The Two Noble Kinsmen Read Online

Slowly they regained their place in the repertoire, and they continued to be reprinted, but it was not until the great actor David Garrick (1717–79) organized a spectacular jubilee in Stratford in 1769 that Shakespeare began to be regarded as a transcendental genius. Garrick’s idolatry prefigured the enthusiasm of critics such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) and William Hazlitt (1778–1830). Gradually Shakespeare’s reputation spread abroad, to Germany, America, France and to other European countries.

During the nineteenth century, though the plays were generally still performed in heavily adapted or abbreviated versions, a large body of scholarship and criticism began to amass. Partly as a result of a general swing in education away from the teaching of Greek and Roman texts and towards literature written in English, Shakespeare became the object of intensive study in schools and universities. In the theatre, important turning points were the work in England of two theatre directors, William Poel (1852–1934) and his disciple Harley Granville-Barker (1877–1946), who showed that the application of knowledge, some of it newly acquired, of early staging conditions to performance of the plays could render the original texts viable in terms of the modern theatre. During the twentieth century appreciation of Shakespeare’s work, encouraged by the availability of audio, film and video versions of the plays, spread around the world to such an extent that he can now be claimed as a global author.

The influence of Shakespeare’s works permeates the English language. Phrases from his plays and poems – ‘a tower of strength’, ‘green-eyed jealousy’, ‘a foregone conclusion’ – are on the lips of people who may never have read him. They have inspired composers of songs, orchestral music and operas; painters and sculptors; poets, novelists and film-makers. Allusions to him appear in pop songs, in advertisements and in television shows. Some of his characters – Romeo and Juliet, Falstaff, Shylock and Hamlet – have acquired mythic status. He is valued for his humanity, his psychological insight, his wit and humour, his lyricism, his mastery of language, his ability to excite, surprise, move and, in the widest sense of the word, entertain audiences. He is the greatest of poets, but he is essentially a dramatic poet. Though his plays have much to offer to readers, they exist fully only in performance. In these volumes we offer individual introductions, notes on language and on specific points of the text, suggestions for further reading and information about how each work has been edited. In addition we include accounts of the ways in which successive generations of interpreters and audiences have responded to challenges and rewards offered by the plays. The Penguin Shakespeare series aspires to remove obstacles to understanding and to make pleasurable the reading of the work of the man who has done more than most to make us understand what it is to be human.

Stanley Wells

The Chronology of Shakespeare’s Works

A few of Shakespeare’s writings can be fairly precisely dated. An allusion to the Earl of Essex in the chorus to Act V of Henry V, for instance, could only have been written in 1599. But for many of the plays we have only vague information, such as the date of publication, which may have occurred long after composition, the date of a performance, which may not have been the first, or a list in Francis Meres’s book Palladis Tamia, published in 1598, which tells us only that the plays listed there must have been written by that year. The chronology of the early plays is particularly difficult to establish. Not everyone would agree that the first part of Henry VI was written after the third, for instance, or Romeo and Juliet before A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The following table is based on the ‘Canon and Chronology’ section in William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion, by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, with John Jowett and William Montgomery (1987), where more detailed information and discussion may be found.

Introduction

‘THE MOST SUPERB WORK IN THE LANGUAGE’

The highest and grandest claim about The Two Noble Kinsmen was made in 1828 by Thomas De Quincey:

The first and the last acts, for instance, of The Two Noble Kinsmen, which, in point of composition, is perhaps the most superb work in the language, and beyond all doubt from the loom of Shakspeare, would have been the most gorgeous rhetoric, had they not happened to be something far better. (Blackwood’s Magazine 24, p. 896)

‘Perhaps the most superb work in the language’: if people took these words seriously, the play would be a lot better known than it is. Praise like this, from a major critic, gives ample reason to look again at The Two Noble Kinsmen and see where it might earn its superlatives. But De Quincey’s words may also point to a reason the play has not been more widely acclaimed. ‘The first and the last acts’ do not make up a whole play: perhaps it is uneven and lacks integrity of design? Superb ‘composition’ is not quite the same thing as successful drama: perhaps the literary excellences are not theatrically compelling? Such doubts as these have continued to lower the reputation and to limit the afterlife of this extraordinary play. De Quincey’s phrase ‘the loom of Shakspeare’ points to something tremendously wrought, like a tapestry; but the medium of weaving is not the medium of theatre. Theodore Spencer, one commentator on the play who admired its poetry but found it wanting as drama, astutely suggested that ‘the slow lines move like figures in heavy garments’, and regretted that its dialogue was often ‘more like the comment of a chorus than the speech of a protagonist’ (Modern Philology 36, pp. 259, 260). But many a good play has featured heavy garments and choruses; they need not be matter for regret. We need to think about what kind of dramatic effects the play aims for before finding fault with its method.

For a brief example of its poetic and dramatic method, here is the first speech of Emilia, replying to the supplication of one of the widowed queens:

No knees to me.

What woman I may stead that is distressed

Does bind me to her.