Shakespeare After All

by Marjorie Garber

The Two Noble Kinsmen begins with a Prologue and ends with an Epilogue, thus bracketing its ceremonial, romantic, and tragic events from a faraway past with gestures toward the present-day audience.

Hymen—also present in the wedding finale of As You Like It—is the classical god of marriage.

the two “kinsmen,” Palamon and Arcite, cousins and best friends, are introduced.

The stage is set for a move from pageantry to love comedy, and then, via the Daughter's unrequited love for Palamon, to madness.

Two Noble Kinsmen, as in most—though not all—Shakespearean instances, these discussions locate the ideal model of friendship in the past, as something to be accommodated to the changed circumstances of marriage

or as something lost and perhaps irreplaceable

But “never” in such conversations serves almost always, especially in the comedies, as a kind of dare, waiting to be proved wrong

Like Emilia's “never,” Palamon's “not … ever” invites a dramatic reversal, and that is exactly, and immediately, what it gets.

“Why then would you deal so cunningly, / So strangely, so unlike a noble kinsman, / To love alone?” asks Arcite. “Speak truly. Do you think me / Unworthy

of her sight?” (2.2.193–195). Like another eponymous duo, the two gentlemen of Verona in Shakespeare's play of that name, likewise sundered by their love for Silvia, Palamon and Arcite split apart over their “love” for Emilia,

“We were not bred to talk, man. When we are armed / And both upon our guards, then let our fury, / … fly strongly from us” [3.6.28–30]).

One of the play's many pleasures is the way it juxtaposes the “high” courtly and triangulated romance of Palamon, Arcite, and Emilia with the “low” story of the Jailer's Daughter and her Wooer. The fact that these country characters have labels rather than names—not unusual in plays of the period— underscores their difference from the nobility. Yet the Jailer's Daughter, and indeed the Jailer himself, are in some ways far more vivid characters than their courtly counterparts.

Like many of the last plays in which Shakespeare had a hand, and especially his late romances, this play seems to cite, quote, and excerpt from key moments in earlier Shakespearean plays, especially those that were—and are—memorable onstage.

This play, written by two authors, seems to have as its ideal the melting of two (kinsmen, authors) into one.

The process of writing this book began at least as early as the mid-1970s, when, as a young assistant professor, I was given the opportunity to teach the Shakespeare lecture course at Yale. I taught a version of that course at Haverford College, and, in 1981, when I came to Harvard, I began lecturing in Emerson Hall, Paine Hall, and, ultimately, Sanders Theater, teaching undergraduates, graduate students, and—to my great pleasure—many alumni and members of the general public who began to attend these open lectures regularly and to share with me their own love of Shakespeare.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING