Paper Abstracts for 2014 Cincinnati Shakespeare Symposium:
The Two Noble Kinsmen: Text, Sources, Performance, and Pedagogy
Roundtable: Shakespearean and Other Contexts for The Two Noble Kinsmen
Participants: James M. Bromley, Katharine Gillespie, and Kaara Peterson, Miami University
This roundtable has two aims: to connect the less familiar Two Noble Kinsmen with more familiar Shakespearean contexts and to trace the connections between this play and major events and conflicts in early modern culture. Taking up texts on friendship from Aristotle to Montaigne and Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona, James Bromley will discuss the way the play participates in but also offers alternatives to the centralization of the early modern intimate sphere around marriage. Katharine Gillespie will connect the play to events and ideologies emerging from the court of James I. She will focus specifically on the play’s mourning for and critique of martial masculinity as a response to the death of Prince Henry in 1613. Kaara Peterson will explore the representation of the Jailer’s Daughter in light of early modern understandings of female sexuality and the bedtrick plot device. These short papers will be followed by discussion among the speakers and ample time for audience questions, for we hope that by facilitating a discussion of the play’s relationship to Shakespeare’s career and to its cultural contexts, this roundtable will provoke a reconsideration of the play’s literary, theatrical, and historical significance.
Gender, Amazons, and Madness
Jim Casey, Arcadia University, "'The victor has the loss': Courting and Competition in The Two Noble Kinsmen"
Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale, an analogue to The Two Noble Kinsmen, reinscribes traditional gender expectations on the bodies in the tale, wherein a woman’s blason describes her physical beauty, while a man’s blason describes his coat of arms (the original meaning of the word comes from French heraldry and refers to either the coat of arms or a codified description of it). Emelye is desired for her appearance and the men are respected for their martial prowess. Fletcher and Shakespeare’s play presents a more complex depiction of gender and the relationship between courting and competition, despite the surface similarities between the two stories. The kinsmen and the Amazons seem to embrace traditional gender roles and hierarchies, but Palamon and Arcite’s pursuit of Emilia, and the play’s representation of her, subvert these expectations and present the woman not as a worthy prize, but rather as a sinister and destructive force. The play does not present an Amazon’s arrogation of masculine (martial) attributes or the repudiation of feminine (marital) attributes, but nevertheless emphasizes the discord generated through her Amazonian presence. Not only does Emilia lead the men away from honor, but she also lures them from the appropriate, moderate desire of desidero and tempts them to the excessive desire of cupidito. As Theseus observes, such cupidity endangers a man’s very humanity, for “being sensually subdued, / We lose our human title.” Shakespeare and Fletcher overturn the simple gender calculus of masculine valor plus feminine beauty equals romantic success when “The victor has the loss.”
Niamh J. O'Leary, Xavier University, "Amazonian Revisions: Female Community in The Two Noble Kinsmen"
Shakespeare and Fletcher’s 1613 collaboration, The Two Noble Kinsmen, has become a standard reference for those who seek to point out the unviable nature of female friendship in early modern drama (and, perhaps, culture). Emilia’s famous speech, delivered in response to Hippolyta’s recounting of Theseus and Pirithous’s friendship as a “knot of love” that can “never [be] undone” (1.3.41-44), memorializes her dear friend, Flavina, who died when they were both only eleven years old. Her nostalgic recounting of their closeness concludes with the assertion that “the true love ’tween maid and maid may be / More than in sex dividual” (1.3.81-82). Emilia believes that she will never love a man as much as she loved Flavina. The critical readings that focus on Emilia’s grief over losing this love—platonic and sexual—have precluded any further attention to female society in this play. However, if we step back from focusing on Emilia and Flavina’s admittedly tragic story, we can attend to the vibrant narrative of female alliance that pervades the play. This narrative is not an elegy; female community is not “always already lost,” even in a world of conquered Amazons.
I argue that, by drawing attention to the vestiges of Amazon community, and putting this community in conversation with the Theban widows, Shakespeare and Fletcher open up a whole landscape of female alliance—Amazon and otherwise. But this community is not all-inclusive. We see the bond between Hippolyta and Emilia, and between the sisters and the Theban widows; but the lonesome Jailer’s Daughter is left out, exposed to the questionable care only of men. This essay will seek to uncover the traces of female alliance in a play populated by conquered Amazons, bereaved Thebans, and one lone Athenian (mad)woman.
Kendra Preston Leonard, Silent Film Sound & Music Archive, "Music, Class, Communication, and the 'Talking Cure' in The Two Noble Kinsmen"
In The Two Noble Kinsmen, the Jailer’s Daughter, like Ophelia, is accorded mad because of her public vocality. Unlike the shocked (Claudius) and compassionate (Gertrude) responses to the disordered vocality of the high-born Ophelia, however, the reactions to the Daughter’s performances are that she is “harmless” (the Jailer) and useful for entertainment purposes (the Rustics). These reactions to the Daughter suggest two differences between her distractedness and that of Ophelia: the women’s respective classes, and their ability to control their own narratives through song. Whereas no one would dare suggest that Ophelia would be cured through sexual intercourse with Hamlet (or anyone else), especially outside of marriage, this is the prescribed cure for the Daughter. In addition, the songs sung and referenced by the Daughter suggest that she is cognizant of her lovesickness and is using song to help her reach peace with it, whereas Ophelia’s songs are widely recognized to be outbursts of secret or subconscious emotions. In this presentation, I will examine the Daughter’s vocality and song in the context of early modern interpretations of mental illness, representations of class, and depictions of female lovesickness, arguing that the Daughter’s songs represent her class and value within her class, that she employs song both as a means of obliquely but coherently communicating with those around her, and that she does so as a method of overcoming her love-induced melancholy. In doing so, I will draw on the song texts and their tunes (where known) and known contemporary associations with those tunes; Marion A. Wells’s theories of the voice in love-melancholy; and both early modern and more recent approaches to curing “hysteria” through Josef Breuer’s “talk therapy” or “talking cure.” Finally, I will survey modern performances of Two Noble Kinsmen to illustrate ways in which the Daughter’s vocality is read and performed as a marker of class and a means of rational but unconventional communication.
The Two Noble Kinsmen's Intertexts: Chaucer, Fletcher, Jonson
Bonnie Erwin, Wilmington College, "Chivalry is (Un)Dead"
The Two Noble Kinsmen is a haunted play: hanging over the action is the specter of an undead Chaucer, invoked by the Prologue as a watcher from beyond who might judge the playwrights’ fidelity to his Knight’s Tale. My paper will investigate this haunting, arguing that Shakespeare and Fletcher highlight and magnify something intrinsic to Chaucer’s text when they construct the poet as ghostly arbiter of their art. The Knight’s Tale, I contend, positions knighthood as a state of living death, and does so in order to critique chivalry as an ideology that insists its adherents deny their grief to perpetuate the system.
Like their counterparts in Shakespeare and Fletcher’s adaptation, Chaucer’s Palamon and Arcite exist in a state similar to what Jane Gilbert has observed in other medieval texts and labeled “living death”: they seem compelled toward self-annihilation as well as the destruction of others, and thus they hover always between the two worlds of the living and the dead. I seek to build upon Gilbert’s theory of living death by demonstrating that in Chaucer’s text, Arcite’s demise does more than eliminate one good knight. Arcite’s death does not stop at the boundaries of his body: his death overcomes and transforms the mourners left in his wake. Palamon, Emelye—even Theseus—all have their individual subjectivities destroyed, subsumed within the faceless crowds of the bereaved, as soon as Arcite dies. Yet none is allowed to properly mourn his loss; all must participate in celebrating his ultimately pointless sacrifice to chivalric ideals. In denying their grief and elevating Arcite as a model, the other characters take on his death, and pass chivalry’s death drive on to others.
It is this deathly sense of futility that Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Prologue to Two Noble Kinsmen invokes. Far from creating a work that would make Chaucer spin in his grave, as the Prologue imagines, the playwrights have echoed his condemnation of chivalry and passed it on to their own audience, allowing Chaucer’s critique of an oppressive ideology to haunt the early modern stage.
J. F. Bernard, University of Montreal, "Sharp weapons, soft sheaths, and The Two Noble Kinsmen's Melancholic Pivot"
My paper reads The Two Noble Kinsmen's dual engagement with melancholy as a crucial junction in early modern theater, one that denotes transitions along stylistic, generic, and cultural lines. In doing so, I echo Brian Vickers and other critics in dividing the play along the axis of its central and subordinate plotlines. Essentially, the tragic (Shakespearean) story of rival kinsmen contrasts the more comical depiction of the Jailer's Daughter and her romantically-induced melancholic affliction. For Shakespeare, The Two Noble Kinsmen represents the culminating efforts of a career-spanning rethinking of melancholy through the prism of comedy. Fletcher's development of the concept, on the other hand, is emblematic of his own comedic style, one predicated on a renewed interest in humorality and an increased reliance on medicine and its practitioners. The play thus bears witness to a passing of the torch, as it were, between the two playwrights, both in their respective treatments of what I term comic melancholy and, more generally, within early modern cultural, aesthetic, and dramatic predilections.
As my paper suggests, such a reconsideration of The Two Noble Kinsmen and the manifold artistic shifts that its treatment of melancholy infers allows for a clearer understanding of early modern comedy as a genre in constant flux. Eschewing incompatibility, the paper reclaims the play for Shakespeare, while nevertheless firmly inscribing it within the Fletcherian canon of tragicomedies. Much like Emilia's description of Palamon as being "so mingled as if mirth did make him sad / And sadness merry" (V, iii.52-53), the play can be seen as hinging on a melancholic pivot so as to display its many faces in a strikingly harmonious symbiotic interplay.
Richard Dutton, Ohio State University, "‘Tales, Tempests and such-like drolleries’: Two Noble Kinsmen and Bartholomew Fair"
The dismissal of Shakespeare’s late romances as ‘Tales, Tempests and such-like drolleries’ (97-8) in the Induction to Bartholomew Fair is well known.[1] But its implications have usually been considered in relation to the two plays which Jonson most openly alludes to, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, sometimes linked to disparaging comments about Bohemia having no sea coast and to Jonson’s scorn elsewhere for another late romance, Pericles (a mouldy tale).
But relatively little attention has been given to the fact that, within Bartholomew Fair proper, Two Noble Kinsmen is the play which carries the weight of Jonson’s critical disdain. When Quarlous and Winwife choose pseudonyms for Troubleall to choose between, and so resolve their competition for Grace’s hand, Quarlous chooses ‘Argalus’, a noble lover in Sidney’s Arcadia. To which Winwife responds ‘And mine out of the play: Palamon’ (4.3.57), clearly – in context -- a reference to TNK. The submission of their fates to the whim of a madman reduces to absurdity the complacent conviction of tragicomedy/romance that virtue will find a way and the right man prevail.
There is a secondary dimension to this. Although the primary referent in 1614 would have been TNK we must assume that Jonson also had in mind Richard Edwardes’s play of Palemon and Arcyte, performed before Queen Elizabeth at Oxford in 1566. The text of that play has not survived, but it had been a resonant success. And Jonson chose to base Leatherhead’s bathetic puppet-show on Edwardes’s one surviving play, Damon and Pythias. Moreover, among the original cast of Palemon and Arcyte was John Rainolds, who played Hippolyta; this is the later Dr Rainolds whose Th’Overthrow of Stage Plays (1599) is the most resonant denunciation of cross-dressing in the Elizabethan theatre – precisely the issue of Busy’s attack on the puppet-show, which is rendered mute by the puppet revealing itself to be sexless.
Jonson’s attack on TNK is part of a much wider critical analysis of theatrical practice, old and new, the extent of which remains to be fully explored.
[1] References are to the Cambridge Jonson edition of Bartholomew Fair, edited by John Creaser.
The Two Noble Kinsmen: Text, Sources, Performance, and Pedagogy
Roundtable: Shakespearean and Other Contexts for The Two Noble Kinsmen
Participants: James M. Bromley, Katharine Gillespie, and Kaara Peterson, Miami University
This roundtable has two aims: to connect the less familiar Two Noble Kinsmen with more familiar Shakespearean contexts and to trace the connections between this play and major events and conflicts in early modern culture. Taking up texts on friendship from Aristotle to Montaigne and Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona, James Bromley will discuss the way the play participates in but also offers alternatives to the centralization of the early modern intimate sphere around marriage. Katharine Gillespie will connect the play to events and ideologies emerging from the court of James I. She will focus specifically on the play’s mourning for and critique of martial masculinity as a response to the death of Prince Henry in 1613. Kaara Peterson will explore the representation of the Jailer’s Daughter in light of early modern understandings of female sexuality and the bedtrick plot device. These short papers will be followed by discussion among the speakers and ample time for audience questions, for we hope that by facilitating a discussion of the play’s relationship to Shakespeare’s career and to its cultural contexts, this roundtable will provoke a reconsideration of the play’s literary, theatrical, and historical significance.
Gender, Amazons, and Madness
Jim Casey, Arcadia University, "'The victor has the loss': Courting and Competition in The Two Noble Kinsmen"
Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale, an analogue to The Two Noble Kinsmen, reinscribes traditional gender expectations on the bodies in the tale, wherein a woman’s blason describes her physical beauty, while a man’s blason describes his coat of arms (the original meaning of the word comes from French heraldry and refers to either the coat of arms or a codified description of it). Emelye is desired for her appearance and the men are respected for their martial prowess. Fletcher and Shakespeare’s play presents a more complex depiction of gender and the relationship between courting and competition, despite the surface similarities between the two stories. The kinsmen and the Amazons seem to embrace traditional gender roles and hierarchies, but Palamon and Arcite’s pursuit of Emilia, and the play’s representation of her, subvert these expectations and present the woman not as a worthy prize, but rather as a sinister and destructive force. The play does not present an Amazon’s arrogation of masculine (martial) attributes or the repudiation of feminine (marital) attributes, but nevertheless emphasizes the discord generated through her Amazonian presence. Not only does Emilia lead the men away from honor, but she also lures them from the appropriate, moderate desire of desidero and tempts them to the excessive desire of cupidito. As Theseus observes, such cupidity endangers a man’s very humanity, for “being sensually subdued, / We lose our human title.” Shakespeare and Fletcher overturn the simple gender calculus of masculine valor plus feminine beauty equals romantic success when “The victor has the loss.”
Niamh J. O'Leary, Xavier University, "Amazonian Revisions: Female Community in The Two Noble Kinsmen"
Shakespeare and Fletcher’s 1613 collaboration, The Two Noble Kinsmen, has become a standard reference for those who seek to point out the unviable nature of female friendship in early modern drama (and, perhaps, culture). Emilia’s famous speech, delivered in response to Hippolyta’s recounting of Theseus and Pirithous’s friendship as a “knot of love” that can “never [be] undone” (1.3.41-44), memorializes her dear friend, Flavina, who died when they were both only eleven years old. Her nostalgic recounting of their closeness concludes with the assertion that “the true love ’tween maid and maid may be / More than in sex dividual” (1.3.81-82). Emilia believes that she will never love a man as much as she loved Flavina. The critical readings that focus on Emilia’s grief over losing this love—platonic and sexual—have precluded any further attention to female society in this play. However, if we step back from focusing on Emilia and Flavina’s admittedly tragic story, we can attend to the vibrant narrative of female alliance that pervades the play. This narrative is not an elegy; female community is not “always already lost,” even in a world of conquered Amazons.
I argue that, by drawing attention to the vestiges of Amazon community, and putting this community in conversation with the Theban widows, Shakespeare and Fletcher open up a whole landscape of female alliance—Amazon and otherwise. But this community is not all-inclusive. We see the bond between Hippolyta and Emilia, and between the sisters and the Theban widows; but the lonesome Jailer’s Daughter is left out, exposed to the questionable care only of men. This essay will seek to uncover the traces of female alliance in a play populated by conquered Amazons, bereaved Thebans, and one lone Athenian (mad)woman.
Kendra Preston Leonard, Silent Film Sound & Music Archive, "Music, Class, Communication, and the 'Talking Cure' in The Two Noble Kinsmen"
In The Two Noble Kinsmen, the Jailer’s Daughter, like Ophelia, is accorded mad because of her public vocality. Unlike the shocked (Claudius) and compassionate (Gertrude) responses to the disordered vocality of the high-born Ophelia, however, the reactions to the Daughter’s performances are that she is “harmless” (the Jailer) and useful for entertainment purposes (the Rustics). These reactions to the Daughter suggest two differences between her distractedness and that of Ophelia: the women’s respective classes, and their ability to control their own narratives through song. Whereas no one would dare suggest that Ophelia would be cured through sexual intercourse with Hamlet (or anyone else), especially outside of marriage, this is the prescribed cure for the Daughter. In addition, the songs sung and referenced by the Daughter suggest that she is cognizant of her lovesickness and is using song to help her reach peace with it, whereas Ophelia’s songs are widely recognized to be outbursts of secret or subconscious emotions. In this presentation, I will examine the Daughter’s vocality and song in the context of early modern interpretations of mental illness, representations of class, and depictions of female lovesickness, arguing that the Daughter’s songs represent her class and value within her class, that she employs song both as a means of obliquely but coherently communicating with those around her, and that she does so as a method of overcoming her love-induced melancholy. In doing so, I will draw on the song texts and their tunes (where known) and known contemporary associations with those tunes; Marion A. Wells’s theories of the voice in love-melancholy; and both early modern and more recent approaches to curing “hysteria” through Josef Breuer’s “talk therapy” or “talking cure.” Finally, I will survey modern performances of Two Noble Kinsmen to illustrate ways in which the Daughter’s vocality is read and performed as a marker of class and a means of rational but unconventional communication.
The Two Noble Kinsmen's Intertexts: Chaucer, Fletcher, Jonson
Bonnie Erwin, Wilmington College, "Chivalry is (Un)Dead"
The Two Noble Kinsmen is a haunted play: hanging over the action is the specter of an undead Chaucer, invoked by the Prologue as a watcher from beyond who might judge the playwrights’ fidelity to his Knight’s Tale. My paper will investigate this haunting, arguing that Shakespeare and Fletcher highlight and magnify something intrinsic to Chaucer’s text when they construct the poet as ghostly arbiter of their art. The Knight’s Tale, I contend, positions knighthood as a state of living death, and does so in order to critique chivalry as an ideology that insists its adherents deny their grief to perpetuate the system.
Like their counterparts in Shakespeare and Fletcher’s adaptation, Chaucer’s Palamon and Arcite exist in a state similar to what Jane Gilbert has observed in other medieval texts and labeled “living death”: they seem compelled toward self-annihilation as well as the destruction of others, and thus they hover always between the two worlds of the living and the dead. I seek to build upon Gilbert’s theory of living death by demonstrating that in Chaucer’s text, Arcite’s demise does more than eliminate one good knight. Arcite’s death does not stop at the boundaries of his body: his death overcomes and transforms the mourners left in his wake. Palamon, Emelye—even Theseus—all have their individual subjectivities destroyed, subsumed within the faceless crowds of the bereaved, as soon as Arcite dies. Yet none is allowed to properly mourn his loss; all must participate in celebrating his ultimately pointless sacrifice to chivalric ideals. In denying their grief and elevating Arcite as a model, the other characters take on his death, and pass chivalry’s death drive on to others.
It is this deathly sense of futility that Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Prologue to Two Noble Kinsmen invokes. Far from creating a work that would make Chaucer spin in his grave, as the Prologue imagines, the playwrights have echoed his condemnation of chivalry and passed it on to their own audience, allowing Chaucer’s critique of an oppressive ideology to haunt the early modern stage.
J. F. Bernard, University of Montreal, "Sharp weapons, soft sheaths, and The Two Noble Kinsmen's Melancholic Pivot"
My paper reads The Two Noble Kinsmen's dual engagement with melancholy as a crucial junction in early modern theater, one that denotes transitions along stylistic, generic, and cultural lines. In doing so, I echo Brian Vickers and other critics in dividing the play along the axis of its central and subordinate plotlines. Essentially, the tragic (Shakespearean) story of rival kinsmen contrasts the more comical depiction of the Jailer's Daughter and her romantically-induced melancholic affliction. For Shakespeare, The Two Noble Kinsmen represents the culminating efforts of a career-spanning rethinking of melancholy through the prism of comedy. Fletcher's development of the concept, on the other hand, is emblematic of his own comedic style, one predicated on a renewed interest in humorality and an increased reliance on medicine and its practitioners. The play thus bears witness to a passing of the torch, as it were, between the two playwrights, both in their respective treatments of what I term comic melancholy and, more generally, within early modern cultural, aesthetic, and dramatic predilections.
As my paper suggests, such a reconsideration of The Two Noble Kinsmen and the manifold artistic shifts that its treatment of melancholy infers allows for a clearer understanding of early modern comedy as a genre in constant flux. Eschewing incompatibility, the paper reclaims the play for Shakespeare, while nevertheless firmly inscribing it within the Fletcherian canon of tragicomedies. Much like Emilia's description of Palamon as being "so mingled as if mirth did make him sad / And sadness merry" (V, iii.52-53), the play can be seen as hinging on a melancholic pivot so as to display its many faces in a strikingly harmonious symbiotic interplay.
Richard Dutton, Ohio State University, "‘Tales, Tempests and such-like drolleries’: Two Noble Kinsmen and Bartholomew Fair"
The dismissal of Shakespeare’s late romances as ‘Tales, Tempests and such-like drolleries’ (97-8) in the Induction to Bartholomew Fair is well known.[1] But its implications have usually been considered in relation to the two plays which Jonson most openly alludes to, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, sometimes linked to disparaging comments about Bohemia having no sea coast and to Jonson’s scorn elsewhere for another late romance, Pericles (a mouldy tale).
But relatively little attention has been given to the fact that, within Bartholomew Fair proper, Two Noble Kinsmen is the play which carries the weight of Jonson’s critical disdain. When Quarlous and Winwife choose pseudonyms for Troubleall to choose between, and so resolve their competition for Grace’s hand, Quarlous chooses ‘Argalus’, a noble lover in Sidney’s Arcadia. To which Winwife responds ‘And mine out of the play: Palamon’ (4.3.57), clearly – in context -- a reference to TNK. The submission of their fates to the whim of a madman reduces to absurdity the complacent conviction of tragicomedy/romance that virtue will find a way and the right man prevail.
There is a secondary dimension to this. Although the primary referent in 1614 would have been TNK we must assume that Jonson also had in mind Richard Edwardes’s play of Palemon and Arcyte, performed before Queen Elizabeth at Oxford in 1566. The text of that play has not survived, but it had been a resonant success. And Jonson chose to base Leatherhead’s bathetic puppet-show on Edwardes’s one surviving play, Damon and Pythias. Moreover, among the original cast of Palemon and Arcyte was John Rainolds, who played Hippolyta; this is the later Dr Rainolds whose Th’Overthrow of Stage Plays (1599) is the most resonant denunciation of cross-dressing in the Elizabethan theatre – precisely the issue of Busy’s attack on the puppet-show, which is rendered mute by the puppet revealing itself to be sexless.
Jonson’s attack on TNK is part of a much wider critical analysis of theatrical practice, old and new, the extent of which remains to be fully explored.
[1] References are to the Cambridge Jonson edition of Bartholomew Fair, edited by John Creaser.