‘Be Rough With Me’: The Collaborative Arenas of The Two Noble Kinsmen
[In the following essay, Hedrick contends that The Two Noble Kinsmen's thematic exploration of the nature of artistic rivalry suggests that Shakespeare did not collaborate in the writing of the play. Hedrick focuses on the play's treatment of the subject of collaboration, and on the relationship between cooperation and competition explored in the play.]
To the extent that necessity is socially dreamed, the dream becomes necessary.
—Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle
I. COLLABORATION VERSUS AUTHORSHIP
In describing The Two Noble Kinsmen, one might well follow Pierre Macherey's prescription that a literary work be treated as “the product of a specific labor,” thereby avoiding an account of artistic creativity that in humanist fashion “omits any account of production.”1 I want to provide such a description, however hindered by the formidable obstacle that the historically specific circumstances of the labor producing this work—usually assumed to be a collaboration of Shakespeare and Fletcher—are wholly lost, as are for the most part the circumstances of collaboration between any Elizabethan playwrights. As indexes to such practices, we have but a few, scattered facts together with the plays themselves. The Two Noble Kinsmen may be our best theoretical index.
The account I want to provide is neither an attribution study nor a thorough “reading,” but rather a selective analysis based on my interest in the audience strategies or rhetoric of Renaissance spectacle. By the “spectacular” I refer to the economy of visual practices constituted by the agency of all participants (including managers, actors, patrons, texts, artists, audiences, judges, administrators), practices whose end is in decision and judgment. These decisions take different forms, such as taste in artistic spectacle, “calls” in athletic spectacle, and consent in political and legal spectacle. The prizes respectively conferred on the spectators—genius, fanhood, and citizenship—may be as substantive as any of those for the performers.
I propose that this play represents the general practices and perhaps the immediate circumstances of its production. It may even be that it is designed for its historical audience, or at least part of the audience, to recognize these circumstances through the play “translucently,”2 although such a possibility could hardly be confirmed from the chiefly “internal” evidence and interpretation I give. Along the way I will make several claims useful to a “reading” and to attribution study. Specifically, I claim that the play thematically explores the nature of artistic rivalry, in such a way as to suggest strongly that one of its collaborators was not, as is customarily thought, Shakespeare.3 The former analysis is not dependent on this incidental claim, whose value depends on an unincluded analysis on new stylistic grounds—rejecting Shakespeare on the basis of speech act theory, by demonstrating that Fletcher's unidentified coauthor is wholly unskilled in the degree and kind of indirect, inferential, second-order speech acts characteristic of Shakespeare. These sorts of acts constitute the informal logic of natural conversation, where speakers reconstruct, reinterpret, and draw inferences from each other's words; where speech acts appear as other forms (assertions as questions, requests as assertions, and so on); and where conversational “maxims,” such as the principle requiring one to be relevant to the topic at hand, are often violated for effect and meaning. (See Appendix for examples and discussion.)
Conversation is, not coincidentally, the consummate form of a collaborative practice that includes a competition or rivalry. As such, it too participates thematically in a play about a rivalry between friends. In addition to its reliance on speech act theory—introduced as a language model that vastly improves upon the models grounding earlier style study—the present analysis uses the feminist theory of “homosociability” in order to read systematically the play's representation of collaboration as a professionalist subtext, a reading that adds further weight to the case against Shakespeare as coauthor. Finally, another detachable section—a speculative “Coda”—advances the case by a circumstantial scenario based on the theme.
As a detective enterprise in collaborative work, attribution study typically locates discoverable stylistic differences resulting from two writers combining efforts to produce a spectacle. For The Two Noble Kinsmen, aside from the disputes about the names of the writers, there has been some consensus along these lines: (1) the play is written in two distinct styles, (2) one of the styles is more Shakespearean than the other, and (3) there is some rough parity in their quality.4 I propose to recuperate the collective force of these views by seeing them not as the discoveries of scholars but rather as the special features of the spectating experience for the historical audience, including the writers themselves. The motivating question is this: What if such features of writing were meant to be seen? What if dual authorship does not merely produce the show, but constitutes the show? The scholarship on this question has provided important insights while evading their force—that the play presents its differences as spectacle. I propose that The Two Noble Kinsmen is less significant as a collaboration on spectacle than it is as a spectacle of collaboration.
Collaboration itself, I want to show, appears as a subject for scrutiny in the play. This obsessive topic corresponds, moreover, to the play's valorization of a certain nobility, whose representation is the chief addition to Chaucer and which is always accompanied by a radical anxiety concerning any collaborative production of meaning and value. That is, when The Two Noble Kinsmen, unlike The Knight's Tale, strives to idealize friendship and nobility, it reflects an anxiety about the way they are produced—specifically, in an artistic, competitive, and “homosocial” labor. This specific mode of labor is at the same time the mode of production of the two noble collaborators of The Two Noble Kinsmen. The play is their title match.
The rivalry of Palamon and Arcite for the hand of Emilia is, of course, the central action, shared by both Chaucer's tale and The Two Noble Kinsmen. The major thematic shift is signaled by the term noble in the play's title, since the rivals' nobility and magnanimity are continually studied, as if transposing the story's arms contest into a Renaissance magnanimity contest. Noble gestures, which are selfless and unnecessary, punctuate the entire story—from Theseus's willingness to interrupt his wedding at the pleas of the three widowed Queens for noble burials of their husbands, to Palamon and Arcite's decision to fight for their own kinsman Creon despite his moral inferiority, to the fraternity-style, charitable collection of the knights contributing to the madwoman's dowry. The most spectacularly magnanimous gesture is undoubtedly the scene of the two kinsmen arming each other for their combat, a scene vastly enlarged from the wordless event merely mentioned by Chaucer. Here again we see the play's added fascination with the dramatic ironies of honor between antagonists. What the play chiefly adds, then, is an exaggeration of the paradoxicality of the rivalry, fluctuating as it does between reluctance, assertiveness, nostalgic goodwill, and hostility.
With this addition, the play raises the question of differences in nobility between the two without ever fully clarifying, fixing, or dramatizing those differences. (Hence the interpretive debate about their distinguishability.) For Chaucer the differences were more thematic, functioning more as instantiations of courtly love questions such as “Who loves truly? the one who loves his object as a human or the one who loves his object as a goddess?”; or, “Who is worse? the imprisoned one who sees his beloved, or the free one banished from his beloved?” For The Two Noble Kinsmen, we seem to be invited only to search for differences in noble style, as Emilia searches for them, as if constructing an indecisive though discriminating audience. Stressing the paradoxical rivalry, the play reduces the consequentiality of any differences. It does this not only by the trick ending in which the military victor dies while the loser wins the girl, as in Chaucer, but especially by its changes. Emilia's indecision, for instance, is as anguished as her preference is fickle. In the play's added subplot, moreover, the Jailer's Daughter does see difference between Palamon and Arcite, but the difference is inconsequential since in her madness she accepts the unnamed Wooer as the surrogate Palamon and is thus fooled into sleeping with him. In both plots there is an ultimate failure—through indecision or through madness—to establish differences. A female failure resolves male rivalry.
In its deliberate exaggeration of the themes of noble indifference, selection by destiny, and courtesy between rivals, the play approaches self-parody, an internal pressure best defined and completed by the play's reception in Jonson's contemporaneous Bartholomew Fair. Jonson's allusion signals the main direction of the change from Chaucer, in the rivalry between Winwife and Quarlous for the hand of Grace Wellborn. Interrupting their sword fight, Grace coolly describes both her Emilia-like indecision and its solution: she will also let fate decide, but in a literary way, having each of them write down (“conceive”) a word, one of which the next random passerby is to mark. Quarlous picks his word “out of the Arcadia, then: ‘Argulus,’” and Winwife “out of the play: ‘Palamon’” (translating their competition into a competition between literary works). Their absurd hostility-cum-courtesy is a condensation of The Two Noble Kinsmen. The situation in which one helps the other produce one's own defeat—a chief paradox of The Two Noble Kinsmen—is the ground of Jonson's amusement at Grace's cheery mediation: “Because I will bind both your endeavors to work together, friendly and jointly, each to the other's fortune, and have myself fitted with some means to make him that is forsaken a part of amends.”5 This world is so noble that no one ever loses in it.
The reluctance of the rivalry, and the simultaneous heightening and dissolution of difference, corresponds to the play's elevation of nobility defined as a kind of collaboration among the noble.6 To understand this “collaboration,” however, it is useful to interrogate the term, its uses and associations. Current interest in the subject spans the arts and may be part of a general cultural project of overcoming a textual ideology linked to Romantic and modern notions of individual authorship and genius. Allied to such interests are recent, poststructuralist interrogations of authorship itself, including the “death” of the “author” and his replacement by textuality, or by an “author-effect” in which his identity is institutionally and ideologically constituted, his roles or practices dispersed.7 Coincidentally, such theoretical claims correspond to recent shifts in Shakespeare studies, where author-centered meaning is reduced by comparison with the meanings produced by the institution itself. Shakespeare's art accordingly can be seen as more of a workshop product of the theatrical company and, bringing in the other side of the stage, as the collaborative product of interchange with the audience, a view growing out of Collingwood's aesthetics.8 But all such shifts, I believe, demonstrate a premature mystification of collaboration, particularly insofar as, by stressing cooperation, they filter out an oppositional character to the term, one that is revived in the European association of collaboration with subversion or treason. In a word, we will soon require more of Jonson's critique of mystified collaboration, expressed in his parody of The Two Noble Kinsmen.
How broadly may the term be applied to Elizabethan drama? G. E. Bentley, on the subject of collaboration, concludes, “Every performance in the commercial theatres from 1590 to 1642 was itself essentially a collaboration; it was the joint accomplishment of dramatists, actors, musicians, costumers, prompters (who made alterations in the original manuscripts) and—at least in the later theatres—of managers.”9 Although this is a persuasive view, we need not stop at a consideration of practices exclusively “internal” to the theater companies. We might also include involvement by the nobility and royalty—positive as in commissioned performances and texts, negative as in censorship. This mixture of encouragement and control, cooperation and competition, had an unofficial form as well, if we can believe Dekker's mention of tavern “revels masters” whose criticism influenced playwriting and revision.10 Indeed, the Elizabethan theater seems to have been as oppositional as it was cooperative. There was cutthroat competitiveness among rival companies at the very beginning of the institution, not to speak of the rivalries among actors, between men's and boys' companies, and between public and private theaters. Plays combated plays, in arenas where bears combated dogs, and fencers combated each other. We have not yet thoroughly explored the implications of a situation in which dramatic texts were themselves arenas for actors, in a setting where wagers were sometimes placed on competing actors, who may have supplemented their salaries by bets that they would outdo others in some role.11
The term collaboration, with its current positive associations, was not the term applied to the joint authorship of plays, nor did we have the term until two centuries later. Henslowe, recording payments to collaborators, doesn't call them that but simply registers their names with their full or installment payments during or after the composition.12 Yet we have a recoverable technical term for “coworker” from Jonson himself. The term is co-adjutor, significantly used by him in the prologue to Volpone, where he demotes this and corollary terms in a boast that he wrote the play all by himself in only five weeks:
From his owne hand, without a co-adiutor,
Nouice, iourney-man, or tutor.(13)
As an index to the times, Jonson may be less representative because of his role as a self-classicizing playwright writing on the side of individual genius in a bookish theater.14 But his remarks nevertheless carry general significance, even though it may be vain, as Bentley asserts, to speculate about procedures of collaboration from this list. The list presupposes, we might say, a range of possibilities rather than a standard method; more importantly, it signals a power differential and a potential rivalry between coworkers, proceeding from the more equitable to the more power-differentiated relationships. Bentley, in his discussion of what is known about Elizabethan collaboration, argues there must have been a standard procedure and that collaboration itself was the standard mode of authorship, on the grounds that as many as half of the plays were coauthored. But Bentley's claims evade the force of the brute evidence he furnishes—that if half of the plays were coauthored, half were not. What we can infer is not the existence of some procedural norm, but the existence of a system in which modes of production are themselves in competition for privilege. Authorship competing with collaboration was the Elizabethan theatrical situation thematized, as we shall see, in The Two Noble Kinsmen.
II. CONVERSATION AND CONTEST, OR HOW MEN DO THINGS WITH WORDS
Among all the productive modes of collective effort, perhaps the most common is the practice of conversation, that is, the joint production of utterances among at least two participants. One of the singular accomplishments of Shakespeare that has received little sustained attention among scholars is his ability to represent natural conversation naturally. Throughout the canon he is increasingly attentive to the informal logic, and indeed the collaborative nature, of ordinary talk, including its capacity for the anticollaborative or competitive construction of meaning (best exemplified by Hamlet, or by fools).15 It is this informal logic with its attendant violations of conversational maxims, as indicated earlier, that led me to conclude that the non-Fletcherian portions of the play were quite un-Shakespearean—that speakers in these portions simply did not do to each others' words as much as Shakespeare can have his speakers do. (See my Appendix for more on this stylistic criterion to add to those such as vocabulary, image clusters, and metrics.)
For the present purposes, it is sufficient to observe the general phenomenon that conversation is a mode of the production of meaning in which team cooperation and individual competitiveness are in a positive tension. This aspect of conversation enables it to participate significantly in the matrix of competitive-cooperative forces in the play. But the notion of conversation as a form of contest requires translation into a narrower context here: namely, in The Two Noble Kinsmen conversation is to be understood as masculine conversation in specifically masculine contexts. The reason for this will become clearer when the concept of conversation is linked to a thematic reading of the play in terms of “homosociability.”
Competing readings of The Two Noble Kinsmen yield the customary themes of humanist literary studies. One such reading—that the play exemplifies the (late Shakespearean) theme of the passage from innocence to a joyless experience—is especially relevant to the present concerns.16 The timeless theme of passage, however, here acquires a gendered form. A feminist version of this narrative paradigm is provided in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's concept of “male homosocial desire,” by which she means all forms of male bonding, located within a standard cultural narrative of a “male path through heterosexuality to homosocial satisfaction,” a path that while compulsory in most cultures is nevertheless a “slippery and threatened one.”17 Mapping this cultural narrative onto the action of the play brings into relief the way in which the contest over Emilia later becomes a contest among all chivalric values. Since those are presumably male values, this path corresponds to Sedgwick's theory of “homosocial desire.” Finally, I want to translate this “desire” into the terms of a specifically artistic desire.
More evident in The Two Noble Kinsmen than the theme of lost innocence is the play's pervasive representation of the male world of contests. Their frequency has been noticed by Paul Bertram, who thereby deduces thematic unity and the play's single authorship by Shakespeare.18 (The argument is flawed in its assumption that a main theme could not be jointly achieved.) He notes, for example, that the wedding festivities and the war against Creon are “sports craving seriousness and skill.” There are also the “games of honor” that Palamon and Arcite say they will miss, Arcite's wrestling at the May “pastimes,” and Theseus's hunting expedition in the third act. Even the morris entertainment becomes a contest for exhibiting skill and prowess, with the schoolmaster Gerrold (who has difficulty when forced to collaborate with rustics) in something like Theseus's role in the final tournament. Other games and sports include the Wooer's fishing after being deserted by the Daughter, the couples' chase game of “barley-break” (known also as “last couple in hell”), and the Wooer's invitation to supper and cards. While noting the relation of such contests to the interest in heroic values, Bertram is finally content to generalize about the enduring significance of play in all human cultures.
What is lost by this generalization is the problematization of gender-specific play throughout The Two Noble Kinsmen, where the paradoxes of a self-defeating victory are foregrounded, simultaneously defining and threatening the male world of collaboration and contest.19 Early in the play we observe this fascination with paradox, in Palamon's comments on the military veterans now begging in the streets of Thebes: “scars and bare weeds / The gain o' th' martialist, who did propound / To his bold ends honor and golden ingots, / Which though he won, he had not; and now flurted / By peace, for whom he fought” (1.2.15-19). And Emilia, lamenting the loss that wins her a husband, concludes the spectacle: “Is this winning?” (5.3.138). Palamon universalizes, “O cousin, / That we should things desire which do cost us / The loss of our desire!” (5.4.109-11). And Arcite makes the paradox an economic one: “Emily, / To buy you, I have lost what's dearest to me, / Save what is bought; and yet I purchase cheaply, / As I do rate your value” (5.3.111-14). Such paradoxes require, I believe, a more gender-specific consideration.
Working from an unswerving humanist essentialism,20 Bertram simplifies the play's treatment of noble values. But he does so in an instructive way when observing the theme of “admiration-turning-to-emulation.” We identify the theme in 1.3 when Emilia tells how she and her childhood friend imitated one another in everything. Its fullest treatment, however, is the dialogue between Palamon and Arcite in which, as they arm each other, they recall earlier encounters:
PAL.
Methinks this armor's very like that, Arcite,
Thou wor'st that day the three kings fell, but lighter.
ARC.
That was a very good one, and that day,
I well remember, you outdid me, cousin;
I never saw such valor. When you charg'd
Upon the left wing of the enemy,
I spurr'd hard to come up, and under me
I had a right good horse.
PAL.
You had indeed,
A bright bay, I remember.
ARC.
Yes. But all
Was vainly labor'd in me; you outwent me,
Nor could my wishes reach you. Yet a little
I did by imitation.
PAL.
More by virtue.
You are modest, cousin.
ARC.
When I saw you charge first,
Methought I heard a dreadful clap of thunder
Break from the troop.
(3.6.70-84)
To concentrate on a theme of emulation of the dialogue, however, is to risk losing sight of the deliberate way that the escalating compliments begin to perform the very rivalry bringing Palamon and Arcite to combat in the first place. As Arcite describes how Palamon “outwent” him in the arena of battle, both begin to transform their conversation into another arena, each outdoing the other by competitive memory and by the one-downsmanship of humility. What follows after the passage Bertram cites is therefore crucial, for Palamon appropriates Arcite's metaphor of thunder in order to say that Arcite was actually first in the charge, just as lightning comes before thunder:
PAL.
But still before that flew
The lightning of your valor. Stay a little;
Is not this piece too strait?
ARC.
No, no, 'tis well.
PAL.
I would have nothing hurt thee but my sword,
A bruise would be dishonor
ARC.
Now I am perfect.
PAL.
Stand off then.
(3.6.84-89)
In complimenting each other they disarm each other while arming each other, acting out an emulation bound up in principle with a rivalry both constructive and destructive. A speech about competition, in the homosocial recursive economy of language, itself becomes a competition. Not accidentally, the scene also figures as an aesthetics of military equipment, a discriminating evaluation of war materials by joint recollections of former armor and former horses. The conversation builds to its natural conclusion in action—a military fashion show of sorts, with Palamon admiring how well his assistance has adorned Arcite.
In recapturing the past, this dialogue echoes other reminiscences in the play, notably in 3.3 when Palamon, having just been released by the doting Jailer's Daughter, is eating the food Arcite brings to strengthen him for their fight. Jarring to critics because of its snickering, locker-room tone, the scene portrays Palamon and Arcite gossiping about former girlfriends, about getting wenches pregnant, and about “hunting” in the woods. Here they employ what socio-linguists term the “topping constraint” in competitive story chaining.21 They license this competitive discourse with an initial agreement to police their conversation by having “no more of these vain parleys” over Emilia. And they agree to have “no mention of this woman” and to “argue that hereafter” (3.3.5ff.). But they cannot keep cooperation and competition apart. Their nostalgia immediately sours when the topic of Emilia comes up “naturally”—that is, as a result of the logic of competitive conversation. Once again they are at each other's throats with insults and threats as memories of conquest intrude on present cooperation.
An even more important instance of the collaboration/competition matrix is found in the scene in which the rivalry begins:
PAL.
I saw her first.
.....
ARC.
I saw her too.
(2.2.160-61)
The issue of who went into battle first will repeat this issue of who saw Emilia first. In the logic of the spectacle, a competition is countered by an emulation, itself another competition. Chaucer's debate about which lover loves truly is emended into a seeing contest or spectacular competition. Thus, women produce not only sight but also sighting, or competitive male work. They are the agency through which the claims of seeing first and seeing too are pitted against one another, juxtaposing competition and collaboration.
Aggressive vision is also assigned to the Jailer's Daughter, who is quick to distinguish between the two prisoners in another spectacular moment: “No, sir, no, that's Palamon. Arcite is the lower of the twain; you may perceive a part of him. … It is a holiday to look on them. Lord, the diff'rence of men!” (2.1.49-54). Her unfeminine, unhesitant vision is reprimanded by her father, who tells her not to point at them because they would not do so to her. In contrast to Emilia, she is not reluctant to distinguish noble men in competitive and hierarchical terms. But that reluctance is, in Emilia, a positive force, a noble indecision. Indeed, the Jailer's Daughter's failure to be thus reluctant seems allied to her very madness. True nobility makes men difficult to distinguish. Emilia's indecisiveness honors the homosocial community of noble men; the other woman's decisiveness disrupts it. The latter imagines distinctions between Palamon and Arcite that aren't there, while failing to see those that are there between Palamon and the Wooer.
Because of its anxiety about collaborative speech and vision, the play intermittently must present a frictionless conversation, different from its idealization of a “rough” one. This style is by and large a female one, signaled at the outset by the resolutely cooperative entreaties of the three Queens. We also find it in the prison scene when, before the men see Emilia, they are collaborating together on a meditation, a resignation to a fate that will keep them not only from corruption but also from either “business” or a “wife [who] might part us lawfully,” followed by a list of natural evils such as sickness (2.2.88ff.). Arcite compares women to “liberty and common conversation, / The poison of pure spirits” (2.2.74-75), insofar as both seek to mislead youth. Accordingly, he goes on to imagine the opposite of “common conversation,” that is, a high-minded conversation of further collaborative meditations. This future talk is thought of as the product of an all-male generation:
ARC.
What worthy blessing
Can be, but our imaginations
May make it ours? 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 …
(2.2.76-84)
Despite the imagery of this, we need not look for a homoerotic or homosexual subtext, if we acknowledge the governing structure of “male homosocial desire.” Arcite is daydreaming an idealized arena of labor that dissolves all other social structures but that lacks usual competitive forces. The vision is one of artistic collaboration between comparably talented coadjutors, a vision that is itself collaboratively produced as the two men work together on an acceptable metaphor for their present enclosure. (Arcite begins, “Let's think this prison holy sanctuary” [2.2.71].) But the entire play will move toward its proper enclosure—the field—as the true metaphor for male homosocial satisfaction and its “new births of love.” The momentary vision of sanctuary, like other nostalgias for a pure cooperation, will not survive conversation.
In its representation of arenas for speech, vision, and love, The Two Noble Kinsmen inevitably focuses on titles, a theme that has been well demonstrated by Bertram. In its primary sense title signifies a victory, as in Palamon's prayer to Mars that he “be styl'd the lord o' th' day” (5.1.60). The adjunct sense of ownership is also included, as Palamon uses the term when he accuses Arcite of being as “false as thy title to” Emilia (2.2.172), and as Arcite uses the term, responding that his is “as just a title to her beauty” (2.2.180, ownership of spectacle). In a later scene he reasserts the claim of “good title” (3.1.112). One of the Knights will describe the shifts of “Fortune, whose title is as momentary / As to us death is certain” (5.4.17-18). Theseus will tell one of the Queens that to be mastered by the senses is to “lose our human title” (1.1.233) and will later tell Emilia that she must attend the final spectacle since she is “the price and garland / To crown the question's title” (5.3.16-17). Allowing Theseus's metaphor of herself as the “treasure” that “gives the service pay,” she will nevertheless deny that she must be present at the homosocial arena: “Sir, pardon me, / The title of a kingdom may be tried / Out of itself” (5.3.32-34). Emilia is reluctant to be a spectator, fearing that she will influence the outcome of the contest if she herself becomes a spectacle for the two rivals as they fight. Hippolyta alludes to other “title” matches, lamenting that she would rather see a fight for a different prize: “They would show / Bravely about the titles of two kingdoms” (4.2.144-45). The metaphor of contested kingdoms echoes Arcite's description of the horses Emilia gave him as fitting to be “by a pair of kings back'd, in a field / That their crowns' titles tried” (3.1.21-22).
The title-seeking of the two “bold titlers” (5.3.83) is represented also at the important level of conversation and language, where we again find the struggle between collaboration and competition. Rivalry mixed with respect motivates, moreover, the exchanges of the two men when they select titles of address for one another. “Noble kinsmen,” “sir,” “cousin,” and proper names alternate in their polite address in the arming scene, where the shifts between formal and informal address again signal their bond and their distance. Palamon even adopts an old, punning form of address to embody the dilemma: “Cozener Arcite” (3.1.44). Turning address itself into yet another contest, their final farewell before the tournament again turns magnanimously competitive:
PAL.
You speak well.
Before I turn, let me embrace thee, cousin.
This I shall never do again.
ARC.
One farewell.
PAL.
Why, let it be so; farewell, coz.
ARC.
Farewell, sir.
(5.1.30-33)
But to win a title is, in the arena of the play, for the other to lose a title, a “paradox” emblematized in the tournament's un-Chaucerian rule that the loser shall die. Fame and the memory of name are contrasted to the forgetting of a name, as Arcite describes:
ARC.
I am in labor
To push your name, your ancient love, our kindred,
Out of my memory, and i' th' self-same place
To seat something I would confound.
(5.1.25-28)
When they speak of who loses, the talk again acquires its competitive edge, where to praise the other requires one to debase oneself. Thus, in the arming scene Palamon first wishes an honorable place for whichever man is defeated, offering forgiveness in advance if he himself is killed:
PAL.
If there be
A place prepar'd for those that sleep in honor,
I wish his weary soul that falls may win it.
(3.6.98-100)
After a handshake, however, the conversational rivalry continues, as Arcite competes by announcing an even more spectacular resignation to fate: if he loses, he will accept from his opponent what would be a patently unjust title:
ARC.
If I fall, curse me, and say I was a coward,
For none but such dare die in these just trials.
Once more farewell, my cousin.
PAL.
Farewell, Arcite.
(3.6.104-7)
The absurdity of such exchanges, with Palamon not reacting to this outrageous request, can be accounted for as a desperate artistic attempt, bordering on self-parody, to imagine a transcendent Sprezzatura.
Just as title and form of address are used as weapons in the collaborative-competitive arena, so are the speech acts of praise and blame. When Palamon and Arcite first meet after prison, the rapid shifts between flattery and insult may seem an impoverished psychological verisimilitude, but the intention seems to be to represent the paradox of productive rivalry. When Arcite generously offers to bring files to remove Palamon's shackles, to feed, clothe, and even perfume him until he's ready to fight to the death for Emilia, Palamon momentarily demands that the rivalry be conducted with fitting conversation, that is, with a hostility to match the forthcoming combat:
PAL.
Most certain
You love me not; be rough with me, and pour
This oil out of your language. By this air,
I could for each word give a cuff, my stomach
Not reconcil'd by reason.
(3.1.101-5)
Proceeding with invincible politeness, Arcite begs pardon that his language is not rough, using polite language to apologize for polite language. He explains that he does not even chide his own horse to spur him. Palamon has located language itself in the system of a homosocial labor aesthetic, as a rough “spur” to inspire an escalating greatness in both opponents. To request to be used roughly is the paradigmatic magnanimous gesture of this competitive-cooperative arena. The entire play dreams of a contradictory speech act—“[Please] be rough with me”—as the figure of ideal social relations, the social dream noted in the present essay's epigraph. This is what men do with words.
We see the female antithesis of this complex mode of speech when the deluded Jailer's Daughter goes off to sleep with the man she thinks is Palamon, requesting to him, “But you shall not hurt me,” and replying to his assurance, “If you do, love, I'll cry” (5.2.111-12). The pacific mode of action and discourse, linked to women and to madness, is specifically devalued by its juxtaposition with the male dream.
Collaborative-turned-competitive discourse also dominates the prison scene, where the dialogue upon the sighting of Emilia shifts from iteration to one-upmanship:
ARC.
She is wondrous fair.
PAL.
She is all the beauty extant.
(2.2.147)
As they have produced collaborative warfare, meditations, and viewings, so Palamon and Arcite here create collaborative judgment and value. Here, as elsewhere in the play, it is difficult to distinguish between the cousins, and their competitive descriptions increase the stakes in the rivalry at the same time they constitute the value of its object:
PAL.
What think you of this beauty?
ARC.
'Tis a rare one.
PAL.
Is't but a rare one?
ARC.
Yes, a matchless beauty.
PAL.
Might not a man well lose himself and love her?
ARC.
I cannot tell what you have done; I have,
Beshrew mine eyes for't! Now I feel my shackles.
PAL.
You love her then?
ARC.
Who would not?
(2.2.153-58)
The tone of this scene is hard to grasp, probably because it is a version of the artificial conversation game known as the “vapors,” or sustained contradiction or nonacceptance of whatever your partner says—the game that Jonson spoofs in the same play wherein he spoofs The Two Noble Kinsmen. At once imitative and adversarial, such collaborative labor proceeds almost tentatively, as if the production of value is too important to be assigned to a single member of the team. It may be that the love judgments of the men are undermined in the scene, as if neither would be in love if the other were not, but it seems rather that we are invited merely to admire their high masculine spirits. Indeed, this collaborative work seems more a sign of nobility than a deviation from it. Dependence on the other's judgment does not by itself seem to be the object of an implied critique, at least not in the parallel circumstance of Emilia's indecisiveness about the two men. Her indecision is another collaboration. Choice is not simply choice for her but choice in an arena, even when she is alone, soliloquizing over their two pictures in yet another spectacular contest. While she debates their looks—now preferring Arcite's sweeter face, now Palamon's more sober face—at one point she indicates that her choice is not merely influenced, but actually constituted, by the audience observing the choice. Significantly, the choice is gender specific, so that for the male audience she says she loves Arcite, the worshiper of Mars, and for the female audience she says she loves Palamon, the worshiper of Venus:
For if my brother but even now had ask'd me
Whether I lov'd, I had run mad for Arcite;
Now if my sister—more for Palamon.
Stand both together: now, come ask me, brother—
Alas, I know not! Ask me now, sweet sister—
I may go look! What a mere child is fancy,
That having two fair gauds of equal sweetness,
Cannot distinguish, but must cry for both!
(4.2.47-54)
Emilia in her anxiety of choice focuses on the aspect of the arena that makes choice impossible—its bifurcated audience. To seek common values in such a situation is ultimately delusory. The spectacle is constituted by the spectator; the answer to a question depends on who is asking. Along with her own reluctance to be a spectator at the tournament, for fear of becoming a distraction, Emilia's representation of the power of the audience reflects the authors' similar ambivalence toward their audience—an ambivalence, it might be added, far more Jonsonian than Shakespearean, tending more toward hostility than toward generosity. In the audience's power, we learn from the Prologue and Epilogue, rests the play's victory, or its defeat.
III. NURTURING COMPETITION: BEYOND THE SPECTACULAR ARENA
Having located a gender-specific thematization for The Two Noble Kinsmen, we might expect some direct correspondence of cooperation with the female, competition with the male. But this equation breaks down in the play's more complicated versions of spectating. Ultimately, the play presents not a gendered division of labor and identity but rather a purified labor and identity that, by balancing cooperation and competition, usurp the realm of the female, who accordingly disappears as the requisite audience constituting the male homosocial arena. The purified or idealized arena is always endangered by a non-idealized, specifically bifurcated audience for whom every performance will always carry a specifically bifurcated significance. Men and women, seeing two different shows in the same arena, place bets on different contestants. In such a spectacle, winning is always losing. The male appropriation of the two oppositional terms—emulation and competition, or oily and rough language—forms the spectacular dream of a nurturing competition, hence raiding the customary, envied social slot of the female. No wonder that Emilia is an anxious, unwilling audience. Reduced, or elevated, to being the contested “kingdom,” she is included as a spectator only to be excluded as a judge or collaborator, not only “guiltless of election” but also denied the construction of value. Emilia leaves the arena to the men, letting “the event,” which Arcite calls “that never-erring arbitrator” (1.2.114) and which is doubtless a male version of Fortune, decide.
The Two Noble Kinsmen is largely about differentiating and electing men by their qualities. This activity is carried out aside from the main plot in a rather odd extension of Chaucer's descriptions of the assistant knights at the final tournament. In this undramatic section of the play we hear lengthy descriptions of the men's features and clothing, from which we are apparently, as implied spectators, to judge manliness. Many of the details are drawn from Chaucer, but the features are distributed among three instead of two men, as if specific actors may have been intended. The descriptions involve such an exerted delicacy of distinction that judgment itself becomes a noble performance, a skill best exemplified in the ability to read paradox: “when he smiles / He shows a lover, when he frowns, a soldier” (4.2.135-36). The slightest shades of color are deployed in the judgment, demonstrating noble discrimination: “He's white-hair'd, / Not wanton white, but such a manly color / Next to an aborn” (4.2.123-25). The arena is significantly a male aesthetic one, a decadent patriarchal aesthetics.22 We have observed that the indecision of Emilia acknowledges the community and variety of male virtues while at the same time stereotyping her feminine inconstancy. Still worse is the Jailer's Daughter, who, unintentionally inconstant, chooses too soon and gullibly accepts cheap substitutes. Failing at noble judgment, these women are inferior audiences.
The men, of course, differentiate themselves through combat, which is itself a mode of spectacle. When Theseus interrupts Palamon and Arcite's duel in the forest, he merely defers it; by ordering a tournament, he shifts the mode from private duel to public spectacle. (For the audience, however, it is the second combat that, because offstage, is “private.”) The stakes are the same but mediated differently: the loser expects to lose life and title, but only in the private spectacle will he die by the other's hand, the destructiveness unmediated. In spectacular terms the viewing of a contest is itself a contest of viewing, reminding us of the rivals' obsession about who saw the beloved one first. Public spectacle is an arena of audience bifurcation constructed by the male value of priority, where rival viewing replaces rival combat. The issue for the two kinsmen is chiefly whether Palamon's seeing Emilia first counts as a victory, an idea rejected by Arcite with this military analogy:
ARC.
Because another
First sees the enemy, shall I stand still,
And let mine honor down, and never charge?
(2.2.193-95)
What is not at stake is whether the event counts as a contest. That is, no one asks if love is really like a contest or not. Maintaining the question within the terms of a contest, Arcite only muddles the issue by substituting military conventions, but he does so by devaluing spectating and by locating a mimetic component within a competition. In its spectacular economy, the enemy is exchanged for the loved one.
Fight in The Two Noble Kinsmen is invariably allied to sight, a conjunction we see in a repetition of phrases by different speakers anticipating the final tournament: the Messenger warns the Doctor that he may “lose the noblest sight / That ev'r was seen” (5.2.99-100), to which the Doctor promises, “I will not lose the fight” (5.2.103; some later editions emend this to “sight”). The following scene begins with Pirithous asking Emilia, “Will you lose this sight?” (5.3.1). Emilia's indecision figures as a self-contesting vision:
… I
Am guiltless of election. Of mine eyes
Were I to lose one, they are equal precious,
I could doom neither. …
(5.1.153-56)
The idea of an internal visual contest rehearses the values of the homosocial arena, and accordingly the figure of her fear is reversed by Palamon when he expresses his absolute willingness to destroy the enemy, even if it were a part of himself: “weren't one eye / Against another, arm oppress'd by arm, / I would destroy th' offender, coz, I would, / Though parcel of myself” (5.1.21-24). The dream of the arena is thus repeated in and on the male body. The cultural narrative of an achieved homosocial satisfaction is accompanied by anxiety about the proliferation of arenas, which create competitive viewing, even within one subject. The anxiety is relieved by a desire to reduce the internal violence of competitive viewing by reducing the event either to a private spectacle or to a public spectacle viewed by a unified, noble audience capable of drawing distinctions but for whom choice remains a rough, noble performance. The dream of homosocial performance requires a homogeneous audience. Appropriately, the Epilogue to the whole play is addressed only to the “gentlemen.”
A version of the nostalgia for a single audience is found in the prison scene when Palamon, lamenting that they can't see Thebes, speaks of spectacle lost: never again to see “the hardy youths strive for the games of honor, / Hung with the painted favors of their ladies, / Like tall ships under sail” (2.2.10-12). Palamon collaboratively reminisces about a race, another of the play's numerous contests, in which he and Arcite outran their competitors as well as the audience of ladies:
… then start amongst 'em
And as an east wind leave 'em all behind us,
Like lazy clouds, whilst Palamon and Arcite,
Even in the wagging of a wanton leg,
Outstripp'd the people's praises, won the garlands,
Fre they have time to wish 'em ours.
(2.2.12-17)
This vision reconciles collaboration and competition by turning a public race into a private one, unifying the spectators by erasing them. To erase the spectators is to erase the fact of Palamon and Arcite's own competition. Since we never hear which of the two won, their rivalry has been substituted by the rivalry with others. Rough with each other, they spur each other's victory beyond the others, and beyond the competitive judgments of the bifurcated spectators. Like Emilia, the audience is denied the power of observing winning. Especially noteworthy is the play's inclusion of a scene in which the dominant male homosocial vision is explicitly contrasted with the extramural, female alternative. I refer to Hippolyta and Emilia's commentary praising the friendship between Theseus and Pirithous, which, with differences, reminds the women of the childhood friendship between Emilia and a certain Flavina. Hippolyta pictures the men's friendship as a world of sport and labor, describing their having “cabin'd / In many as dangerous as poor a corner,” “skiff'd / torrents,” and fought together (1.3.35-40). She pictures their ideal male friendship as a self-supporting but self-contesting bondedness: “Their knot of love / Tied, weav'd, entangled,” and not to be unwoven (1.3.41-42). Anticipating the imagery of the arming scene, Emilia compares the men's friendship to women's own: “Theirs has more ground, is more maturely season'd, / More buckled with strong judgment, and their needs / The one of th' other may be said to water / Their intertangled roots of love” (1.3.56-59).
In her extended description of her own friendship, Emilia emphasizes a different sort of collaboration, if it can be called collaboration. She pictures this female friendship as a mirror rather than a knot, emulation rather than self-contestation. In their innocent admiration, the two girls would imitate each other in specular spectatorship:
EMIL.
What she lik'd
Was then of me approv'd, what not, condemn'd,
No more arraignment. …
(1.3.64-66)
Her idealized memory constitutes a homosocial aesthetics when she describes a flower she would put between her breasts, with Flavina longing to do just the same: she would “commit it / To the like innocent cradle, where phoenix-like / They died in perfume” (1.3.69-71). Cradled, these flowers are both children and works of art. Emilia and her friend would copy each other's fashions (“On my head no toy / But was her pattern”). And they would copy each other's music, both copied or “stolen” tunes (“Had mine ear / Stol'n some new air”) as well as original ones (“or at adventure humm'd [one] / From musical coinage, why, it was a note / Whereon her spirits would sojourn (rather dwell on) / And sing it in her slumbers” [1.3.71-78]). The images of friendship are consistently those of artists working together.
Friendship, a given in Chaucer, is the subject under investigation by The Two Noble Kinsmen through juxtapositions with artistic labor, originality, and collaboration. Both female-female and male-male friendships are thus explicitly idealized and at the same time subjected to an implicit comparison or competition. The play adds a new love-debate to Chaucer by asking: “Which friendship is best?” Emilia, introducing this rivalry between friendships, suggests the priority of the female, claiming, “the true love ‘tween maid and maid may be / More than in sex [dividual]” (1.3.81-82). Broadly speaking, a self-contesting but collaborative mode is pitted against a narrowly imitative one lacking priority or leader. The former will turn out to be the preferred mode, as we might expect when we hear Palamon declare that he will never imitate bad manners because he never stoops to any imitation whatsoever: “Either I am / The forehorse in the team, or I am none / That draw i' th' sequent trace” (1.2.58-60). Scorning the textual realm of the sequent trace, his speech diminishes in advance the mimetic values of female friendship, while the female mode of reproductive “sequent traces” is nevertheless given its due, however anxiously.
Fear of the imitativeness idealized in the Flavina-Emilia relationship takes a different form in another of the play's literalized artistic collaborations—the dance. When the Jailer's Daughter declares “I'll lead” (3.5.90) and presumably dances the Third Countryman (who replies “Do, do”) offstage after her last line, her madness is gender defined, or gender violating. Her aggressive desire not to be a “sequent trace,” allied to the hopeless madness of electing Palamon as her lover, signals an invasion of the homosocial arena that at the same time validates the male traits she appropriates. She is accordingly represented as a kind of mad artist, whose audience admires her mad pageants and especially her originality—as the Doctor exclaims, “How her brain coins!” (4.3.40). Her artistic assistant is the fantasy horse that she says can dance, read, and write (5.2.47ff.). This gift, which she believes Palamon has given her for releasing him from prison, is nicely contrasted to the pair of horses given by Emilia to Palamon and intended for use in military collaboration. But the Jailer's Daughter suffers spectacular indignities, ranging from sleeping with the mere image of Palamon to being herself an image appropriated for the performance of the rustics, who decide that she is just the right thing for a winning show:
3. Coun.
If we can get her dance, we are made again.
I warrant her, she'll do the rarest gambols.
1. Coun.
A mad woman? We are made, boys!
(3.5.74-76)
Where the sequent trace or copy is not idealized as in the Flavina passage, it is denigrated and again linked to a version of artistic production. When the Doctor advises that the nameless Wooer pretend to be Palamon by adopting his title (“Take upon you, young sir her friend, the name of Palamon”) and by singing the songs Palamon sings (4.3.75ff.), the imposture taints the very ideal of copy. That this imposture is connected to the realm of art, and even to inferior art, is more noticeable in a later scene when, at the Wooer's protest that he has no voice to sing like Palamon, the Doctor advises him to sing anyway: “That's all one, if ye make a noise” (5.2.16). In another example, Emilia, walking outside the prison just before the rivalry is initiated, speaks with her waiting woman about the flower Narcissus and its story of self-mimetic exclusion: “a fair boy certain, but a fool / To love himself. Were there not maids enough?” (2.2.120-21). Emilia asks the woman if she can “work such flowers in silk” for a “gown full of 'em” and admires their color (2.2.127). But to “take out” or copy in this way is, of course, a devalued female and schoolboy labor. It will figure as such in the brute sexual jesting of the countrymen, who prescribe a male folk remedy to cure another problem woman, a jealous wife, by handing her one's erect penis:
3. Coun.
Ay, do but put
A fescue in her fist, and you shall see her
Take a new lesson out, and be a good wench.
(2.3.33-35)
In this joke, female art is performed by means of male technology; that is, the woman is temporarily both armed and disarmed by the masculine instrument of copy.
Despite such superficially evenhanded evaluations of both male and female forms of homosocial friendship, The Two Noble Kinsmen works to “ground” or privilege male friendship and the collaborative arena in which spectating is purified of a female emulation, or emulation is purified of a female spectating. The purification takes the final form of nurturing competition. We are tempted to conclude from such a play that women are the objects of this male rivalry. And our conclusion would be supported by a literalized reading of Theseus, for example when he urges Emilia's attendance at the tournament, saying, “You are … the price and garland / To crown the question's title” (5.3.16-17). In spectacular rather than metaphorical terms, however, we see them not as valued objects but as empty circles enclosing value, like the numerous garlands, arenas, and other round enclosures of the play. By spectacular inversion, women stand for the dream of a purified male arena.
I have tried thus far to show the ways that collaboration and competition “intertangle”: in speaking, in spectating, in being either performer or audience, in love and friendship. But in these examples of the paradoxes of a noble male rivalry, we have repeatedly encountered specifically artistic constructions of that rivalry. In other words, the category of artistic labor has swallowed up or included all other categories of practice, revealing the entire play as a study of the satisfactions achieved from a male labor that is specifically artistic. Moreover, the labors of The Two Noble Kinsmen are quite pointedly theatrical, spectating events so that the play is self-referential and, more significantly, self-endorsing. The conditions of dual authorship, then, are represented within the play as a residue of anxiety and perhaps as the intentional effect of spectacular translucency. If the effect is intentional, then some specific audience—the theater audience, the company, the managers, or the writers themselves—is intended to wonder at the writers' high, competitive collaboration. (The sustained effect of this attempt to enforce wonder may even account for the responses of some modern readers who find the play insufferable.)
The arming scene in act 3, continually circled about and reviewed by the present study for various purposes, turns out to be even more crucial for the professionalist subtext of the play since it exhibits not only the paradoxes of a nurturing rivalry but also a specifically male technology in a backstage performance of a tekhne or skill. The scene's clever premise is the alternation of polite discourse with the stage business of arming each other to kill—and what is more ironic, to kill one another. The dialogue is obsessed with the aesthetics of weapons and armor. The muted (or inept) comic effect is one of cumulative, involuted ironies, resulting from the participants' exaggerated, well-meaning, and temporary deference. We have already observed moments of an emulation that arouses spectacular virtue and competitions of humility. Palamon, in order to outdo Arcite's generous wish for an honorable “place” for the loser, whoever it should be, offers to accept the title of coward should be himself lose in order to show that these are “just trials” (3.6.105). His humility legitimates, just as brashness does, the entire male arena. We might once again formulate the speech act here as a request to be rough, an act reconciling collaboration and competition in speech and action. The conversation of the scene is punctuated with physical gestures that contain and license, like the conversation itself, whatever is rough:
ARC.
Do I pinch you?
PAL.
No.
.....
ARC.
I'll buckle't close.
PAL.
By any means.
.....
PAL.
Good cousin, thrust the buckle
Through far enough.
ARC.
I warrant you.
.....
PAL.
Thank you, Arcite.
How do I look? Am I fall'n much away?
ARC.
Faith, very little. Love has us'd you kindly.
PAL.
I'll warrant thee, I'll strike home.
ARC.
Do, and spare not.
I'll give you cause, sweet cousin. …
PAL.
Is not this piece too strait?
ARC.
No, no, 'tis well.
(3.6.55-86)
I will not examine the dialogue's sexual innuendo, assuming that is what is operating in these double entendres, although I would argue that the probable tone of this passage is intended to produce a homosocial locker-room snickering for the male audience rather than a homosexual reference to the characters. For the present purposes, one sees that their conversation embodies both the visions as well as the tensions of the collaborative arena in which the two contests of private victory and collaborative victory are entangled. The involutions brought about by this idealized magnanimity are evident enough here and once again bound up with art.
When Arcite begins by offering, “I'll arm you first” (3.6.53), we observe how important priority is to these collaborative competitors as artist-soldiers. We are perhaps expected to notice that the more one helps one's opponent to arm, the greater the risk to the self, and the more noble one's victory will be in the end. Politeness is radically consequential: the better, more confident fighter facilitates, through his nobility, his own defeat. What is more, in this rough use, the fight stands for the friendship, as Arcite implies when he responds to Palamon's wish that he could thank him for his services with embraces rather than blows: “I shall think either, / Well done, a noble recompense” (3.6.23-24). Blows and embraces are interchangeable, both capable of being artistically “well done.”
Watching these artist-figures, as it were, behind the scene, we conclude that more important than the choice of women (ultimately decided merely by fate, not by skill) is the choice of arms. The latter is performed in delicate negotiation:
PAL.
I am well and lusty: choose your arms.
ARC.
Choose you, sir.
PAL.
Wilt thou exceed in all, or dost thou do it
To make me spare thee?
ARC.
If you think so, cousin,
You are deceived, for as I am a soldier,
I will not spare you.
PAL.
That's well said.
ARC.
You'll find it.
(3.6.45-49)
To choose first in this game (like being the starting player in collaborative art) is to confess a desire for better arms, thereby conceding one's inferiority. But cooperation and competition threaten to cancel each other out in a comedy of painful deferentiality where competitive magnanimity trips over itself. A new convention deconstructs gender division by dictating that the more deferential contestant is the more masculine contestant. On the other hand, an act of deference—letting the other choose first—could just as well be read as a strategy for victory, which implies that the other must repay, or outdo, the gesture by letting up in combat. All this male comedy depends on an awareness of the self-interfering character of a collaborative, competitive magnanimity. It addresses a male audience, assumed to be both amused and obsessed by such rituals of deference.
At the end of the cited passage the temporary dispute is resolved by a return to the first rule—contractual roughness—followed immediately by Palamon's aesthetic judgment of Arcite's conversational move. Deference, the spectacular acknowledgment of another's authority, again contains within it a potential alternative reading: to acknowledge the authority is to authorize it, and by authorizing one becomes its author. In this arena politeness threatens to subvert, and speech turns on noble gesture to disarm it. With Emilia, Palamon, and Arcite we might ask, “Is this winning?” as they tangle themselves within the involutions of a mimetic and competitive magnanimity. To “defy in fair terms” (3.6.25) is the oxymoron upon which both the play and its discourse are constructed.
IV. MEN'S TOURNAMENT OF ART
To view the men's final tournament is not only to be a part of it, as Emilia fears, but also to constitute it as a tournament, which, Theseus tells her rather unconvincingly, could not exist as a private contest: “You must be there; / This trial is as ‘twere i' th' night, and you / The only star to shine” (5.3.18-20). In her absence the event is perhaps only semipublic. In any case, if viewed, this “deed of honor” becomes a work of art:
THE.
She shall see deeds of honor in their kind,
Which sometime show well, pencil'd.
(5.3.12-13)
Whether this means (1) “a mere sketch will represent them,” or (2) “as long as they are depicted in word or image,” his comment valorizes the event as public spectacle of men's art.
The desire to reconcile rough behavior with cooperative behavior ultimately determines Theseus's novel ground rules for the tournament—a game that requires critical explanation beyond what it has so far received.23 For the contest he orders that a “pyramid” or obelisk be constructed and that each man, with the assistance of his three knights, attempt to force his opponent to touch the pillar first. While Chaucer stages a bloodless, ordinary tournament between Palamon and Arcite and their one hundred knights, The Two Noble Kinsmen creates a peculiar contest with significant structural relations to the many other contests of the play. Among the “games of honor” about which the two men are most nostalgic are racing and combat. Theseus interrupts their actual combat, changes the game, and adds an audience. The form of the new game is significant: the fight around an object mirrors the rivalry over the love-object. Beyond that, the new game is a synthesis of relations: the contest whose object is a common goal (love) and the contest whose object is the elimination of the other (war) are combined in the form of the pillar spectacle, which is an inverted race—by forcing the other man toward a single object that he resists, one escapes rather than seeks the “goal.” Fighting not to touch the column is a physical embodiment of the deferential or self-defeating rivalry characterizing the male arena and its goal of homosocial satisfaction. The game reflects and reverses the play's obsessions. On the one hand, to spur the other on with rough talk and opposition, thus reconciling competition and collaboration, is to reverse the game of the obelisk, in which one resists with all one's strength moving in the direction that one's opponent is pushing. On the other hand, the game is a remarkable embodiment of the idealized rivalry: it replaces swordsmanship's more single-directed thrusting with the tactical give-and-take of something more like wrestling. In such a contest momentary cooperation or passivity, like a polite gesture, can be a feint in order to use, as in the martial arts, an opponent's full momentum against him. Passivity is not the opposite of power, but just one more of the tools in its box. On the other hand, full cooperation, or cooperation at just the wrong moment, is fatal. Thus, this tournament figures both the idealized form and the attendant anxiety of a collaborative-competitive enterprise. The project of The Two Noble Kinsmen is twofold: the construction of a dream arena for homosocial labor, and the design of just the right dream game to play in it.
A metaphor for artistic collaboration, the pillar contest contrasts with the singing contest that Theseus uses for the play's ultimate figure of the rivalry between Palamon and Arcite. Summarizing the fight as a nurturing competition, Theseus narrates an aspiring, self-undoing contest that proceeds toward undifferentiation and absence of priority, a knot of love rendering useless the judgment of spectators, like the race that left all the spectators behind:
I have heard
Two emulous Philomels beat the ear o' th' night
With their contentious throats, now one the higher,
Anon the other, then again the first,
And by and by out-breasted, that the sense
Could not be judge between 'em. So it far'd
Good space between these kinsmen, till heavens did
Make hardly one the winner.
(5.3.123-30)
The play returns to the circumstances of its production through the striking analogy of a singing contest. A bold tale in which the heavens intervene to make losing into winning, in which the power of spectating to decide a contest is neutralized, and in which an audience is too noble to assign either man victory, is a tale serving as the ideal vehicle for an artistic project in which group and individual success are both interdependent and at odds. The final tournament is, ultimately, an inverse spectacle of fame, since the obelisk, the icon of eternal fame, is to be avoided rather than sought. More precisely, the pillar of fame is what one spurs the other to touch by working in selfless collaboration. By the special rules of the contest, however, to touch the male monument is to lose girl, friend, and life, in a repetition of the play's paradoxes of losing by winning, and vice versa. By a complicated representation of nobility and noble contests, The Two Noble Kinsmen rereads Chaucer as a stalemate dream permitting continued life within the contradictions that produce value and meaning in an arena of artistic, competitive, and male homosocial labor. Circumstances, not people, conspire to reconcile collaboration and competition perfectly.
But the idealizations of male production, and the consequent reduction and exclusion of female spectatorship, do not tell the full story. The Two Noble Kinsmen outdoes its own representations by an even more extravagant mystification of its own artistic labor. In the last degree of mystification of this labor, art takes on the character of the radical other, the mimetic female kingdom in which differentiation and competition with the other dissolve. The highest representation of a mystified homosocial labor, what such representation dreams to become a metaphor of, is paradoxically female labor, whose product is a child who is also a work of art but not a victory. The hyperidealized work, then, inevitably draws a physically sensuous imagery from lovemaking, like the flower imagery of Emilia and Flavina. We have already noted how Palamon and Arcite's collaborative meditation is regarded as their child: “We are one another's wife, ever begetting / New births of love” (2.2.80-81). In another instance, when we hear a description of physical male beauty such as the messenger gives of the freckle-faced knight attending Palamon, and when that description strives for its most mystified status, the imagery again turns toward pregnancy:
… his arms are brawny,
Lin'd with strong sinews; to the shoulder-piece
Gently they swell, like women new-conceiv'd,
Which speaks him prone to labor, never fainting
Under the weight of arms. …
(4.2.126-30)
The Two Noble Kinsmen desires to be another “new birth of love” of a collaborative homosocial labor. Accordingly, it produces at the end a boy, who appears to be a child actor (comparing himself to a “schoolboy” in his dumb-founded fear) to deliver the Epilogue, which is conventionally apologetic and which teasingly calls for a judgment of the entire spectacle. The homosocial arena surrounds both story and play as the boy addresses his “good night” only to men—unlike typically Shakespearean epilogues addressing both sexes.
The Prologue (whether or not it is a later addition) also introduces the ideal of a homosocial birth by comparing the staying power of the play to the staying power of a wife's modesty after the marriage day (“New plays and maidenheads are near akin” [Pro. 1]), before turning to an announcement of the play's source and competitive patriarch, Chaucer (“a poet never went / More famous yet ‘twixt Po and silver Trent” [Pro. 11-12]), who is significantly termed the play's “noble breeder and a pure” (Pro. 10). The Prologue reinforces the desired, collaborative nobility of the writers by expressing the fear that if they fail (“if we let fall the nobleness of this”) Chaucer himself will lose fame: “O, fan / From me the witless chaff of such a writer / That blasts my bays and my fam'd works makes highter / Than Robin Hood!” (Pro. 18-21). Originality and unoriginality are reconciled, as are the productive modes of competition and collaboration. In the spirit of the play, the Prologue thus constructs a selflessness by which one noble assists and advances the other. The fear of an aspiring artistic epigone is also uttered: “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). Repeating the motif of athletic effort, while transferring it to the realm of writing, the Prologue goes on to ask for its own assistants (“your helping hands” [26]), to rescue it from drowning.
Representing itself as a collaborative birth of homosocial satisfaction, of “noble breeders” who bond together even across time to do noble things with each other's words in conversation, The Two Noble Kinsmen thus translucently represents the circumstances, and reveals the anxieties, of an idealized collaboration and, by extension, of the specific collaboration of its two authors. My interpretation, in sum, suggests a collaborative contest between rivals and friends of more comparable professional stature—not between the retiring master impresario and the young playwright who was replacing him. This particular professionalist subtext would be odd for a retiring, but not for an aspiring, playwright.
In any case, whoever dreamed it, the play is a compulsory dream for a masculinist theater, a masque of labor for reconciling collaboration and authorship. The inescapable deconstructive conclusion is that its oppositions interanimate one another—that collaboration is the ground of individual authorship, as individual authorship is the ground of collaboration. Let us escape from such a conclusion. We do so by recognizing that the special tension is only significant insofar as the binaries are not logical but historical. That is, this writing occurs at a time when half the plays were produced in one mode, half in the other, and when their interdependency was institutional and gender-specific rather than always rhetorical. Grounded in these facts, even a fanciful conjecture is more historical than an endless play of figures.
In this spirit I offer such a conjecture, having concluded that The Two Noble Kinsmen is a title match and spectacle of professional collaboration with some rules, some spectators, some judge, and some prize.
V. CODA
A play that presents art as the children of men's labor imagines a system devoid of paternity or legitimacy questions; yet, ironically, its own paternity has been most seriously in doubt. The play touches on paternity suits of its own—from the Prologue, in which the writer or writers defer to Chaucer, mentioning him only as its “noble breeder,” to Palamon's odd prayer before battle to Venus, whose power enabled a gouty, deformed, eighty-year-old man to have a child by his child-bride—or so it is said:
This anatomy
Had by his young fair fere a boy, and I
Believ'd it was his, for she swore it was,
And who would not believe her?
(5.1.115-18)
The madness of the Jailer's Daughter raises other paternity questions. She praises Palamon because all the maids of the town are supposedly in love with him, and she muses that he has made “at least two hundred” of them pregnant (4.1.129). If she swears they are his, who would not believe her? When we last see her, she goes off to sleep with the nameless Wooer, about whom she says, “We shall have many children” (5.2.94). Those children may get different answers from mother and father when they inquire as to their paternity. Who you are depends on who is asking.
The title page of the first and only published quarto of The Two Noble Kinsmen indicates Shakespeare as its breeder, along with Fletcher. But the publisher twelve years later sold his copyright without Shakespeare's name. Title pages were often inaccurate, and dispute still exists about the play's style or styles.24 The inaccuracy of title pages at the time reinforces the present claim that the era was as divided as its plays were between the values of single authorship and those of collaboration. Writers of Shakespeare's time, like poststructuralists, were groping toward concepts of authorship. Title pages are sites of conflict over sovereignty and must have been subject to whatever forces of circumstance and competition existed in each case. Jonson shows us the territorial thinking when, in order to keep his single-title authorship of Sejanus, he painstakingly rewrote all his collaborator's passages, in what he implies is a generous prevention of a “usurpation,” as he calls it. The title page is thus yet another arena where we often find the residues of some power relation: there, a coauthor might somehow lose his title; or writers who contributed different amounts (if the records of differing payments are indicative), not to mention different qualities, might win equivalent titles as authors.25
Let the reluctant rivalry of The Two Noble Kinsmen represent its writers' competitive and collaborative feelings, an anxious and intertangled knot of ambition to promote the self, the other, and the play. Stage a tournament for writing, and let the splendid choice of arena for the tournament be Chaucer's tale of deep play between friends where everything is at stake. Expand the old tale with considerations of a collaborative artistic nobility and, risking your own defeat, spur on your co-adjutor. Dwell on these paradoxes for your spectators, who may have bet on writers as they bet on actors, and win points by showing magnanimity as you show off your style. The audience will know the circumstances of the collaboration: the private spectacle and contest behind the public one. The collaborators should both be of a comparable age—Fletcher and the other one—but more important than age is that they should both be arriving at a propitious moment to whet professional desire. (The King's Men in 1613 had arrived at a professional watershed. They were about to lose, or had just lost, their chief playwright, a sovereign of sorts and very successful. Fletcher's old collaborator Beaumont was no longer collaborating for he had married and left the arena. Fletcher himself may have just married. That year their theater was to burn down, and they would by the summer of 1614 have a new arena.)
Let there be some ground rules for the exercise of power. If there were usual procedures of collaboration (Bentley conjectures, without real evidence, that there were) let them be followed, but there will still be decisions to make, such as the choice of which acts each will write (usually thought to be a common means of division). Let the decision be made like a choice of arms, magnanimously, so that to choose first hints of one's weakness or lack of self-confidence. It is no special honor to go first. Let the weaker man have the positional or material advantage, at least the first and last acts, usually attributed for the most part to Fletcher's collaborator. Let your own writing spur on the other's. Let winning be everything, and nothing. Yet you must win; by making moves that the other won't match, by appropriating his moves, and even by writing him into an occasional corner. Let Shakespeareans attempt to explain inconsistent elements either as failures of design or as harmonious parts of an unobvious, organic unity—as if collaborative work is somehow on principle pacific and never dialogic; as if the paradigm for writing is editing; as if there were no place for, or no consequences of, professional envy, the emotion producing the chance conclusion of the play when a little “envious flint,” envious of the horse dancing “to th' music / His own hooves made (for, as they say, from iron / Came music's origin)” (5.4.59-61), terrifies Arcite's horse, which throws the winner to his death. Let Fletcher win.
What prize? The 1634 title page of the play is a page of titles. “Written by the memorable Worthies of their time; Mr. John Fletcher, and Mr. William Shakespeare Gent.” One of its titles is Gentleman, applying, if it does, to Fletcher as well as Shakespeare, whose earlier personal ambition was a coat of arms. The other title is appropriate for military champions; the “Nine Worthies” were also contemporarily known as “The Nine Nobles.” In a contest for fame, through a play that represents its own contest for fame around a “pyramid,” one of the collaborators will lose title, fame, and, in the arena of the book, his name. His work is subsumed under the title of an artistic sovereign or master. In Italian Renaissance workshop paintings, novice work was treated this way; in fact, the signature of the master from some workshops actually confirms that the painting was not his but the work of assistants. In other cases, a master might sign, with his own signature, a student's work that particularly impressed him. What seems to us dishonest or cavalier merely operated in an unfamiliar system of honorable collaboration. We understand only with difficulty an era of artistic production in which the status of authorship was not as fixed as it now is, or was in contention, as is suggested by the circumstances of Elizabethan collaboration.
At about this time Fletcher becomes the new main playwright of the King's Men, replacing Shakespeare. He may have collaborated in the same year as The Two Noble Kinsmen on a play with Nathan Field and Philip Massinger.26 Field, an actor-playwright, may have received Shakespeare's shares to the company, as Fletcher received his position. Massinger, by some scholars assigned the non-Fletcherian parts of the play, was buried, in a gesture of spectacular friendship, in a single grave with Fletcher.27 The year 1613 was something of a watershed in the circumstances of Fletcher's dramatic career. After his collaborations of this and the preceding years, his usual practice changed to single authorship. Let Shakespeare, as artistic sovereign, be the judge of this masque of labor, this title match and tour de force of collaboration about collaboration. (But if Shakespeare was coauthor after all, let Fletcher be termed “coadjutor” in the term's other, power-differentiated sense, signifying the assistant to an aging and feeble bishop, an “assistance” in preparation for taking over the position.) Let Shakespeare judge between suitors, as Elizabeth did for Sidney's Lady of May, in which the judging sovereign is written into the spectacle, though the actual judgment left to her. Let the weaker collaborator honor the judge by displaying a familiar dense style and echoing some familiar moments of the master. Let the translucent play imply how hard it will be for a noble judge to decide between such emulous Philomels. If he has to decide between the styles of the future, let Shakespeare elect what some see as a cheap theatricality, over what some see as “the voice and music of the master.”28 If someone magnanimously swears the child is his, who would not believe him?
After all of this dreaming, let Shakespeare, for a moment reversing the direction of the cultural narrative in which he and his coworkers were all spectacularly inscribed, leave the powerful arena of artistic satisfaction and return home to three women.
APPENDIX: SHAKESPEAREAN CONVERSATION AND THE TWO NOBLE KINSMEN
The following is a brief discussion of a stylistic criterion that best distinguishes, I believe, the dialogue of the non-Fletcherian parts of The Two Noble Kinsmen from Shakespeare, thus arguing against Shakespeare's coauthorship. The criterion is the representation of natural conversation, a stylistic determinant not captured by any traditional stylistic tests of authorship, yet one crucial to the study of Shakespeare's language. A full discussion of Shakespeare's habit and skill at this can be found in my “Merry and Weary Conversation: Textual Uncertainty in As You Like It, II.iv.,” ELH 46 (1979): 21-34. I must forego the possibility of proof here for several reasons: one can notice the differences in ability to represent conversation only in large stretches of text; procedures for identifying chains of speech acts would require an enormous interpretive apparatus; and in this case I am suggesting what is not there, an evidentiary situation entirely different from demonstrating what is there.
I can, however, give the reader a few guides to perform his or her own examination of the difference. First, one can recognize that one of the major skills Shakespeare developed was to represent the dialogic nature of conversation, including intentional or unintentional violations of straightforward communication such as topic changing, giving more or less information than is requested, breaking the established tone, answering questions with questions, and so on. In addition to showing how we do things to others' words in our speech, he becomes much more subtle at what are known as “indirect speech acts,” in which an utterance takes a different form than its actual pragmatic force or point. In a direct speech act, for example, a question-form is used to ask a question (“What day is it today?”). In an indirect speech act, a questionform might be used for an entirely different point—to thank, to command, to request, and so on (“Can you pass the salt?” is a request that only looks like a question). To see Shakespeare's remarkable development at portraying the messy—though perhaps logical even in its messiness—sequence of real speech, one might compare the flat dialogue of the proposition scene of King Edward and Lady Grey in 3 Henry VI (3.2) with the subtleties of the proposition scene of Angelo and Isabella in Measure for Measure (3.1). Since both scenes portray conversation at cross-purposes, the latter stands out in relief.
The non-Fletcherian parts of The Two Noble Kinsmen, while rich in a Shakespeare-style poetic diction and complex syntax, are almost entirely devoid of the misconstructions, inference-drawings, and indirect modes of conversation that occur in what is summed up in the idea of “uptake.” Typically, the dialogue there is more limited to direct speech acts, in patterns of question/answer, assertion/agreement or disagreement, and topic/comment, requiring less sense of the context in order to convey complete meaning. Even the occasional interruption of dialogue is achieved mechanically, chiefly to convey information:
PAL.
… that which rips my bosom
Almost to th' heart's—
ARC.
Our uncle Creon.
PAL.
He,
A most unbounded tyrant, whose successes
Makes heaven unfear'd …
(1.2.61-64).
A few brief instances from later Shakespeare plays may attune one to the skills Shakespeare had by that time developed, unevident in The Two Noble Kinsmen. (Fletcher, though otherwise stylistically quite distinct from Shakespeare, is actually much closer to Shakespeare in this.)
1. Surry.
May it please your Grace—
KING.
No, sir, it does not please me.
I had thought I had had men of some understanding …
(Henry VIII, 5.2.169-70)
The interruption is fully charged, as a deliberate refusal to accept a stock politeness, by taking the word please literally. The linguistic moment is fully dramatic, when an attempt to seize the floor and change the direction of conversation is abruptly warded off by the king, who willfully reads the conventional indirect speech act (a request to be heard) as if it were the direct one of its verbal form (a request to please).
2. Anne.
Pray do not deliver
What here y'have heard to her.
OLD L.
What do you think me? Exeunt
(Henry VIII, 2.3.106-7)
Shakespeare can even end a scene with a question, unlike a beginner at representing dialogue. But it is an indirect speech act—not really a question, but a promise not to tell. It carries with it a clear-cut tone, full implications of the spirit of the woman, and an index to their relationship. For a lesser writer the form of her response might simply be an agreement, however emphatically expressed, that she would not tell.
3. Subtle construction of oblique reference in conversation is represented in Pericles when Boult, who has just gotten customers for the virginal Marina's services, makes a very indirect request that he might try her out first, a request only developed as such in their shared, oblique language moves:
BOULT.
But, mistress, if I have bargain'd for the joint—
BAWD.
Thou mayst cut a morsel off the spit.
BOULT.
I may so.
BAWD.
Who should deny it?
(4.2.129-33)
By force of the delicacy of the context and evasion of responsibility, the process of request and permission doesn't even take on the speech act forms of request or permission. The bawd's final permission is masked as a question.
4. As the plot develops in The Tempest to kill Alonso, questions and answers are again obliquely used:
ANTONIO.
What a sleep were this
For your advancement! Do you understand me?
SEBASTIAN.
Methinks I do.
(2.1.267-69)
The question here, superficially about understanding words, is actually a plea for consent to an assassination not spoken about as such. Sebastian's tentative reply is a partial denial, at that moment, of consent. We understand not that he is unclear about the point of Antonio's speech, but that he is hesitant to accept its clear proposal.
Readers are invited to compare these examples and others they can readily find, where there is such a striking residue of meaning outside the linguistic forms themselves, to the conversational sequences of the supposedly Shakespearean scenes in The Two Noble Kinsmen.
Notes
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Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production (London, Henley, and Boston: Routledge, 1978), 51, 58.
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Donald K. Hedrick, “The Masquing Principle in Marston's The Malcontent,” English Literary Renaissance 8 (1978): 24-42.
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The version of this paper presented at the seminar on The Two Noble Kinsmen in 1985 is largely unchanged with respect to its subsidiary claims against Shakespeare's coauthorship on stylistic and thematic grounds. I want to thank Charles Frey for his critique of the reading, but especially for challenging me at that time to provide an alternative candidate. Although I believed that the kind of study I had done relieved me of the obligation to seek a different author, I began to study evidence about one of the candidates mentioned in the “Coda,” Nathan Field. I learned that he had never been considered, that other collaborations of his had been only recently identified, and, most striking, that the nineteenth-century stylistic foundation of the case for Shakespeare—a supposedly thorough comparison of the text's style with all other authors of the period—while still treated as authoritative and relied on by serious scholars and editors of the play, had never actually been carried out.
I have left the fanciful “Coda” virtually unrevised, to reflect my original thinking. If Field was Fletcher's coauthor, its conjectures nevertheless remain surprisingly apt, except that Field would have been younger than his collaborator, hence more aspiring and less a professional equal. The “Coda” remains fanciful, of course, in its fiction of a kind of playwriting contest with Shakespeare as judge, but I think there may be a larger, nonliteral truth to it. We have more work to do in understanding the institutional base of the drama of the time.
Nathan Field, ambitious artistic upstart in Jacobean theater, a self-confessed aspirant to write tragicomedy like that of his friend Fletcher, and the only major actor-playwright immediately following Shakespeare, was working with Fletcher, as we now know, at the time of Kinsmen. He had already tried his hand at adapting Chaucer for the stage, unlike Shakespeare, and had done so working with Fletcher. His poetic style was the only remaining one like Shakespeare's, whose influence is readily argued from plot borrowings, neologizings, and from Field's having memorized Shakespeare in order to act in his plays. Recognized stylistic features of Field, such as “clotted” rhetoric and uncertain tone, have been consistently remarked in the non-Fletcherian parts of Kinsmen. The lengthy actor-oriented stage directions we find in Kinsmen are a signature, as are other themes, motifs, bawdy style, sexual themes, and Jonsonian misogyny. Major metrical and vocabulary tests (including double endings, o'th', 'em, hath and doth, and unique inventions) support the claim. Field's theatrical connections to Henslowe and others, his move to Shakespeare's company (where he may have received Shakespeare's shares), and his early disappearance support his candidacy as Fletcher's collaborator on this play. His cheeky personal spirit of outrageously noble gestures, his self-fashioning as Bussy D'Ambois (the character he starred as), all imbue The Two Noble Kinsmen. The thematic concerns I first recognized in the play turned out to be his “identity themes.” In his self-fashioning to fill the gap left by Shakespeare, Field, I believe, deserves study as the first Shakespearoid writer.
The evidence I summarize here was presented in a paper given at the Shakespeare Association Meeting in Montreal, 1986: “The Politics of Attribution: Authorial Image and the Competitive Field of The Two Noble Kinsmen.”
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For the development of the consensus, see David V. Erdman and Ephim G. Fogel, eds., Evidence for Authorship: Essays on Problems of Attribution, with an Annotated Bibliography of Selected Readings (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966), 486-94.
-
Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, in Drama of the English Renaissance: The Stuart Period, ed. Russell A. Fraser and Norman Rabkin (New York: Macmillan, 1976), 4.3.71-74.
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In the visual arts of the Renaissance and modern eras, see for example Collaboration in Italian Renaissance Art, ed. Wendy Stedman Sheard and John T. Paoletti (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), and Cynthia Jaffee McCabe, Artistic Collaboration in the Twentieth Century (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian, 1984).
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See Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image-Music-Text (New York: Farrar, 1977), and Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. Josue V. Harari (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979).
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R. G. Collingwood, “The Artist and the Community,” in The Principles of Art (1938; rpt. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972).
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G. E. Bentley, The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare's Time: 1590-1642 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 198-99.
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Thomas Dekker, The Gull's Hornbook, in A. M. Nagler, A Source Book in Theatrical History (New York: Dover, 1952), 135.
-
B. L. Joseph, Elizabethan Acting, 2d ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), 94.
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Bentley, Profession of Dramatist, 199ff.
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The Works of Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1937), vol. 5, Pro. 15-18.
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Timothy Murray, “From Foul Sheets to Legitimate Model: Antitheater, Text, Ben Jonson,” New Literary History 14 (1983): 641-64.
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For Shakespearean conversational analysis, see my “Merry and Weary Conversation: Textual Uncertainty in As You Like It, II.iv.” Early Literary History 46 (1979): 21-34; or Keir Elam, Shakespeare's Universe of Discourse: Language-Games in the Comedies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
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Philip Edwards, “On the Design of The Two Noble Kinsmen,” A Review of English Literature 5 (1964): 89-105.
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Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Sexualism and the Citizen of the World: Wycherly, Sterne, and Male Homosocial Desire,” Critical Inquiry 11 (1984): 228-29. See also Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
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Paul Bertram, Shakespeare and “The Two Noble Kinsmen” (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1965).
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For a gender-specific reading of the play's world, see Charles Frey, “‘O sacred, shadowy, cold, and constant queen’: Shakespeare's Imperiled and Chastening Daughters of Romance,” in The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 305-12.
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I follow the critique of this intellectual tradition offered by Jonathan Dollimore in Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Brighton, U.K.: Harvester, 1984), 156ff.
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Livia Polanyi, “The Nature of Meaning of Stories in Conversation,” Studies in Twentieth Century Literature 6 (Fall 1981-Spring 1982): 59.
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For an account of the Renaissance view of performance judgment as just another kind of performance, see Frank Whigham, “Interpretation at Court: Courtesy and the Performer-Audience Dialectic,” New Literary History 14 (1983): 623-39. For insight into the relation of masculinist aesthetics and warfare I am indebted to poet Jonathan Holden's studies of contemporary sensibilities, especially the essay on the ways American boys satisfy the “aesthetic impulse” with warplanes: “Boyhood Aesthetics,” Iowa Review 12 (1981): 135-46.
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The strongest and most illuminating discussion of the form of the contest is by Paula S. Berggren, “‘For what we lack, / We laugh’: Incompletion and The Two Noble Kinsmen,” Modern Language Studies 14 (1984): 3-17. Berggren recognizes the physical character of the game as “strength working against itself” (7) and as a reversal of phallic assertion in having a goal one loses by touching. Her investigation of possible sources of the game identifies it as historically unique to the play.
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For a summary of the developing issues and positions, see Proudfoot, “Introduction” to The Two Noble Kinsmen, xiii-xix; the annotated bibliography in Erdman and Fogel, Evidence for Authorship, 486-94; G. Harold Metz, Four Plays Ascribed to Shakespeare: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland, 1982), 135-81; and Hallett Smith, “Introduction” to The Two Noble Kinsmen, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). For additional historical materials, see E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford: Clarendon, 1923), 3:226-27; E. H. C. Oliphant, The Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1927), 325-48; S. Schoenbaum, Annals of English Drama 975-1700 (London: Methuen, 1964).
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Bentley, Profession of Dramatist, 206, 201.
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Henslowe Papers, Being Documents Supplementary to Henslowe's Diary, ed. Walter W. Greg (London: A. H. Bullen, 1907; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1975), article 68, pp. 65-66.
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T. W. Baldwin, The Organization and Personnel of the Shakespearean Company (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1927), 51.
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Alfred Hart, “Shakespeare and the Vocabulary of The Two Noble Kinsmen,” Review of English Studies 10 (1934): 274.
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Collaborating with Shakespeare: After the Final Play
Topicality or Politics?: The Two Noble Kinsmen, 1613-34
