This is one of the apocryphal plays, although the Stationers' Register notes joint authorship: Shakespeare and John Fletcher. "There is no good reason to doubt this ascription: many plays of the time did not appear in print until long after they were written" (Wells 381). [!!!] Three plays are now considered Shakespeare/Fletcher joint projects: this one, the lost Cardenio, and Henry VIII, only this last included in the First Folio perhaps to round out the Histories sequence.

Like Pericles, this play became semi-canonical later on, published first in a 1634 quarto edition. "It is related in style and content to Shakespeare's romances and to tragicomedies written by Fletcher with Francis Beaumont" (Wells 382) -- presumably meaning that it contains "little action and minimal character portrayal (Bloom 694). It dramatizes Chaucer's The Knight's Tale: the rivalry between Palamon and Arcite for Emilia. Earlier in Elizabeth's reign, Richard Edwards was credited with a play titled Palamon and Arcite which was presented before the Queen at the Oxford University graduation ceremonies in 1566, when the 17th Earl of Oxford graduated. Some "surviving excerpts" of this play "strongly resemble de Vere's early poetry" (Anderson 33). The close proximity of de Vere to this acknowledged precursor for Two Noble Kinsmen suggests that John Fletcher may have revised and updated an old piece of Shakespeare juvenilia or perhaps a surviving torso of an update that de Vere attempted late in life. (Farina 55). "The play is deeply concerned with friendship, with love, with tensions resulting from the conflicting demands of friendship and love, and with marriage" (Wells 385). An additional dimension, the Jailor's daughter's infatution with Palamon and going mad, is original. Otherwise the play is laborious -- heavy with rhetoric and formal masque-like pageantry that don't seem very Shakespearean.

PROLOGUE

A conceit connecting "New plays and maidenheads" (Pro.1f) is followed by a source citing -- Chaucer -- and a lot of humble fretting that the play will encheesify his admirable work. Stanley Wells would like to think that the reference to "Our losses" (Pro.32) is an allusion to the burning of the Globe in June 1613 (Wells 382). The Prologue is "jaunty, bawdy, and colloquial" (Garber 890). But,

one cannot help wondering if this sort of thing isn't a sign of a certain insecurity on the part of the playwright. Uncertain as to the worth of the play, does he call on the name of a revered ancient as a shield against criticism? (Asimov 53)

ACT I

SCENE i

The first Act is considered Shakespeare's while most of the subsequent three acts are considered Fletcher's (Asimov 61). After a lot of formal pageantry signifying a wedding, and after a song about flowers -- e.g., "Primrose, first-born child of Ver" (I.i.7), an obsolete term for Spring (Asimov 56) among other things -- and birds, three veiled queens interrupt the proceedings at Athens by falling at the feet of Theseus, his bride Hippolyta, and her sister Emilia -- this last "a character who does not belong to classical mythology at all, but to medieval fiction" (Asimov 56). Their dead husbands are the victims of "The wrath of cruel Creon" (I.i.40), king of Thebes.

The Queens' supplicating laments are ritualistic, essentially baroque in their elaborations. The luxuriance, not so much of grief, but of outrage dominates. Outrageousness is the rhetorical tonality of Shakespeare's final mode, where most voices carry the burden of having been outraged: by injustice, by time, by eros, by death. (Bloom 699)

The complex rhetoric of the speech, with its sixteen-line first sentence, tortuous in construction, piling subordinate clauses one on top of another, some in apposition, some subordinate to others, with its qualifying and parenthetical clauses, its figurative language, its mixture of concrete and abstract expressions, its coined compounds ('scythe-tusked' and, later, 'blood-sized'), its invented words ('soldieress', not previously recorded), its inversions and ellipses and elisions, it srun-on verse lines and feminine endings, and the grotesque imagery of the concluding lines, amounts almost to a parody of Shakespeare's late style, making no concessions to either the speaker of the hearer.... (Wells 383-384)

SCENE ii

Palamon and Arcite are cousins with "somewhat priggish moral character" and "no personality" (Bloom 701). They "are creations strictly of the medieval romances" (Asimov 60). They are also nephews of Creon, whom they acknowledge is "A most unbounded tyrant" (I.ii.63) and from whom they distance themselves morally. They seem to feel that "Affectations of style, speech, and dress have overtaken the court of Creon" (Garber 893). Yet when called, they agree to fight for the sake of Thebes.

SCENE iii

Although a "grotesque vision" that creates an "alienation effect" (I.iii.18-22) and an "uncanny dispassionateness" (I.iii.35-47) are part of the scene (Bloom 702), Emilia tells Hippolyta that she could never love any man, only another maiden such as her youthful chum Flavina, with whom she was so much in tune that if she put a flower between her breasts then Flavina would whimper until she had one to place between her own. "The contrast between this union of serenities and the murderous violence of the Palamon-Arcite strife for Emilia could not be more persuasive" (Bloom 704). If Hippolyta believed a word of this she'd be so upset she'd have to consider breaking up with Theseus, but the silly girl doesn't know what she's saying.

SCENE iv

Theseus triumphs in the big war so the queens are pleased. Among the victims, Palamon and Arcite are near death but have impressed Theseus greatly: "The very lees of such (millions of rates) / Exceed the wine of others" (I.iv.29-30). He sends for doctors.

SCENE v

The queens escort hearses with their dead husbands to the tune of a snappy little dirge.