Customer Reviews

The Two Noble Kinsmen (3rd Series)

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This volume, part of the third series of the Arden Shakespeare, is long overdue, since good critical editions of "Two Noble Kinsmen" have been scarce compared with other Shakespeare plays (perhaps because of its joint authorship with John Fletcher). Lois Potter does a splendid job of giving a well-edited text, with thorough notation of emendations of the First Quarto of 1634, and offering an informative introduction detailing the theatrical and critical fortunes of this work.

The Two Noble Kinsmen was only partially written by Shakespeare. The primary author was John Fletcher, and Shakespeare seems to have been doing a rewrite more than a collaboration. As a result, you get two different styles of narration and development in the same story. The underlying tale follows very closely on the famous Knight's Tale from Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. As a result, you get a three way perspective on Shakespeare that is not available elsewhere -- what his co-author did, what Chaucer did, and how Shakespeare handled similar problems in other plays.

Where the Knight's Tale was primarily a story about chivalry, love, and spirituality, The Two Noble Kinsmen is very much about psychology and human emotions. Like other plays that Shakespeare wrote, this one shows how conflicting emotions create problems when we cannot master ourselves. In this case, the two loving cousins, Palamon and Arcite, fall out over having been overwhelmed by love for the appearance of Emilia, Duke Theseus's sister. The play explores many ways that their fatal passion for Emilia might be quenched or diverted into more useful paths. The dilemma can only be resolved by the removal of one of them. This places Emilia in an awkward situation where she will wed one, but at the cost of the life of the other. She finds them both attractive, and is deeply uncomfortable with their mutual passion for her. In a parallel subplot, the jailer's daughter similarly falls in love with Palamon, putting her father's life and her own in jeopardy. Overcome with unrequited love, she becomes mad from realizing what she has done. Only by entering into her delusions is she able to reach out to others.

What most impressed me from reading this play is how much better Shakespeare was as a writer than either Chaucer or Fletcher. You can tell the parts that Shakespeare wrote because the language is so compact, so powerful, and so filled with relevant imagery. The tension is unremitting and makes you squirm.

By contrast, the Knight's Tale is one of the dullest stories you could possibly hope to read and admire for its virtuosity without experiencing much enjoyment. Although the same plot is developed, few emotions will be aroused in you. When Fletcher is writing in this play, the development is slow, the content lacks much emotion, and you find yourself reaching for a blue pencil to strike major sections as unnecessary.

In fact, this play would not be worth reading except for the exquisite development of the dilemmas that are created for Emilia. Her pain will be your pain, and you will want to escape from it as much as she does. In these sections, you will find some of Shakespeare's greatest writing.

I also was moved by the way several scenes explored the duality of cousinly friendship and affection occurring at the same time that lethal passions of love and jealousy are loose.

Although this play will probably not be among your 50 favorites, you will probably find that it will sharpen your appetite for and appreciation of Shakespeare's best works.

I also listened to Arkangel recording, and recommend it. The performances are fine, the voices are easy to distinguish, the music is magnificent, the singing adds to the mood nicely, and you will find your engagement in the play's action powerfully increased over reading the play.

When do you lose control over your emotions? What does it cost you? How could you regain control before harm is done?

May you find peaceful, positive solutions to all of your dilemmas!

I will be the first to admit this is not the "best" or the "greatest" play written by the bard, but it is still very worthy of his name, and incredibly beautiful! Kinsmen is a romance in the style of Shakespeare's other late plays, Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest (my favorite). In many ways it reflects his earlier works, namely A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hamlet, and The Tempest. It tells a wonderfully romantic story of two good friends who fall for the same girl (I know, sounds familiar, but trust me, it's a different take on the setup) in Athens. The poetry in it is lovely, the characters very well developed, and the plot is incredible. Many people haven't heard of this play as Shakespeare cowrote it with Fletcher, but belive me, it is still wonderful. Highly recomended.

The Arkangel Shakespeare series being issued by Penguin Audio is now halfway through the plays and the surprise is that <The Two Noble Kinsmen> was given preference to the remaining more familiar works. Co-authored by Shakespeare and Fletcher, this play remains an odd man out for several reasons. Based fairly closely on the "Knight's Tale" from Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales," it tells of two cousins, who just after swearing eternal friendship in one of Duke Theseus' prisons immediately fall in love with the same woman, Emilia, and become bitter rivals for her affections. One of them, Arcite, is exiled but returns in disguise; the other, Palamon, escapes with the help of the Jailer's Daughter, who goes mad for love of him; and...well, see for yourself. Of the play's 23 scenes, 7 and part of an 8th are attributed to Shakespeare, a 9th doubtfully so, and the rest to John Fletcher, who was probably handed over to Shakespeare to learn the ropes as it were. The Shakespeare parts are easy to spot: they are nearly impossible to understand without a heavily annotated copy of the text open before you! Even more so than in his late plays like "Cymberline" and "Winter's Tale," the syntax is so complex, the thoughts so condensed, that one might (and has) compared his writing with the late Beethoven String Quartets. As one of the scholars quoted in the excellent Signet Classic paperback edition of this play comments, the play is most unShakespearean in that none of the characters change over the course of the play. And I should add the subplot of the Daughter's madness is never integrated into the main plot. One scene, in fact, is devoted entirely to the description of some minor characters and might have been influenced by a similar and much longer sequence in "Seven Against Thebes." In short, do not play this for a casual listen; but be prepared to be challenged. Look especially for echoes of the earlier all-Shakespearean plays. The nuptials of Theseus and Hippolyta recall the opening scenes of "A Midsummer Night's Dream," the main plot that of "Two Gentlemen of Verona," the Daughter's madness of Ophelia, and so on. As for the actual recording, it would be difficult to better it! The voices of the two kinsmen (Johnathan Firth and Nigel Cooke) are easily distinguishable, Theseus (Geoffrey Whitehead) sounds advanced in years and noble, Emila (Helen Schlesinger) mature and alert, Hippolyta (Adjoa Andoh) vocally of African origins as perhaps befits the character, and all the rest as understandable as the text allows and "into" their roles. Thank you, Penguin, for this noble entry in a series that is getting better and better.

Last night I completed my 2010 goal of reading or re-reading all of Shakespeare last year by finishing this play. This New Year's morning I read some of Harold Bloom's essay about it. I think Bloom (who confesses he'd rather not ever see this play staged) struggles to make it sound credible as possibly Shakespeare's last (and co-authored), at moments superb, work. Though many of the lines are fine, all in all it's a botch, as you may agree when you read it and approach the ending with the sickening feeling that the play will only be resolved with the cheapest of tricks. You'll know by act IV that the playwright(s) are painted into a corner.

But it's also the botch that Shakespeare mined to write one of his greatest plays, A Midsummer Night's Dream, a much "earlier" work in the traditional dating of the plays. Many of the distinguishing elements of MSD are there in rough form TNK, though they don't really hang together. I think the author of Shakespeare was still a young playwright learning his chops (and leaning more heavily than he ultimately could on his source, Chaucer)when he wrote the basic draft of TNK. Then, fortunately for us, he let it metamorphose into the magic of MSD.

One reason I wanted to revisit all of WS in the last year was to get a better sense of the march of his work and of the problems with arranging the plays in the generally accepted chronological order. That interests me because I tend to think increasingly that the "authorship" problem is real, and that most likely Shakespeare's works came basically from Edward de Vere, who was born ten years before WS the man and who most likely died in 1606, after finishing his most famous four tragedies. My sense of TNK is that it fits with the likelihood that all the plays believed to have been written after de Vere's death were in fact written in more or less stageable form much earlier, then trotted out again (or for the first time) for performance with some doctoring by Fletcher and maybe others in the 1610s.

I was surprised how well TNK fits this line of thinking. Hats off to all the writers, researchers, and other "Looneys" who continue to build a better understanding of where the magnificent works of Shakespeare come from.

In this play, Shakespeare is widely regarded as having authored most of Acts I and V whereas Fletcher did the rest. Other scholars have suggested a more even distribution of the writing. It is a tragi-comedy based on Chaucer's "Knight's Tale" and takes place in Athens when Theseus ruled. Two Theban prisoners, Arcite and Palamon, see the sister-in-law of Theseus, Emily, and both fall in love with her. This causes a break in the friendship of the two cousins. In the last act they fight for the honor of Emily's hand. One significant difference from the Chaucer tale is the presence of the jailor's daughter who falls in love with Palamon. She goes a little mad from her unrequited love but is cured by a lower class man pretending to be Palamon. The play is rarely produced today and does not come up to the lofty standards of the other works of Shakespeare. In fact, I suspect that more people have read Chaucer's version than Shakespeare's and Fletcher's. Nevertheless, it is a play that an educated person should read.

I just want to cast my vote for the play: I love it. (I love the Knight's Tale, too). If you've ever known love to ruin a friendship, one of the other sex to come between you and your friend - doesn't this happen quite often? - this play is for you. I ached and wept. Besides it has Amazons. It's about friendship rather than love, it's a tragedy of friendship, and for portrayal of both woman-woman and man-man emotion, for the thesis that this love beats the "sex dividual" love, often, here's your play. It's late, dark but elegiac, at times staggeringly bitter, with a ghastly hymn to the Goddess of Love, and can be as gory a romp as Titus.