestions out of each other's scenes may be doubted. Still, the conviction that any collaboration by Shakespeare must in part bear the opprobrious taint of collaborating with the enemy, or at least with an undesirable, remains widespread.

But if we think of Shakespeare as collaborating only to his and our detriment, because we think that whoever he collaborated with necessarily compromised the purity of his unique genius, then do we also assume by probable implication that other persons in Shakespeare's working environment—actors in his company who limited his conception and, possibly, persuaded revision of parts; audiences whose comprehension and taste limited Shakespeare's otherwise infinite range; colleagues or source authors or court authorities whose ideas were cruder than the Bard's yet still influenced him—do we assume that such persons were also alien to or restrictive upon Shakespeare's otherwise unhampered expression of genius? Was Shakespeare, a free spirit capable of moving beyond the collaborations of tradition and ideology, forced nonetheless or even quite willing perhaps to collaborate with the enemy of limitation by coauthority? Or might such colabor, on the contrary, often have rendered “Shakespeare's” contribution less page-bound, more active, accessible, and public? less high-and-mighty in diction and skepticism, more body-voiced, and more emotionally real and grounded than possible from a silent authorial text? Any playwright of other than closet drama chooses to be a collaborator (even a closet dramatist collaborates with the audience he imagines), and if Shakespeare chose to collaborate not only with scribes, copyists, actors, other share-owners, varied audience cliques, and so on, but also with a specific or several specific coauthors, who are we to single out the coauthor or authors for special opprobrium and for separatist treatment? Do we know no other ways to give power, coherence, allegiance, credit to a work product than to trace it to an individuating source?

In the case of other kinds of work products, surely, we do jointly credit our labor. Indeed, probably most human labor is jointly credited in significant ways. We look at a road, a car, a building, at most of the things we use, and we jointly credit their makers. We look at each other or at ourselves and jointly credit pairs of parents for our being. Only in certain, specialized classes of labor can we retain any, if often a false, sense of authorship. The word collaborate derives from the Latin verb laborare, to labor, and this word seems to connect not only with ancient imagery of grasping but also with a whole host of loosely related terms derived from an “l-e-b” stem, terms that suggest a rhythm of grasping and letting go, terms like lap, lip, labial, lapse, lobe, slump, slab, slip, and sleep. Labor in many associations seems to connect to actions influenced by gravity or other forces beyond personal control or will—as in the labor of love and labor of birth where the sense of individually willed effort fuses with the mandates of extrapersonal forces. Birth labor is straining work and at the same time a gift of nature whereby one mother is made two (or more) persons and two parents are made three (or more) persons. Still, despite the colabors of love and birth and their joint accreditings, we beholders of birth take up attribution study the moment the child issues. We say the new child, or work of art, has one parent's eyes, or another's nose, or voice. By analogy, then, a collaborative literary work may be considered, in our culture, connected in each part to a single authorial parent.

The Prologue to The Two Noble Kinsmen works with several images of colabor, including that of the play itself as child of various breeders. Before such an image is reached, however, the play is compared not to the child but to, of all things, the maidenhead of the child's mother:

New plays and maidenheads are near akin—
Much follow'd both, for both much money gi'n,
If they stand sound and well. …

(Pro. 1-3)

The potential mother's maidenhead—both her virginity and, more literally, her hymen—is valuable if it stands sound and well, if under the stress of “first night's stir” (Pro. 6) it really stands up to the push of breeding and thus constitutes proof of virginity, because then any child that results from the “stir” should have a known paternity. That is, new plays are like hymens in a patriarchy: men may be assumed to value them when they give proof of authorship. The very first lines of the play, then, raise a question of collaboration: how can one know whether the issue held forth by paired collaborators really is the product of each? This question could, of course, apply to declared coauthors of a play, such as Shakespeare and Fletcher, but here it applies in the first instance to a different pair of collaborators: the “new play” itself as wife and the audience as husband who seeks proof of authenticity in the play.

Now, “much money” is given, I assume, not to the play itself or, in terms of the metaphor, to the virginal wife, but rather to the one(s) who present and guarantee the play or maid to the husband. And that underlying or covert assumption naturally directs attention, in the patriarchal economy of the metaphor, to the status of the “breeder” (Pro. 10) of the play/maid. Would the breeder(s) be likely to have produced honest, modest, chaste offspring? What is the status of the breeder?

As if this last question had been raised explicitly, the Prologue immediately identifies not the playwright(s) but an ancestor, Chaucer, as the pure and noble “breeder” (Pro. 10) of the play that now is both “like her” (the virgin) and also “our play.” As the new play evolves, in the Prologue from “maidenhead” to “her” to “our play” with Chaucer as its breeder, the implicit image widens from the audience as husband giving “much money” for the new, virginal play toward Chaucer as breeding “it” (Pro. 10) and then to Chaucer as giving not the play but rather the “story” that itself lives, like a chaste wife, “constant to eternity” (Pro. 14). Just where the playwright(s) may fit into this procreative tangle remains mysterious, however, for, insofar as the playwright(s) may be identified with the father who takes “much money” for being able to provide a virgin daughter, the playwright(s) may seem quite the patriarchs, but, insofar as the playwright(s) may be identified with the play itself, “our play,” or with the “story” as “constant to all eternity,” then to that extent the playwright(s) would seem feminized to the special maternal source and sole knower(s) of legitimacy. As the Prologue proceeds, this feminized role for the playwright(s) seems to be the one that is developed:

If we let fall the nobleness of this,
And the first sound this child hear be a hiss,
How it will shake the bones of that good man. …

(Pro. 15-17)

Now the play is a “child” whom the “writer” (Pro. 19) or writers must protect from bastardizing hisses by refusing to “let fall” the nobleness of “this” (breeder? story? child? retelling?). It sounds as if the writer(s) may control the nobleness of the play in some way analogous to the way in which the maid controls the “honor” of the first night.

An alternative reading of the Prologue could place the writer(s) of this new play as male(s) sub-breeding the play from the “constant” female story sired by Chaucer. This seems the direction taken by the continuing Prologue:

For, to say truth, it were an endless thing
And too ambitious, to aspire to him,
Weak as we are, and almost breathless swim
In this deep water.

(Pro. 22-25)

This sounds like male emulation of a progenitor. The focus has shifted from inquiring whether the new play, as maiden, catches up the nobility and purity of her ancestor, Chaucer, to inquiring whether “we”—writer(s) and, perhaps, actors—may gain some strength to compete with Chaucer.

Such strength is to be gained here not from coauthorial collaboration but rather from collaboration with the audience. Whereas at first the audience was invited to judge the quality of the play by the purity and nobility of its authorship, now the audience is invited to participate in providing “breath” or inspiration:

                                        Do but you hold out
Your helping hands, and we shall tack about
And something do to save us. …

(Pro. 25-27)

One could summarize the argument of the Prologue thus: “You in the audience would like to know for certain the paternity of a new play such as ours, wouldn't you? Well, it does have a particularly famous and noble ancestor, and it would be a shame if his nobility were somehow compromised in our retelling. But, really, we can't emulate him exactly, so you'd better decide you will help by applauding and appreciating what you get here. Let Chaucer sleep, and you be content.”

I am arguing, obviously, that the Prologue to The Two Noble Kinsmen anticipates, indirectly, the major critical debate on the play, namely, the debate over the nobility of its authorship. While later generations of readers have pondered the relative merits of two possible coauthors, the Prologue sets up a rivalry between two generational levels of authorship—Jacobean and medieval—and then submerges that rivalry through an extended plea for a supervening collaboration, that between the immediate producers of the play and the watching throng. This argument, that the basic strategy of the Prologue is to deflect attention and inquiry from one pair of collaborators to other pairs (and specifically from authorial collaboration to responsive collaboration), informs the more extended argument of my essay: that a dominant internal strategy of the play is to deflect our attention from the “right” collaborative couple to a “wrong” one and that a potentially useful external strategy for our treating the play is to deflect attention from the “right” collaborative couple, the presumed coauthors and their relative merits, to the “wrong” collaborative pair, modern productions of the play (including texts, performances, teachings, and criticism) and their varied audiences.

The play opens with the wedding celebration of Theseus and Hippolyta, whom Theseus has conquered and who now collaborates with her former enemy. The first character we actually see is Hymen, god of marriage but also god of the “maidenhead” proposed first for examination by the Prologue. At issue, then, is issue: whether the “firstborn child” (1.1.7) and “Nature's children sweet” (1.1.13) will bless the royal couple and be free from “the sland'rous cuckoo” (1.1.19).

Somewhat as inquiry into the relations of the new play and its “husband” shifted to inquiry into the status of a third party, the bride's breeder, so now attention on ritually banishing any taint from the royal coupling shifts to Theseus's “gentility” (1.1.25), to Hippolyta's “mother's sake” and Hippolyta's wish that her “womb may thrive with fair ones” (1.1.27), and on to a third focus (or couple), Emilia and “the love of him whom Jove hath mark'd / The honor of your bed, and for the sake / Of clear virginity” (1.1.29-31). In equational terms, the Prologue's “husband” is to Theseus as the new play is to Hippolyta, and as attention is deflected in the Prologue from the maidlike new play to its noble breeder and then onward from purity of authorial collaboration to collaboration of a third party (the audience), so here in the opening scene attention is deflected from Hippolyta to her “mother's sake” and then onward from the royal progenitive pair to a distinctly “third” relation, the bride's sister and her as yet unknown husband, a relation that turns out to be the true focus of interest.

As, in the Prologue, the test of “goodness” for the play/maid turned from her physical virginity to the nobility of her paternal breeding, so in the opening scene attention turns from the panoply of physically present signs—Hymen, the wheaten garlands, white robes, and so on (all suggesting virginity)—to the wider context of noble breeding. Purely physical virginity may help the husband to feel assured of his paternity, but beyond that assurance lies the desire to be assured of gentle or noble offspring. In the Prologue, that desire evolved into a registry of the play/maid's male ancestral line; in the opening scene, that desire evolves, via the Theban Queens, somewhat more comprehensively into mention both of Theseus's “gentility” (1.1.25) and of Hippolyta's “mother's sake” (1.1.26). According to the Queens, if Theseus would demonstrate the nobility of his breeding (“gentility” as “extraction” as in Orlando's usage in the opening scene of As You Like It), then he must heed the Queens' demands for help. If Hippolyta would give sign to the world that her mother bore noble offspring and if Hippolyta would hope herself to do so, then she must heed the Queens' demands. Gentility and nobility are not just secrets in the blood, for they are made manifest only through behavior, action. As Duke Vincentio says in Measure for Measure: “if our virtues / Did not go forth of us, 'twere all alike / As if we had them not” (1.1.33-35). There must be some outward and visible sign of the inward condition, a sign signaling beyond physical beauty toward a volitional virtue.

To recapitulate my argument thus far: (1) attention to The Two Noble Kinsmen has centered on the issue of collaboration and, more specifically, the question of to what extent Shakespeare's authorship may be in evidence; (2) the play's Prologue almost anticipates that question when the Prologue interrogates the ancestry, authorship, and breeding of the piece in terms showing how naturally we tend to test aesthetic or artistic merit by our conception not merely of immediate purity or virginity of the piece itself but also of its patriarchal blood-lines (if Chaucer made it, it must be good); (3) intermediary breeders between the noble grandauthor (Chaucer) and the present incarnation or child can prevent the nobleness from “falling,” prevent it not by themselves aspiring to claim authorial or genetic nobility but rather by soliciting the enthusiasm of the contemporary audience and letting the child play to that; (4) the play's opening scene sets up a similar dynamic in that the initial focus on Hippolyta's maidenhead or hymen as guarantor of noble progeny widens into a focus on her and her husband's nobility of ancestry and then into a focus on the deeds that must be done to give outward signs of the inward nobility.

One of the things this argument may have obscured is the imprecision of analogies between artistic collaborations and procreative couplings. Theseus and Hippolyta are man and woman, capable of engendering offspring (though Hippolyta as an Amazon would catch up attributes of the male gender). By verbal sleight of hand, the Prologue inserts differential sexuality into the authorship of the play: first the new play is likened to a maid whose husband seems to be the audience following and giving money; then the new play turns into the offspring of Chaucer. The missing term becomes the play's mother. Implicitly, the playwright(s) would occupy that position if the metaphor of human sexual procreation were to remain in mind. Sexual difference thins out, however, from the Prologue as he proceeds to convert the playwright(s) to the masculinized force that could blast Chaucer's bays (Pro. 20) and to the male writer(s) who could “aspire to him” (Pro. 23). The audience, moreover, asked to help the play-producing swimmers or sailors (again plainly men), would also seem to be imagined as men in a male environment. Compare the Epilogue's final words: “Gentlemen, good night” (Epi. 18).

The shocking, even brutal, invocation of the hymenal site as source and test of siring standards becomes subordinated first to a consideration of patriarchal bloodlines or gentility and then to an almost parthenogenetic vision of men—Chaucer and the writer(s)—seeking to create what is worthy through their own actions and presenting it to other men. This movement away from what might be called heterosexual anxiety toward what might be termed homosocial hoping is a movement of the main action of the play where the initial view of Hymen and the bride and groom seems to slip out of focus as attention turns to Emilia and Flavina and then to Palamon and Arcite and the bonds of their brotherhood.

The essential collaboration for the extension of the human race is between men and women, as is evident in the opening images of both Prologue and play. The image of the two different sexes collaborating equally in essential creation may underlie much of our cultural imagery of colabor—as when the Prologue first posits a two-gendered origin for the play or when critics such as Dowden distinctly feminize the “beauty” of “the young Fletcher in conjunction with whom Shakspere worked upon The Two Noble Kinsmen.”² Thus searching for the Shakespearean portion of the play is also searching for the man's (or “real man's”) part.

Apart from making babies, however, much of the most revered colabor in Shakespeare's society (if not also our own) took place among same-sex groups, and the colabor or action that was deemed ennobling as the proof of high blood was, in that patriarchal context, the colabor of men in the church, in legal institutions, or in battle. Thus, to prove his “gentility,” Theseus (who has already “shrunk” the Amazon Hippolyta back into the woman's bound she was overflowing [1.1.83]) will take his army of men to attack Thebes. Emilia, furthermore, declares that she will never “take a husband” (1.1.205) unless Theseus takes the petitioned action, as if the war against Thebes were an act emblematic (or even productive) of man's progenitive honor, an act allowing Emilia to choose a worthy mate. Palamon and Arcite, similarly, mull over causative connections between male actions—infamous or heroic—and their impact on male blood. The Theban tyrant Creon is one, says Palamon, who subsumes the heroism of others into his own bodily substance, “who only attributes / The faculties of other instruments / To his own nerves and act” (1.2.67-69). Arcite would have the pair leave the court:

                                                                                                    for our milk
Will relish of the pasture, and we must
Be vile, or disobedient—not his kinsmen
In blood unless in quality.

(1.2.76-79)

Here is made explicit not only the notion that male heroic action directly influences nobility of blood but also the notion that male blood catches up the essential defining power for the quality of offspring. Palamon and Arcite are like two mother cows concerned for their calves and fearful that their environment will taint their “milk,” which controls the worth of their physical and spiritual inheritance and bequest.

Both the Prologue and the developing play (as well as traditional criticism of the play) are founded on the grossly patriarchal paradox that the qualities of biological (and artistic) offspring are to be judged, ultimately, not on their own merits or on the apparent merit (virginal status) of any mother but only on the noble breeding of the male ancestors of both mother and father. Such breeding is proved, however, not simply through blood relationships but rather through heroic (martial) male action that ennobles the hero's “milk,” that purges and purifies the hero's “blood” (1.2.72, 109). The quest for being, for knowing who the ancestors are, turns to a quest for doing, for knowing what the ancestors (male) have done to qualify themselves as noble, so that the outcome of all heterosexual collaboration can be judged, finally, only on the basis of prior homosocial collaboration in heroic (all-male) action.

It is true that The Two Noble Kinsmen presents in its first scene a brief and tantalizing glimpse of noble worth and purity of breeding established not through all-male action but through heroic struggle directly with the female (the Amazon), but this possibility is elided, as it were, through the recycling of Theseus, to prove his “gentility,” into battle with a male antagonist. Still, does not the glimpse toward the society of the “most dreaded Amazonian” (1.1.77) constitute a quicksilver admission or presupposition for the play that women may relish their own society, just as men may relish theirs, and that the business of breeding could be reframed as a subordinate kind of collaboration in life? Hippolyta comes to Theseus not alone but paired with a sister—as if Amazonian society were not quite atomized—and not just with a sister, but with a sister who (unlike the standard marriage-eager sister of much comedy) prefers members of her own sex, declaring “the true love 'tween maid and maid may be / More than in sex dividual” (1.3.81-82).

Further subverting the centrality of cross-gendered collaboration is the friendship or doubling between Theseus and Pirithous. If this were a standard romance, the bride's sister, Emilia, would fall in love with and marry the groom's best friend, Pirithous. But here the main collaborative energy of each is distinctly same-gendered. The “knot of love” between Theseus and Pirithous “may be outworn, never undone” (1.3.41). “Love”—among these Greeks, if not elsewhere—centers itself ambiguously among cross-gendered and same-gendered pairs. The hymenal imperative, the command to breed bravely, seems to motivate the main physical action, but the emotional and spiritual centers of love seem to slip between same-gendered pairs.

How to reconcile the patriarchal dictate for a colabor of man and woman toward noble offspring with the supervening demands of same-sex friendships becomes a central problem of the play as it fusses over the meaning of the love between its titular heroes. Though they are true cousins, the sons of sisters, Palamon and Arcite are first presented as “dearer in love than blood” (1.2.1). The twinning of their souls makes them almost one and leads to strange locutions of oneness. Arcite says to Palamon in prison: “The sweet embraces of a loving wife … shall never clasp our necks” (2.2.30-32); “Were we at liberty, / A wife might part us lawfully” (2.2.88-89): “We are one another's wife, ever begetting / New births of love” (2.2.80-81).

After Palamon spies Emilia and falls for her, Arcite exclaims: “am not I / Part of your blood, part of your soul? You have told me / That I was Palamon, and you were Arcite.” Palamon answers, “Yes.” And Arcite continues:

Am not I liable to those affections,
Those joys, griefs, angers, fears, my friend shall suffer?
PAL.
Ye may be.
ARC.
                                                  Why then would ye deal so cunningly,
So strangely, so unlike a noble kinsman,
To love alone?

(2.2.186-91)

Arcite's question, out of context, sounds funny, perhaps, but the play seems seriously to be asking: If two males think of themselves almost as identical twins and also as soul mates, then will they not share an identity of desire? Just before seeing Emilia, Palamon says to Arcite: “Is there record of any two that lov'd / Better than we do, Arcite?” Arcite replies:

                                                  Sure there cannot.
PAL.
I do not think it possible our friendship
Should ever leave us.
ARC.
                                                                                          Till our deaths it cannot,
                              Enter Emilia and her Woman [below].
And after death our spirits shall be led
To those that love eternally. Speak on, sir.
[EMIL.]
This garden has a world of pleasures in't.
What flow'r is this?
WOMAN.
                                                  'Tis call'd narcissus, madam.
EMIL.
That was a fair boy certain, but a fool
To love himself.

(2.2.112-21)

The inward-looking love of Palamon and Arcite for each other may be a kind of narcissus-like self-love. Just as Palamon raises the issue of whether anything could part their friendship, Emilia enters the garden of time and its worldly pleasures. Arcite continues to affirm a spiritual love between himself and Palamon that will join them in an eternal company. But Palamon has launched his desire now into the garden. When Arcite follows him there, “falling” also in love with Emilia, Arcite quite seriously seems to imagine an equality of love capable of being shared by the two kinsmen, at least for a moment. Since Palamon is made to assume an exclusivity in love the question is soon dropped whether three persons could ever share in an identity, a singleness, of love.

Arcite for an instant hints, however, at a way that both he and Palamon could share a love for Emilia. He says to Palamon: “I will not [love her] as you do—to worship her / As she is heavenly and a blessed goddess; / I love her as a woman, to enjoy her. / So both may love” (2.2.162-65). But Palamon does not really love so spiritually. He insists that he has taken “possession” of all Emilia's beauties. And of course the kinsmen imagine heterosexual love in the context of wives and issue. When Arcite pictures neither of the two kinsmen having a wife, he laments, and perhaps laments primarily, that then, as he says, shall “no issue know us” (2.2.32). Still, Palamon and Arcite could conceivably collaborate in a love for Emilia, in a ménage à trois that produced issue. She herself makes no persistent distinction between them and cannot choose one over the other “but must cry for both” (4.2.54). What makes such a solution repellent, finally, is the anticollaborative convention of paternity that is assumed on all sides. When Arcite in prison laments the prospect of having no wife and no issue, he describes such issue as “figures of ourselves” (2.2.33), sons who could remember what their fathers were (2.2.36). As images of particular selves, garnered in necessity from only one man's sperm, children cannot have collaborative biological fathers. Yet any number of collaborative parenting arrangements could be imagined. Arcite's concern for identifiable paternity is at base an economic convention of ownership; he wants to be able to say (even though he never can be sure) what issue he can assume belong to him as extensions of his physical being. Thus, when the Prologue of The Two Noble Kinsmen speaks of the play as a child with Chaucer as breeder and the author(s) implicated in the breeding process, it invokes and we pursue our deep assumptions about impossibilities of collaborative fatherhood in one sense and improprieties of it in another. That a play is not literally a child, that any spermatic analogies between artworks and children are extremely questionable, and that possible collaboration on a play may indeed challenge our assumptions about the nature of fatherhood, breeding, and authorship seem to be issues that the Prologue taken together with the action of the play invites us to consider.

It so happens that another triangle of lovers in the play comments on the colabors of Palamon and Arcite over Emilia as well as on the possible colabors of producers of this play. The Jailer's Daughter loves Palamon, and she in turn is loved by the character known only as her Wooer. Palamon does not, so far as we know, return her love. The heavy middle of the play is dominated by the very physical passion of the Jailer's Daughter, who longs to lose her maidenhead only by Palamon: “Let him do / What he will with me, so he use me kindly, / For use me so he shall, or I'll proclaim him, / And to his face, no man” (2.6.28-31). In her madness, her talk becomes increasingly bawdy: “I must lose my maidenhead by cocklight” (4.1.112); “I'll warrant ye he had not so few last night / As twenty to dispatch. He'll tickle't up / In two hours, if his hand be in” (4.1.137-39); “now direct your course to th' wood, where Palamon / Lies longing for me. For the tackling / Let me alone” (4.1.144-46). Insofar as the Jailer's Daughter fails to retain, in the terms of the Prologue, much maidenly modesty, she seems to become sexually initiated in the course of the play. When her Wooer substitutes himself for Palamon, and when the couple exits with the mad Daughter plainly intended to go to bed with the Wooer (on Doctor's orders), then we are presented with a strangely collaborative love triangle. The Wooer collaborates, acceptably to the Daughter, with her image of Palamon (as the Wooer's friends all collaborate in her projection). Whose child might she consider any issue to be? Palamon's? Her love gives and hence finds nobility where it wills? Nothing is good or bad but that her thinking, to adapt Hamlet's phrase, makes it strangely so? This is a version of marriage plus sex à trois.

Consider now a different analogy among the triangles. As the Jailer's Daughter yearns for Palamon, so Palamon yearns for Emilia. And as the Wooer steps in for Palamon, so might Arcite step in for Emilia. The notion of Arcite as Palamon's “wife” might seem farfetched were it not for Arcite's explicit mention in prison of them being one another's wife. Arcite, furthermore, though he prays to Mars and wins the fight with Palamon, is consistently imaged as feminine in his beauty. Emilia says of him: “His mother was a wondrous handsome woman, / His face, methinks, goes that way” (2.5.20-21). He has a “sweet face” (4.2.7); his brow is “arch'd like the great-eyed Juno's” (4.2.20); he is “gently visag'd” (5.2.41). Arcite, in praying to Mars, speaks, moreover, of winning a garland described as the “queen of flowers” (5.1.45). And Emilia specifically compares Arcite to Ganymede (4.2.15), Jove's page, who “set Jove afire” (4.2.16). Palamon, furthermore, brings to the final combat a group of helpers who are distinctly feminine in appearance. One has thick-curled yellow hair and the face of a “warlike maid” (4.2.106), pure red and white and with no beard. Another is white-haired with arms that gently swell “like women new conceiv'd, / Which speaks him prone to labor” (4.2.128-29). Is it not thus suggested that Palamon's friends resemble male brides? If he could not accept Arcite as collaborator in his love for Emilia, might he accept Arcite as himself an equivalent love? When Arcite dies, Palamon says to Emilia: “To buy you I have lost what's dearest to me” (5.3.112); Emilia thinks of herself as having cut from Palamon “A life more worthy … than all women” (5.3.143). And Palamon at the end laments that “we should things desire which do cost us / The loss of our desire!” (5.4.110-11).

A further analogy applies that lament to the probable collaboration of Shakespeare and Fletcher. We might think of ourselves as readers or viewers of the play in a position analogous both to that of the Jailer's Daughter longing for Palamon and to that of Palamon longing for Emilia. If we so strongly and singly desire only Shakespeare in the play and will accept no collaborators, then we may find ourselves desiring what costs us the loss of our desire. Our desire need not be primarily to identify our author and his intents. In some important way, all our origins are collaborative. Recognizing that fact, we are freed to make what we can and will out of our own state and being. As interpreters, if we search for intention or original meaning, we may resemble children questioning their paternity. If we concern ourselves less with an authority embedded in history or in tradition and more with what we now make of the little we can know of that authority and tradition, then we may accept, like the Jailer's Daughter, an object of our desires who may be counterfeit but who also responds to those desires with genuine reward.

One result of such thoughts is, I believe, a felt imperative to make real for oneself the play's emphasis on the emptiness of possessive desire. Desire to know authority, to have authority, to obtain power, is seen as laughably inane in The Two Noble Kinsmen. Theseus speaks of the gods “who from the mounted heavens / View us their mortal herd” (1.4.4) as if we were simply ridden and driven by overmastering and uncontrollable forces, and this despite the counterdrive of characters in the play to “master” their own affections and make them bend (1.1.229). The Jailer's Daughter decries “What pushes are we wenches driven to / When fifteen once has found us!” (2.4.6-7). Theseus speaks of Palamon and Arcite having “the agony of love about 'em” (3.6.219). And, in one of the greatest speeches in the play, the address of Palamon to Venus, Palamon refers to the lead-heavy yoke of love that stings like nettles (5.1.97) and to the way Love makes its chase this world “and we in herds thy game” (5.1.132). Though in this aspect the play seems bleak and sad, a moral it teaches is, I think, to question and resist, when possible and appropriate, the neediness of desire, the wanting to own, the promotion of self-interest over collaboration, and the desire for authority, all of which puts us in power struggles, rivalries, and other appetitive uses of our energy. At the end of the play, Theseus advises: “Let us be thankful / For that which is” (5.4.134-35). Such ungreedy emotional expenditure has not been prominent in the play save perhaps in Theseus's charity to the three Queens and in the mad largess of the Jailer's Daughter toward the captive Palamon. Still, the play seems to laud loving as giving, and I would use that notion to commend a similar relationship between us and Shakespeare.

Just as the Prologue turned from an inquiry into the noble breeding of the play toward a plea for collaborative help from the audience to authenticate the play's “content,” so current readers and watchers of the play might usefully turn from inquiring mainly into the play's authorship toward collaborative creation of its contemporary significance. Instead of seeking, worshiping, or emulating Shakespeare's authority, why should we not instead give of ourselves to his plays in the spirit of accepting collaboration? When we read or watch silently, for example, do we behave primarily as consumers, taking it all in, voyeuristically, as if we were not really part of it, but only observing and soaking up the authority of the master author or of professional performers? I would encourage a wholly different stance toward the reading and seeing of Shakespeare, a stance of much more active colabor with Will.

One example of such collaboration would be voiced reading, particularly the sort of voiced reading that relishes the capacity of interjections, oaths, expletives, nonsense words, soundplay, meter, freely chosen tonalities, and all the paralinguistic features of Shakespearean speech to force our own collaborative creation of significance.³ Another example of such collaboration would be to read aloud while standing or walking. Or if one ventured to try out or figure forth certain gestures, postures, or actions in the text, one could immeasurably increase one's sense of life there. In the words of the Prologue: “Do but you hold out / Your helping hands” and greater “content” shall follow.

In the field of English studies, we have barely begun to emulate the great collaborative shift from authorial inquiry to our own psychosomatic, helping-hands response so plainly mandated by the Prologue and perhaps also indicated as a megatrend by the many contemporary decenterings of traditional sources of authority (“man,” Western canonical tradition, God, nature, patriarchalism, and so on). Ironically, as readers we are much less inhibited from holding out our hands in the creation of significance than we are as spectators. Yet I would argue that, against the recognition of what might be created through genuine, living collaboration between spectators and actors, modern Shakespeare audiences tend to be much too observant of conventions relevant only to viewing TV, film, and representational theater where the audience pretends it isn't there. Elizabethan audiences wrote down lines in their table books, made faces and joked at the actors, cried out, wept loudly, laughed uproariously. Nuts were cracked, hands were clapped, apples were thrown, hisses were common, and, at the play's end, audiences would sometimes sing and dance.

Such carryings on might be thought terribly intrusive upon the actors' concentration and any sense of rapt communication with the throng. And there were, certainly, moments of utter silence and stillness. The Elizabethan actors did take a lot of abuse, but also they received from the audience an incredible tide of real, full, warm attention and energy. Each side, performers and spectators, opened itself to the other and collaborated in a vital way. It is hard for us to picture the difference between modern playing conditions and Shakespearean ones. As Bernard Beckerman has written:

Today as much as possible the actor will try to maintain the illusion that he is facing a fellow actor and not facing the audience. The flat picture frame of our theater encourages this illusion. In the Elizabethan theater the actor had to turn out, that is, orient himself to the circumference of auditors, if he were to be seen at all. This condition reinforced the conventional or ceremonial manner in acting.

By turning out, the actor emphasized the stage as a setting behind him rather than an environment around him. This was in accord with the demands of the plays. …

On stage, he shared his experience directly with the audience. He was part of an elaborate pageant taking place in a far-off land against an opulent backdrop. Yet on an emotional level he communicated intimately and directly with the audience. In more or less unrestrained utterance he portrayed extremes of passion.⁴

Each side, in other words, presented itself to the other, through voice contact, movement, and interchange of energies. Today, if a modern Shakespeare audience would seek more than a tepid experience of mild, quiet Bardolatrous reverence, such an audience could hardly do better than to agree to seek maximum openness and mutual commitment to vulnerability with the acting troupe as expressed through direct eye contact, appropriate sound interchanges, and relaxed, small-scale gestural mimicries or incorporations of the actions performed. If we would explore the potential emotion in Shakespeare's plays, we must reappropriate their life and their significance in dynamic debate with cultural authorities of presumed authorship, scholarship, or stage professionalism. Shakespeare can live fully only in our eyes, our voices, our bodies and in the feelings stored and working there. Shakespeare inheres in the full, participatory collaboration between the page, the stage, and our capacities to give, to go forth from ourselves in forms of charity and good humor that are not only learned or socially constructed but also unlearned or deconstructed. Let Shakespeare collaborate and merge with his colaborers. Let us collaborate and colabor with Shakespeare. After the final play, what else is left?

Notes

1. Edward Dowden, Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (New York: Harper, 1881), 360.

2. Ibid., 379.

3. See Terence Hawkes, That Shakespeherian Rag: Essays on a Critical Process (London and New York: Methuen, 1986), 73-91.

4. Shakespeare at the Globe: 1599-1608 (London: Macmillan, 1966), 129, 156.