[In the following excerpt, Proudfoot reviews the themes and characters found in The Two Noble Kinsmen, observing that the play's impressiveness stems not from its characters, but from its adroit handling of tragicomic effects.]

The Two Noble Kinsmen belongs to the vogue of tragicomedy that began about 1609 with the revival of the old play of Mucedorus and with the writing of Cymbeline and Philaster. It differs from these plays in sustaining to the end a somber note which they dispel in the resolution of their plots. The Knight's Tale prescribed the death of Arcite, but the death sentence imposed on the losers in the tournament is not in Chaucer and the emphasis on mortality which pervades Act I is present only at the end of the tale.

Where Chaucer is concerned with the subtle workings of Fortune, the play lays its emphasis on the destructive power of love. “Is this winning?” cries Emilia, as she is awarded to Arcite and Palamon is led to execution. Palamon too, when he is reprieved and Arcite is dead, is conscious mainly of regret:

                                                                                          O cousin,
That we should things desire, which do cost us
The loss of our desire! That nought could buy
Dear love, but loss of dear love!

(V.iv.109-112)

The theme of the bitterness of love is not illustrated only by the cousins' destructive rivalry. Palamon's prayer to Venus in V.i invokes her power in grotesque images which stress the need to placate a deity so inimical to rationality and human dignity. As C. Leech has pointed out, the same destructive power of Venus is exemplified in pathetic and comic terms in the “pretty” distemper of the Jailer's daughter.¹

To offset the picture of irrational and destructive passion, Act I introduces, in the marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta, a love that asserts the natural order instead of disrupting it. Theseus has “shrunk” the Queen of the Amazons into “the bound she was o'erflowing” and Hippolyta, whose subjection to Theseus is voluntary, is ready to postpone her “joy” in order that Theseus may aid the three Queens before concluding the wedding ceremony. Sexual love is here shown under the control of reason, but another love is also exemplified which is not destructive because it is asexual. I.iii is largely devoted to the description of such love, between Theseus and Pirithous, and between Emilia and “the maid Flavina,” who died in childhood innocence. The contrast between childish innocence and sexual experience recalls passages in Shakespeare's late plays; in The Winter's Tale, where Polixenes evokes his early friendship with Leontes, before sexual maturity taught them “the doctrine of ill-doing”; or in Cymbeline, where the jealous passion of Posthumus contrasts with the innocent fraternal love of Guiderius and Arviragus for Imogen in her disguise as Fidele.

P. Edwards gives a convincing account of the design of the play: “We are given, clearly enough, a life in two stages: youth, in which the passion of spontaneous friendship is dominant, and the riper age in which there is a dominant sexual passion, leading to marriage where it can. The movement from one stage to the next, the unavoidable process of growth, is a movement away from innocence, away from joy.”² Edwards attributes this central idea to Shakespeare, but concedes that Fletcher's treatment of it in the middle acts is superficial and regrets that “Shakespeare did not write the whole of the play.” In Acts I and V the main conflicts are thematic. They involve Mars, patron of the soldiers—Theseus, Pirithous, Palamon and Arcite—and upholder of military honor, and Venus, whose power over the senses and passions is inimical both to honor and to the chaste bonds of friendship. The climax of the thematic conflict is reached in V.i with the prayers of Arcite, Palamon, and Emilia to their divine patrons.

The strangest effect of collaborative authorship is that the central action involving Palamon and Arcite does not seem to bear any essential relation to this broader thematic conflict. Palamon is, indeed, presented as a lover and Arcite as a soldier (at III.vi.282-285) but the distinction is merely nominal. The reason for this is that one principle governing the writing of the later acts is that of suspense. The characterization of the kinsmen as “twins of honor” is designed to establish the conflict between them as one of personal merit and to keep its outcome uncertain for as long as possible. This end could be achieved only by minimizing differences between them and by leaving in the background their respective association with Venus and Mars. Even that small degree of moral superiority enjoyed by Palamon in Chaucer is suppressed as the cousins are not bound by an oath “Neither of us in love to hyndre oother,”³ although the result is to reduce Palamon's outraged “I saw her first” to the level of the ridiculous. The uncertainty of the outcome is urged by Emilia's doubts in IV.ii and V.iii and by the description of the knights in IV.ii: Palamon's first knight is duly described as a lover, Arcite's as a soldier, but the third knight is described as a composite of lover and soldier and is assigned to neither party. Palamon is to be the winner, and in retrospect we can see this as the proper outcome, if only because the Jailer's daughter has weighted the scales in his favor; but the process of maintaining suspense led Fletcher to alienate sympathy from him in Act III, where his uncontrolled fury at Arcite's “falsehood” contrasts unpleasantly with Arcite's self-possession.

Chaucer's Emilie is vowed to virginity: so is Emilia in Act I and Act V, scene i, of the play. Elsewhere she is shown to be susceptible to the charms of both lovers. She is faced with two choices, between marriage and virginity and between Palamon and Arcite: both choices are made for her by the gods, but only after her perplexity has been presented at length. In the end, like Silvia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, she is reduced to the status of a possession and is restored to Palamon by Arcite as “your stol'n jewel.”

The impressiveness of The Two Noble Kinsmen lies not in its characters, who are not compelling either as psychological studies or as emblematic figures, but in its mastery of the tragicomic effects, pathos and suspense, and especially in its success, against the odds, in persuading us that its story, which teeters constantly on the verge of absurdity, is a fit vehicle for a poetic exploration of the inscrutability of the gods and of the dangerous power of love. The success is precarious and the tone of heroic hyperbole which makes it possible is sustained only at the cost of emotional involvement and of that range of ironic awareness which usually characterizes Shakespeare's earlier handling of similar themes.

The Two Noble Kinsmen is not best approached as a sequel to The Winter's Tale and The Tempest: Cymbeline and Philaster bear closer affinities to it both in theme and in tone. Its use of elaborate stage spectacle is one of its closest points of contact with Shakespeare's late plays. The Shakespeare scenes, as T. Spencer remarked, “are static and, though with splendor, stiff,” expressing themselves in gesture and tableau rather than in action.⁴ Their visual impact is often one of incongruous juxtaposition: the wedding procession is stopped by the mourning Queens in I.i; the bridegroom is summoned from the scaffold in V.iv. Such images must have had a peculiar power in the London of 1613, which had within the previous year seen the wedding festivities of its princess postponed for the funeral of the Prince of Wales.

Notes

1. C. Leech, ed., The Two Noble Kinsmen (New York, 1966), xxxii-xxxiii.

2. P. Edwards, “On the Design of The Two Noble Kinsmen,” A Review of English Literature, V (1964), 103-104.

3. F. N. Robinson, ed., The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (London, 1957), The Knight's Tale, l. 1135.

4. T. Spencer, “The Two Noble Kinsmen,” Modern Philology, XXXVI (1939), 257.