(I.1.35–7)

This is an odd way of saying ‘glad to help’, but typical of Shakespeare’s final style. The wording produces an effect opposite to fluency. Subject and verb are separated, for instance, so that the slow syntax clarifies only near the end of the sentence. The strange phrasing of ‘what woman I may stead that is distressed’ prolongs the distress and makes it present as both the particular instance and the general rule – compare the less emotionally laboured effect of a phrase such as ‘any distressed woman’. The old-fashioned word ‘stead’ stands a little way from the colloquial, as does the verb form ‘does bind’ (a form more commonly used by Shakespeare than his collaborator). The ‘binding’ in this first scene suggests both a wider human bondage (in thrall to what the First Queen calls ‘mortal loathsomeness’ (45)) and a practical human sympathy which is the proper and chivalric response. Emilia’s phrasing, then, puts the situation in a grand high perspective, as a formal drama of human need, obligation and succour. Earlier Shakespearian heroines would be no less ready with compassion, but they wouldn’t speak in this way: the generosity of Rosalind or Viola would not be measured so much in terms of obligations. There is no doubt that such a style of speech is demanding and problematic for an actor or a theatre audience. But to admirers of the play it has a wonderful eloquence, mannered and weighty, dignified and bleak, not quite like anything else in the language.

Moreover, even Emilia’s first words, ‘No knees to me’, are part of a poetic patterning in this opening scene. The play starts with a wedding song in which a short line of four syllables brings a modulated dying fall to every third line: ‘But in their hue’ (3), ‘And sweet thyme true’ (6), ‘With harebells dim’ (9), and so on. Two centuries later Keats was to hear a post-coital desolation in the short dimeter line (‘And no birds sing’) when he used it in ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ (1819), and here in The Two Noble Kinsmen it lends its autumnal note to one of the least sexy wedding songs in English drama. The four-syllable rhythm, set up in the song, continues to toll unobtrusively but regularly through this first scene of interrupted nuptials: ‘Sad lady, rise’ (35), ‘No knees to me’ (35), ‘Pray you kneel not’ (54), ‘troubled I am’ (76), ‘Lend us a knee’ (96), ‘I’ll speak anon’ (106). It works as a rhythm which makes itself faintly heard. It is part of a more generally musical arrangement of the opening scene, which is organized with a formality which seems at times operatic, with highly ritualized and symmetrical patterns of speech and response. Many of the four-syllable phrases are about kneeling, and perhaps their brevity suggests something bowed, a line of less than its full stature. They culminate in Theseus’ potent summing up of human duty: ‘As we are men, | Thus should we do’ (231–2), a coupling across the line-ending of two of these phrases, giving to his acquiescence in human duty a particularly doleful kind of nobility. (The motif doesn’t continue later in the play, except for one further echo, in a moment of proverbial stoicism from Arcite’s soliloquy in Act II, scene 3: ‘Come what can come, | The worst is death’ (17–18).)

Nearly all commentators agree that the play was co-authored by Shakespeare and John Fletcher, with Shakespeare almost exclusively responsible for Acts I and V, and contributing at least one scene to each of the other acts (II.1, III.1–2, IV.3). The evidence for the collaboration and the contribution of each author is discussed below, but let me set out straight away the generally accepted division of labour:

Shakespeare: Act I, II.1, III.1–2, IV.3, V.1, V.3–4

Fletcher: Prologue, II.2–6, III.3–6, IV.1–2, V.2,

Epilogue

Many provisos complicate the neatness of this scheme. It is possible, for instance, that one of the authors may have revised or added to the work of the other (and probable that Fletcher did so at various points); certain that the papers on which the Quarto text is based include many layers of accretion – notably from the theatre personnel, the scribe and the compositor – and are not just the unadorned words of the authors; possible, too, that some dramatic writers altered their text every time they transcribed it, so that no text can reliably be considered definitive. It should also be mentioned that the stylistic tests of authorship for the prose scenes are less decisive than for the verse ones; and that the most comprehensive and scrupulous analyst of the co-authorship issue, Brian Vickers, believes Fletcher to be the writer of the short scene I.5 (Shakespeare, Co-Author, pp. 416, 425, 431). But with these provisos, the scene attributions can be offered with confidence as the findings of a scholarly consensus and recent research; and there is obviously an interest in attempting to distinguish between the respective contributions of the authors, and good grounds for believing that this approach will illuminate the play linguistically and structurally. This introduction will base its references to Shakespeare’s or Fletcher’s authorship of particular scenes and speeches on the scheme above. (Paul Bertram’s 1965 book Shakespeare and ‘The Two Noble Kinsmen’ includes material of continuing interest, but his (lone) argument for Shakespeare’s sole authorship of the play has been substantially confuted.)

Poetically, the Shakespearian part of the play contains some of the least-known great dramatic poetry in the language. Its pinnacles include the lengthy speech in which Emilia remembers her childhood intimacy with Flavina (I.3.54–82) and a number of formal set pieces, such as the three invocations to the gods in Act V, scene 1, and Pirithous’ messenger-like speech describing the play’s calamity (V.4.48–85). In the old stage-versus-page debates the dogma these days is very much pro-stage: recent editions of Shakespeare have given far more space than previously to performance histories, and commentary has been more attentive to theatrical histories and contexts. These new emphases have been valuable and illuminating, but reading a play has its advantages and vantage points too; it is a different experience from seeing it performed, and not just a poor substitute. Your inner eye and ear can become more active in reading; you aren’t at the mercy of actors’ choices; you can take your own time to work out what’s going on before moving on to the next speech or scene. Some of the liveliest response to The Two Noble Kinsmen has come from creative writers responding to Shakespeare first as poet, and then as theatrical artist: Coleridge, Lamb and De Quincey all played a part in the play’s critical re-emergence in the early nineteenth century, and more recently the Black Mountain poet Charles Olson urged that we see it as the beginning of a new phase of Shakespeare’s style. At the very least, it has a claim to revaluation both as an evolution of dramatic poetry and as an uneven but often intensely realized and spectacular dramatic action.