[In the following essay, Carney comments on the tensions between love and war and between heterosexual desire and single-sex friendship in The Two Noble Kinsmen, suggesting that these antipathies are never resolved.]

The Two Noble Kinsmen, usually attributed to Shakespeare and Fletcher, is a play seldom examined and seldom produced,¹ though perhaps it will receive more attention now that it has been included in the recently published Oxford edition of Shakespeare's Complete Works.² Most of Shakespeare's editors—from Heminges and Condell to their present-day counterparts—have chosen to omit this play from the canon; it is more frequently claimed as one of Fletcher's works.

Perhaps some of the reason for the play's neglect is the confusion engendered by the fact of this dual authorship: some readers categorically resist the idea of Shakespeare as collaborator; others are uncertain about the nature of the collaboration.³ I would suggest that a more important reason for neglect stems from the aura of ambivalence that underscores the play's major themes of love and war, an ambivalence that has given rise to a general sense of unease. E. Talbot Donaldson calls The Two Noble Kinsmen “that most distressing of plays” (50), while Paula Berggren explains that “the play upsets the pleasant fiction that the late romances represent Shakespeare's optimistic summing up” (3).

The Two Noble Kinsmen is concerned with the antithesis between love and war, a conflict that is particularly problematic, not merely because neither side wins, but because each concept itself is presented in such contradictory terms. Thus, while we have a play that is ostensibly a romance and is framed by royal weddings, we also have a play that focuses a good deal of attention on the destructiveness of love and marriage. Nor does war fare any better than love, for in a play in which the eponymous characters and the presiding figure, Theseus, are first and foremost noble warriors, there is also some extremely negative imagery representing the world of battle.

In focusing on the rivalry between love and war, The Two Noble Kinsmen fits into a thematic tradition in Renaissance drama: Sidney's Arcadia; Spenser's Faerie Queene; and Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, Antony and Cleopatra, and Troilus and Cressida are but a few of the works concerned with the conflict between the call of battle and public responsibility and the more private demands of romantic love. This rivalry is generally resolved in the comic and romantic genres by merging public responsibilities and private indulgences through the institution of marriage; in the case of Antony and Cleopatra, both romance and battle come under careful and critical scrutiny, but they are not, finally, diminished. The treatment of these themes in Troilus and Cressida, perhaps more than any other play, parallels that of The Two Noble Kinsmen; in each work the ideal vision of love and war is drastically undercut by the depiction of a harsher reality.⁴ The approach in Troilus and Cressida, however, is more unequivocal in its satire—by the end of the play, soldiers and lovers are, in Pandarus' words, “traitors and bawds”—whereas the ambiguities in The Two Noble Kinsmen remain largely unresolved.

The Two Noble Kinsmen, based on The Knight's Tale from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, was most likely first performed in 1613. It is the tale of the two noble kinsmen from Thebes, Palamon and Arcite—or Tweedledum and Tweedledee, as Kenneth Muir called them in lamenting their lack of distinguishing characteristics (127)—whose loyal friendship is challenged when they fall in love with the same woman, Emilia. They have been taken prisoner by Emilia's brother-in-law, Duke of Athens, who determines that the conflict will be resolved in a formal tournament: whichever of the two kinsmen wins the battle is to receive Emilia, the other is to be put to death. Arcite is the winner, but he is subsequently injured when he falls from his horse. So Palamon is rescued from the executioner's blade, and before Arcite dies, he gives his friend the grand prize, Emilia.

The story centers on a theme popular in Renaissance literature: the debilitating complacency and even immorality that could result within a society when the male characters abandon their public lives as comrades-in-arms, particularly if it is to indulge in love and sexual relationships. In the very first act of The Two Noble Kinsmen, Palamon complains to Arcite about their situation in Thebes, where the soldiers are not being kept happily employed: “… [I] wish great Juno would / Resume her ancient fit of jealousy / To get her soldier work …” (1.2.21-23). Palamon laments that peacetime has brought corruption and decay instead of prosperity. This idea that social stability depends upon the conscientious warrior is emphasized in the very beginning of the play, when Theseus must choose between the rival claims of love and war. In this powerful opening scene, Theseus' wedding to Hippolyta, the Amazon queen he conquered, is interrupted by three queens dressed in mourning. The widowed queens complain that the ruler of Thebes, “the cruel Creon,” has slain their husbands and is denying their corpses proper burial; they beg Theseus to “draw thy feared sword” to defend their lords' honor.

Theseus assures them that he will seek revenge, but his response is not satisfactory: they want him to abandon his marriage celebration and act immediately, reminding him that while he seeks the pleasures of the marriage bed, their husbands do not even have beds “fit for th' dead.” As the first queen explains, if Theseus becomes involved in his wedding night with Hippolyta, he will forget his martial duties:

                                                                                … what wilt thou think
Of rotten kings or blubbered queens, what care
For what thou feel'st not, what thou feel'st being able
To make Mars spurn his drum? O if thou couch
But one night with her, every hour in't will
Take hostage of thee for a hundred, and
Thou shalt remember nothing more than what
That banquet bids thee to.

(1.1.178-185)

The queen warns Theseus against a love feast in which, yielding entirely to erotic pleasures, he would lose his rational sense of time and purpose. Significantly, she refers to the lover as being taken “hostage”; in using a term that is seemingly more appropriate to the battlefield, the distinction between love and war is blurred. The other two queens make similar entreaties to Hippolyta and Emilia, who join the widows in appealing to Theseus. Although Theseus insists that his marriage is a “service” of significance “greater than any war” (1.1.171) it does not take much urging for him to change his mind about his priorities: he abruptly orders his friend, Pirithous, to take charge of the nuptials, while he rushes off to battle, explaining, “As we are men, / Thus we should do. Being sensually subdued, / We lose our human title” (1.1.230-232). In choosing the call to arms over the temptation of his wedding night, Theseus suggests that an indulgence in romantic love can be equated with both a loss of power—“being sensually subdued”—and with a loss of identity—“our human title”—and that a realization of that identity, for the male characters, is concomitant with their martial successes. It is clear that Theseus believes that his decision to fight Creon is necessary and noble; indeed, the other characters urge him to make that decision. Nonetheless, there is a disturbing element in the sudden zeal with which he prepares for battle and in his insistence upon leaving right in the middle of the wedding. He displays no qualms about abandoning Hippolyta at the altar; in fact, his haste suggests that he is not at all sorry to postpone the completion and consummation of his marriage. Throughout the play, he displays a similarly superficial commitment to romantic love and an undeniable preference for the battlefield.

In addition to focusing on the common theme of the rivalry between love and war, The Two Noble Kinsmen illustrates another prominent theme in Renaissance literature: the competing demands of love and friendship, particularly the threat that the love of women poses to the noble virtue of classical male friendship. Palamon and Arcite's dilemma follows in the tradition of such works as Lyly's Euphues and Shakespeare's The Two Gentlemen of Verona, which demonstrate this conflict in its ultimate manifestation: the crisis that ensues when two friends, having sworn eternal loyalty and devotion to one another, fall in love—especially with the same woman. Thus, in this play, we see two popular literary motifs conjoin so that the antithesis between the ennobling demands of war and the debilitating effects of love is further intensified by associating the war experiences so intimately with male friendship.

After Palamon and Arcite are captured by Theseus in his battle against Creon, they sit in prison, consoling themselves with reminders of their friendship: “… and here being thus together, / We are an endless mine to one another; / We are one another's wife …” (2.1.137-139). Their rhapsodies on friendship echo the language of classical amity, though even the intimate tone of the standard friendship rhetoric usually does not include an allusion to the two friends being “one another's wife.” In this case, the reference suggests that the two friends could live quite happily without marriage; indeed, Arcite adds, “Were we at liberty, / A wife might part us lawfully” (2.1.147-148). He argues that given such temptations as the outside world presents, their imprisonment is a blessing.

What the two friends particularly regret is that their days as soldiers in tournaments and on the battlefield are over:

                                                                                                                        O never
Shall we two exercise, like twin gods of Honor,
Our arms again, and feel our fiery horses
Like proud seas under us! Our good swords now—
Better the red-eyed god of war ne'er wore!—
Ravished our sides, like age must run to rust
And deck the temples of those gods that hate us.
These hands shall never draw 'em out like lightening
To blast whole armies more.

(2.1.76-84)

They regret that in their imprisonment they cannot “blast whole armies” on the actual battlefield, but they also lament the more narcissistic pleasures of the knightly “games of honor” in the tiltyard; their reminiscences suggest elements of exhibitionism and sensuality in their soldierly activities. In their devotion to Mars, they seem less concerned with the causes of war than with its rituals and the private satisfactions it renders.

It is not only the youthful Palamon and Arcite who wax nostalgic about the beauties of battle, but Theseus and Pirithous, whose friendship parallels that of the two noble kinsmen, also glory in the martial exploits they have shared. Hippolyta, describing the nature of the men's friendship to Emilia, explains that they have

Fought out together where Death's elf was lodged,
Yet Fate hath brought them off. Their knot of love,
Tied, weaved, entangled, with so true, so long,
And with a finger of so deep a cunning,
May be outworn, never undone. I think
Theseus cannot be umpire to himself,
Cleaving his conscience into twain and doing
Each side like justice, which he loves best.

(1.1.39-47)

It is significant that the friendship of Theseus and Pirithous is also rooted in the world of battle, but more important is Hippolyta's suspicion that Theseus may in fact prefer his friendship with Pirithous over his love for her: as Carol Thomas Neely suggests in her study of the theme of broken nuptials in Shakespeare's plays, the male characters' resistance to marriage is frequently manifest in their inability to detach themselves from their male peers. Although Neely does not specifically discuss The Two Noble Kinsmen, the play serves as a fitting illustration of her remarks on the conflict between male bonding and nuptials: the major obstacles in the successful consummation of marriage for Theseus, as well as for the two noble kinsmen, are represented by the world of masculine friendship. At a later moment in the play, this question of priorities in relationships is echoed by Pirithous; when he begs Theseus not to condemn the two cousins to death, his address is revealing: “By all our friendship, sir, by all our dangers, / By all you love most—wars, and this sweet lady” (3.6.203-204). Theseus' love for Pirithous and the dangers of war are invoked first—Hippolyta seems to come almost as an afterthought.

This antithesis between the male world of camaraderie in battle and the female world of familial relationships and private domesticity is not unusual in Renaissance literature: what is unique about this particular play is that here the female characters do not necessarily oppose masculine loyalty to war; in some ways, they condone it. We have seen how the three widowed queens, in protecting their husbands' honor, urged Theseus to fight, and likewise how Hippolyta and Emilia supported those pleas. In the world of Shakespearean comedy, the heroines might have suggested an alternative solution, one that would satisfy both the queens' plight but still fulfill the wedding celebration. But in this case, Hippolyta's former experience as an Amazon and Emilia's own devotion to friendship render them atypically sympathetic about the male preoccupation with being together in battle. When Hippolyta urges Theseus off to battle in Thebes, she tells him to “hang / Your shield afore your heart” (1.1.195-196) and as Pirithous rushes off to join Theseus, she explains: “We have been soldiers, and we cannot weep / When our friends don their helms, or put to sea …” (1.3.18-19).

While Hippolyta focuses on Pirithous' longing to be part of the battle, Emilia understands that he also desires to be reunited with his friend, and in a speech that echoes Helena's in A Midsummer Night's Dream, she recalls her own commitment to friendship:

You talk of Pirithous' and Theseus' love.
Theirs has more ground, is more maturely seasoned …
                                                                                                              But I
And she I sigh and spoke of were things innocent
Loved for what we did …
                                                                                          … what she liked
Was then of me approved, what not condemned—
No more arraignment; the flow'r that I would pluck
And put between my breasts, she would long
Till she had such another, and commit it
To the like innocent cradle, where phoenix-like
They died in perfume. …

(1.3.55-56, 59-61, 64-71)

Emilia concludes her encomium to female friendship by insisting “That the true love 'tween maid and maid may be / More than in sex dividual” (1.3.81-82).

The attitudes of the female characters underscore the ambiguity surrounding the worlds of Mars and Venus, and the concomitant unease that we experience: unlike, for example, Beatrice and Hero in Much Ado About Nothing or Hotspur's wife in 1 Henry IV, the women here are not fulfilling their expected roles in encouraging men to forego the battle zone for the pleasures of female companionship and the joys of marriage. Emilia, who clearly prefers female friendship to heterosexual love, does not object to the world of male camaraderie in battle; she reiterates her antipathy toward marriage and her sorrow that the kinsmen's friendship has ended because of her. Hippolyta, whose conquest by Theseus has removed her from her own position of power, is forced to accept a secondary position in her husband's world.

In a play that is allegedly a romance, the concept of love does not emerge very positively; none of the characters experiences love at its ennobling best. We have seen that in the case of Theseus and Hippolyta, love is a matter of conquest and leads to broken nuptials. In the subplot's story of the jailer's daughter, her love of Palamon produces some extremely cynical statements about heterosexual relationships and eventually causes her madness. In the Palamon-Arcite-Emilia triangle, love is likewise a destructive force: it ruins the friendship of the men, and forces Emilia to participate in a marriage for which she has no inclination. Palamon's invocation to Venus before the contest against Arcite focuses on the coercive and terrifying powers the goddess of love possesses:

Hail sovereign queen of secrets, who hast power
To call the fiercest tyrant from his rage
And weep unto a girl; that hast the might
Even with an eye-glance to choke Mars' drum …
                                                                                                    I knew a man
Of eighty winters, this I told them, who
A lass of fourteen brided. 'Twas thy power
To put life into dust: the aged cramp
Had screwed his square foot round,
The gout had knit his fingers into knots,
Torturing convulsions from his globy eyes
Had almost drawn their spheres, that what was life
In him seemed torture.

(5.1.77-80, 107-115)

Imagery which again seems to be borrowed from the battlefield—“torturing convulsions”—creates a vision of love as contentious, corrupt, and unnatural; in light of such a grotesque description, it is no surprise that Emilia prays to the virgin goddess Diana, insisting, “I am bride-habited / But maiden-hearted” (5.1.150-151). Love, ultimately, does not fare very well in this play; that this is the case is obvious and has been discussed elsewhere. What is of significance here is not merely that love is a negative force, but that the preferred relationship is friendship, particularly male friendship.

It would nonetheless be misleading to view this play solely as a diatribe against Venus and a paean to Mars, for the god of war is finally presented no more optimistically than the goddess of love. This, I believe, is where much of the sense of unease surrounding this play derives—in the grand contest between love and war established here, neither side offers a choice. Just as we see the profane as well as the sacred elements of romantic love, so too we see war as much more than “the great corrector of enormous times,” as Arcite refers to it in his address to Mars.

As we have seen in the stories of both pairs of friends, Theseus and Pirithous and Palamon and Arcite, the men glory in their roles as warriors. They take great pleasure in recalling their actual experiences of war and in reenacting their martial roles in exercises of chivalry. It appears that when there are no real battles to be fought, the soldiers need to re-create them in their reminiscences and in the elaborate rituals of knighthood.

This obsession with all things martial is nowhere more evident than in the curious scene in which Palamon and Arcite decide to fight each other in order to determine who should win Emilia. Palamon, who has escaped from prison through the help of the jailer's daughter, has been hiding in the woods when he is discovered by Arcite. After nursing his friend back to health, Arcite arrives with the equipment necessary for battle. As the kinsmen prepare to fight, they are paradigms of knightly courtesy: when we recall that they are also sworn enemies preparing to kill each other, they almost become caricatures. When the kinsmen help one another don their armor, they examine the equipment lovingly, recalling the apparel they wore in previous battles. There follows a long scene in which the men seemingly forget their argument, so happy are they to sit together and dwell nostalgically on their martial triumphs. As they praise one another for their valor, it becomes clear that the young men, like Theseus, are happiest when they are recalling their lives as soldiers.

In addition to indulging themselves in remembering their previous exploits, the kinsmen take great pleasure in following the requirements of the chivalric code. Theseus is likewise wholly committed to the etiquette of knighthood: when he discovers Palamon and Arcite armed for battle, he berates them for “making battle, thus like knights appointed / Without my leave, and officers of arms” (3.6.136-137). What disturbs Theseus is not that they are fighting, but that by failing to obtain his permission and secure the necessary witnesses to their fight, they have not followed protocol. He at first condemns them to death, but then decides that the outcome of their argument will be resolved in a more formal challenge that he will devise. It is as though Theseus cannot deprive himself of the opportunity for a good battle.

Indeed, Theseus—whose enthusiasm for war and warriors has already been made abundantly clear—can hardly contain his excitement when the messenger arrives on the day appointed for the tournament. Theseus demands a full description of the knights who have accompanied Palamon and Arcite; the messenger replies that there have never been “six braver spirits”:

                                                                                                    He that stands
In the first place with Arcite, by his seeming
Should be a stout man, by his face a prince.
His very looks so say him …
His hair hangs long behind him, black and shining
Like ravens' wings; his shoulders broad and strong,
Armed long and round, and on his thigh a sword. …

(5.2.75-78, 83-85)

Pirithous and the messenger continue in a similar vein in praising the others knights: they so focus on the physical attractiveness of the young soldiers that their descriptions take on an element of eroticism. Theseus' enthusiastic response certainly contributes to this sense of homoerotic pleasure: “Now, as I have a soul, I long to see 'em! / … Come, I'll go visit 'em! I cannot stay, / Their fame has fired me so” (4.2.142, 152-153).

Throughout the play, male friendship and camaraderie in battle have been intimately associated; this scene carries that connection one step further in contributing an element of sensuality to this masculine world of valor and honor. Emilia's tribute to her childhood friend; Palamon and Arcite's reminiscences in prison; and Theseus' friendship with Pirithous all contain suggestions of latent sexuality, but where the male characters are concerned, the attraction of same-sex friendship is invariably connected to their admiration of each other as soldiers. The sexuality of male-female relationships is, as we have seen a force either destructive or grotesque, but the sexual undercurrents inherent in the same-sex friendships are never so maligned.

The masculine world of chivalric camaraderie completely overshadows the world of romantic heterosexual love in The Two Noble Kinsmen, leaving the female characters quite marginal; yet the play does not even resolve itself in this manner, with Mars emerging victorious, for the god of war also evokes some of the most horrific imagery in Renaissance drama.

In contrast to the beauty of the knights in shining armor, Hippolyta reminds us that at war, one sees “babes broached on the lance, or women / That have sod their infants in—and after eat them / The brine they weep at killing 'em” (1.3.20-22). Equally horrific is the queens' descriptions of their husbands' corpses rotting on the battlefield: “[they] endured / The beaks of ravens, talons of the kites, / And pecks of crows, in the foul fields of Thebes” (1.1.40-42). It is significant that the invectives against war come from the female characters; even though they have endorsed the world of battle, it is a world in which they are more the victims than the participants. As one queen laments, it is “we, whom flaming war doth scorch”: for the women, chivalric games do not compensate for the horrors of war.

Thus, the disturbing tensions in The Two Noble Kinsmen, emerge not only from the juxtaposition of love and war, but from the conflicts inherent within each of the concepts itself. Throughout the play, conventional attitudes and imagery concerning the two themes are frequently reversed: love is usually seen in terms of battle; it is not a joyous exchange between two willing partners, but an antagonistic force which conquers and subdues its victims. Though the play may purport to be a romance, friendship emerges as much more admirable than male-female relationships. War, on the other hand, often receives the devotion and idealization normally reserved for the subject of love, though the sordid realities of actual battle undermine its alleged nobility of purpose. This blurring of thematic boundaries upsets our expectations of The Two Noble Kinsmen as a romance, and calls into question the value of each concept, so that we are left with a disturbing sense of unresolved ambiguities—love is both destructive and irresistible, war is both annihilating and attractive. The result is not a play that succeeds in embracing multiple possibilities, but a play in which we are left with a sense of inevitable contradiction.

The plot exigencies and dual authorship perhaps both contribute to the ambiguous treatment of these themes, but it is also useful to consider what the work suggests about the social and political climate of Jacobean England when the play was written.

In Shakespeare and His Collaborators, Muriel Bradbrook suggests that The Two Noble Kinsmen is related to two specific historical events—the death of Henry, the heir to the throne, in November, 1612, and the wedding of his sister, the Princess Elizabeth, to the Elector Palatine of the Rhine in February, 1613 (28). Glynne Wickham subsequently expanded on this notion in arguing that Emilia “becomes the dramatic emblem for Princess Elizabeth; Palamon the emblem for her fiancé the Elector Palatine, and Arcite, the emblem for Henry.” He further argues, “… by the same token, Theseus and Hippolyta represent, in the world of this play, James I and Anne” (178).

Certainly the date of the play's first performance and the fact that the play ends with the funeral of a noble soldier followed almost immediately by a royal wedding invites comparison to current events. Nonetheless, there are many obvious flaws inherent in this type of strictly mimetic interpretation, problems which have been the subject of much critical debate.⁵ Let us just add that in this case, it would require a particular imaginative leap to see the war-mongering Theseus as representative of James I.

Rather than examining the characters of The Two Noble Kinsmen as thinly disguised equivalents of the royal family, it seems more useful to examine the play's thematic concerns in relation to the historical reality in a larger sense. Thus, the ambivalence about war in this play seems to reflect, at least in part, the dissatisfaction with peacetime policies that was prevalent during the middle years of James I's reign when this play was written. On the one hand, there was an acute awareness of the private and public costs exacted by war: on the other, there was a desire to see England display her power through the glories of military conquest. These conflicting attitudes are perhaps best exemplified in the persons of James I, whose devotion to pacifism is legendary, and his son and heir to the throne, Henry, whose commitment to arms is equally famous. While neither James nor Henry should be considered direct counterparts of any of the characters in The Two Noble Kinsmen, the contradictory policies of the Jacobean “hawks and doves” that they clearly represent are reflected in the conflicting attitudes towards war contained in Shakespeare and Fletcher's play.

The position of James I is appropriately symbolized in his motto, “Beati Pacifi.” Upon his accession to the throne in 1603, one of his first accomplishments was a peace treaty with Spain; another was progress towards the peaceful union of Scotland and England. Contemporary accounts of James, even when they acknowledge his other administrative weaknesses, invariably comment on his pacifism. As Anthony Weldon noted in The Court and Character of King James, “In a word, he was … such a King, I wish this Kingdom never have any worse, on this condition, nor any better; for he lived in peace, died in left all his Kingdoms in a peaceable condition” (16). The pacific stance of James' foreign policy was repeatedly emphasized in the royal image he promoted: in the pageantry that celebrated James' entry into London in 1604, Mars was presented as submitting to the power of Peace (Bergeron, English Civic Pageantry 1558-1642 85-86). Years later, James would similarly attempt to control the image his son Henry encouraged: on one occasion, James “vetoed young Henry's preference for a traditional martial fete in favor of a masque in which he was to be starred as Oberon, the fairy prince” (Orgel and Strong, Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court 210). In the vivid denunciations of battle in The Two Noble Kinsmen, it is difficult not to see James's own aversion to war.

On the other hand, the heir to the throne, Prince Henry, was every bit as militaristic as his father was peace-loving. Although Henry was praised for his enthusiastic interest in the arts, a characteristic that has been emphasized by his most recent biographer, Roy Strong, he is first and foremost presented as a warrior. In 1610, George Marcelline writes in The Triumph of King James, “This young Prince is a warrior alreadie, both in gesture and countenance, so that in looking on him, he seemeth unto us, that in him we do not yet see Ajax before Troy, crowding among the armed troops, calling unto them, that he may joyne body to body with Hector, who stands trembling with chill-cold feare” (50-51). Another description is even more specific in outlining Henry's obsession with the military: “… he did also practice tilting, Charging on Horseback with Pistols, after the Manner of the Wars with all other like Inventions. Now also delighting to confer, both with his own, and other strangers, the great Captains, of all Manner of Wars, Battle, Furniture, Arms by Sea and Land …” (Cornwallis 68). Henry's image as a warrior made him an obvious hero to the old Elizabethan war party who saw in the young heir an alternative to James. Although Henry was actually involved in planning specific military strategies, his involvement as a warrior was primarily restricted to preparations and chivalric exercises: as in The Two Noble Kinsmen, when there is no real battle to be fought, soldiers must reenact their own wars in the tiltyard. Henry is seen by many as the last representative of English chivalry—with his death in 1612, what was already becoming a lost tradition would gradually disappear. In The Two Noble Kinsmen, it seems that Shakespeare and Fletcher are representing the love of chivalry that Prince Henry and many of his countrymen promulgated, while at the same time acknowledging the aversion to war represented by King James.

Similarly, we can consider the relationship between the ambiguous treatment of love in The Two Noble Kinsmen and attitudes towards male-female relationships in the court of James I. According to Muriel Bradbrook, the play's formal, masque-like structure creates a certain distance from the individual characters, which “allows the topic of homosexuality to become pervasive without becoming acknowledged. The relation of the kinsmen to each other lies at the center of the action, and their theme reflects what everybody knew to be the habits of the monarch himself” (32). Bradbrook does not elaborate, but her suggestion that there is a connection between the monarch and the play's thematic concerns seems appropriate. Certainly Shakespeare approached the subject of intimate male friendship in some of his other plays as well as his sonnets, though there is a greater emphasis on the sexual component of friendship in The Two Noble Kinsmen than in most of his other works.

To what degree this theme mirrors the sexual preferences of James and the members of his court is obviously difficult to assess, but there are some parallels that should be drawn. James, like Theseus, seemed to be more personally committed to same-sex friendships than to heterosexual relationships, but still saw the social and political necessity of the institution of marriage. James' attitude towards his own marriage was that it was his duty to take a wife and beget issue for the stability of the kingdom; likewise he encouraged the marriage and procreation of his own children and favorites.

In The Two Noble Kinsmen, we see Theseus going through the motions of his own marriage, and persistently encouraging the reluctant Emilia to marry one of the kinsmen, but his real enthusiasm is reserved for the male characters. This disjunction between personal preference and public responsibility created certain tensions in the court of King James, and it results in similar ambiguities in The Two Noble Kinsmen. The play may leave us dissatisfied in its unsettling juxtaposition of noble chivalry and horrific war, and of male-female relationships and same-sex friendships, but it is significant that these very contradictions were notorious issues in the Jacobean period in which The Two Noble Kinsmen was written.

Notes

1. The Two Noble Kinsmen was recently performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford; for a review of the performance, see Shakespeare Quarterly, 38. 1 (spring, 1987): 82-89. A programme / text was published in conjunction with this performance by Swan Theatre Plays (London: Methuen, 1986).

2. William Shakespeare, William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Gary Taylor and Stanley Wells (Oxford UP: 1986). All quotations from the play are from this edition.

3. Clifford Leech addresses this issue in his introduction to the Signet edition of this play. Although the specific details of the collaboration have been the subject of much literary debate, the general consensus is, according to Leech, that Shakespeare wrote “the beginning and the ending and introduced all the major characters and strands of action,” while Fletcher wrote many of the middle scenes and was responsible for the subplot. Most critics concur with this analysis; I find no reason to disagree.

4. See Howard C. Adams, “‘What Cressid Is,’” in this collection.

5. For a helpful discussion of this type of topical criticism, in Renaissance literature, see the introduction to David Bergeron, Shakespeare's Romances and The Royal Family (UP of Kansas, 1985).

Works Cited

Adams, Howard C. “‘What Cressid Is’” in this collection.

Bergeron, David. English Civic Pageantry 1558-1642. Columbia, S. C., 1971, pp. 85-86.

———. Shakespeare's Romances and The Royal Family. Lawrence: UP of Kansas, 1985.

Berggren, Paula. “‘For what we lack, / We laugh’: Incompletion and The Two Noble Kinsmen.” Modern Language Studies 14 (1984): 3-17.

Bradbrook, Muriel. “Shakespeare and His Collaborators.” Proceedings of the World Shakespeare Congress. Vancouver, 1971. Ed. Clifford Leech and J. M. R. Margeson. Toronto: U of Toronto P: 28-32.

Cornwallis, Charles. A Discourse of the most illustrious prince, Henry, late Prince of Wales. Written Anno 1626, quoted in Strong, Roy. Henry, Prince of Wales. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1986.

Donaldson, E. Talbot. The Swan At The Well: Shakespeare Reading Chaucer. New Haven: Yale UP, 1985.

Marcelline, George. The Triumph of King James the First. London, 1610.

Muir, Kenneth. Shakespeare As Collaborator. London: Methuen, 1960.

Neely, Carol Thomas. Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare's Plays. New Haven: Yale UP, 1985.

Orgel, Stephen and Strong, Roy. Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court. 2 vols. Berkeley: U of California P, 1973.

Shakespeare, William. The Two Noble Kinsmen. Ed. Clifford Leech. Signet Classics. New York: New American Library, 1966.

Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works. Ed. Gary Taylor and Stanley Wells. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986.

Weldon, Anthony. The Court and Character of King James. Quoted in James I By His Contemporaries. Ed. Robert Ashton. London: Hutchinson, 1969.