40
PROTEUS What dangerous action, stood it next to death,
Would I not undergo, for one calm look?
O ’tis the curse in love, and still approv’d,
When women cannot love where they’re belov’d.
SILVIA When Proteus cannot love where he’s belov’d:
45
Read over Julia’s heart, thy first best love,
For whose dear sake thou didst then rend thy faith
Into a thousand oaths; and all those oaths
Descended into perjury, to love me.
Thou hast no faith left now, unless thou’dst two,
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And that’s far worse than none: better have none
Than plural faith, which is too much by one.
Thou counterfeit to thy true friend!
PROTEUS In love,
Who respects friend?
SILVIA All men but Proteus.
PROTEUS Nay, if the gentle spirit of moving words
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Can no way change you to a milder form,
I’ll woo you like a soldier, at arm’s end,
And love you ’gainst the nature of love: force ye.
SILVIA O heaven!
PROTEUS I’ll force thee yield to my desire.
VALENTINE [coming forward]
Ruffian! Let go that rude uncivil touch,
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Thou friend of an ill fashion.
PROTEUS Valentine!
VALENTINE
Thou common friend, that’s without faith or love,
For such is a friend now. Treacherous man,
Thou hast beguil’d my hopes; nought but mine eye
Could have persuaded me: now I dare not say
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I have one friend alive; thou wouldst disprove me.
Who should be trusted now, when one’s right hand
Is perjured to the bosom? Proteus,
I am sorry I must never trust thee more,
But count the world a stranger for thy sake.
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The private wound is deepest: O time most accurst,
’Mongst all foes that a friend should be the worst!
PROTEUS My shame and guilt confounds me.
Forgive me, Valentine: if hearty sorrow
Be a sufficient ransom for offence,
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I tender’t here; I do as truly suffer,
As e’er I did commit.
VALENTINE Then I am paid;
And once again I do receive thee honest.
Who by repentance is not satisfied,
Is nor of heaven, nor earth; for these are pleas’d:
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By penitence th’Eternal’s wrath’s appeas’d.
And that my love may appear plain and free,
All that was mine in Silvia I give thee.
JULIA O me unhappy! [She swoons.]
PROTEUS Look to the boy.
VALENTINE Why, boy!
Why, wag; how now? What’s the matter? Look up;
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speak.
JULIA O good sir, my master charged me to deliver a
ring to Madam Silvia; which (out of my neglect) was
never done.
PROTEUS Where is that ring, boy?
JULIA Here ’tis: this is it.
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[She gives him a ring.]
PROTEUS How! Let me see.
Why, this is the ring I gave to Julia.
JULIA O, cry you mercy, sir, I have mistook:
This is the ring you sent to Silvia.
[She shows another ring.]
PROTEUS
But how cam’st thou by this ring? At my depart
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I gave this unto Julia.
JULIA And Julia herself did give it me,
And Julia herself hath brought it hither.
[She reveals herself.]
PROTEUS How! Julia!
JULIA Behold her that gave aim to all thy oaths,
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And entertain’d ’em deeply in her heart.
How oft hast thou with perjury cleft the root!
O Proteus, let this habit make thee blush.
Be thou asham’d that I have took upon me
Such an immodest raiment; if shame live
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In a disguise of love!
It is the lesser blot modesty finds,
Women to change their shapes, than men their minds.
PROTEUS
Than men their minds? ’Tis true: O heaven, were man
But constant, he were perfect. That one error
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Fills him with faults; makes him run through all th’ sins;
Inconstancy falls off, ere it begins.
What is in Silvia’s face but I may spy
More fresh in Julia’s, with a constant eye?
VALENTINE Come, come; a hand from either;
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Let me be blest to make this happy close:
’Twere pity two such friends should be long foes.
PROTEUS Bear witness, heaven, I have my wish for ever.
JULIA And I mine.
Enter Outlaws, DUKE and THURIO.
OUTLAW A prize, a prize, a prize!
VALENTINE
Forbear, forbear, I say: it is my lord the Duke.
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Your grace is welcome to a man disgrac’d,
Banish’d Valentine.
DUKE Sir Valentine!
THURIO Yonder is Silvia; and Silvia’s mine.
VALENTINE
THURIO, give back; or else embrace thy death;
Come not within the measure of my wrath;
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Do not name Silvia thine. If once again,
Verona shall not hold thee. Here she stands,
Take but possession of her with a touch:
I dare thee but to breathe upon my love.
THURIO Sir Valentine, I care not for her, I:
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I hold him but a fool that will endanger
His body for a girl that loves him not.
I claim her not, and therefore she is thine.
DUKE The more degenerate and base art thou
To make such means for her, as thou hast done,
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And leave her on such slight conditions.
Now, by the honour of my ancestry,
I do applaud thy spirit, Valentine,
And think thee worthy of an empress’ love:
Know then, I here forget all former griefs,
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Cancel all grudge, repeal thee home again,
Plead a new state in thy unrivall’d merit,
To which I thus subscribe: Sir Valentine,
Thou art a gentleman, and well deriv’d,
Take thou thy Silvia, for thou hast deserv’d her.
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VALENTINE
I thank your grace; the gift hath made me happy.
I now beseech you, for your daughter’s sake,
To grant one boon that I shall ask of you.
DUKE I grant it, for thine own, whate’er it be.
VALENTINE These banish’d men, that I have kept withal,
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Are men endu’d with worthy qualities:
Forgive them what they have committed here,
And let them be recall’d from their exile:
They are reformed, civil, full of good,
And fit for great employment, worthy lord.
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DUKE Thou hast prevail’d, I pardon them and thee:
Dispose of them as thou know’st their deserts.
Come, let us go, we will include all jars,
With triumphs, mirth, and rare solemnity.
VALENTINE And as we walk along, I dare be bold
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With our discourse to make your grace to smile.
What think you of this page, my lord?
DUKE I think the boy hath grace in him, he blushes.
VALENTINE
I warrant you, my lord, more grace than boy.
DUKE What mean you by that saying?
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VALENTINE Please you, I’ll tell you, as we pass along,
That you will wonder what hath fortuned.
Come, Proteus, ’tis your penance but to hear
The story of your loves discovered.
That done, our day of marriage shall be yours,
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One feast, one house, one mutual happiness. Exeunt.
The Two Noble Kinsmen
The Two Noble Kinsmen was printed in 1634 as the joint work of ‘those memorable worthies of their time’ John Fletcher and William Shakespeare, performed by the King’s Men at the Blackfriars Theatre. These claims fit the likely date of composition, 1613–14, making it the latest surviving play in which Shakespeare had a hand. A dance from The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn, by Fletcher’s regular collaborator Francis Beaumont, which was presented at Court on 20 February 1613 during the wedding celebrations of Princess Elizabeth and Frederick, Prince Palatine, supplied the characters (and presumably the costumes) for the morris dance in 3.5. Fletcher’s major share in the authorship meant that until the nineteenth century the play remained within the printed canon of ‘Beaumont and Fletcher’ rather than Shakespeare. Interest in The Two Noble Kinsmen revived after collaborative authorship of King Henry VIII began to be seriously proposed in the mid-nineteenth century, and since the 1970s it has regularly appeared in collected editions of Shakespeare. The mode of collaboration is uncertain but the scenes in which Shakespeare’s hand is most evident are mainly in the first and last acts (1.1–5; 2.1, 3[?]; 3.1–2; 4.3[?]; 5.1, 3–4), leaving to Fletcher the bulk of the central action and almost all of the subplot of the Jailer’s daughter.
Though the story of the siege of Thebes is pervasive in classical Greek and Latin literature, the playwrights relied on a medieval accretion to it. Chaucer’s version of the perplexities of the Theban cousins Palamon and Arcite in their rivalry for the love of Emilia, sister of the Amazon queen Hippolyta, bride of Theseus, is assigned to the Knight in The Canterbury Tales (c. 1385). Chaucer got the story from the Teseida of Giovanni Boccaccio (?late 1340s), behind which lies the Thebaid of Statius. Shakespeare had earlier used The Knight’s Tale for his treatment of Theseus and Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Like Chaucer’s tale, the play sets up a series of moral and emotional dilemmas for its characters. Should Theseus proceed with his wedding, or postpone it until he has avenged the widowed queens? Should Palamon and Arcite fight for their native Thebes, or flee from the corruptions of its king, their uncle Creon? Should their friendship prevail over their rivalry in love for Emilia? Should the Jailer’s daughter free Palamon at the risk of her father’s life? Should Emilia choose between marriage and virginity – or between her equally unknown and unwelcome suitors? The struggles of the characters to resolve these dilemmas culminate in a scene, adapted from Chaucer, in which Arcite, Palamon and Emilia in turn invoke their tutelary gods, Mars, Venus and Diana. Thereafter, we increasingly see them as pawns in a divine chess-game. The outcome, in which accidental death robs Arcite of his victory in combat and leaves Emilia to the disconsolate Palamon, is well characterized by Emilia’s cry, ‘Is this winning?’ Meanwhile the destructive passion of the Jailer’s daughter for Palamon moves through suicidal despair and madness to the apparent possibility of transference to her faithful Wooer by a therapy involving sexual relations with him under the pretence that he is Palamon. It is unclear how fully audiences are invited to endorse the statement of Theseus that ‘in the passage / The gods have been most equal’, or his determinist conclusion,
Let us be thankful
For that which is, and with you leave dispute
That are above our question.
The tone of the play varies sharply between elegaic solemnity and a brittle, even cynical, detachment. Since the 1970s, stage productions have proliferated after centuries of relative neglect. The play offers a powerful portrayal of the predicaments of women in a male-dominated world, and its unhappy open-endedness is congruous with the chastened mood of the turn of the century.
The 1997 Arden text is based on the 1634 Quarto.
LIST OF ROLES
Speaker of the PROLOGUE
BOY
singer in the wedding procession
figures in the wedding procession
ATHENIANS
THESEUS
Duke of Athens
PIRITHOUS
friend of Theseus
HIPPOLYTA
bride of Theseus, an Amazon
EMILIA
sister of Hippolyta
OFFICER (Artesius)
officer of Theseus
HERALD
WAITING WOMAN
to Emilia
JAILER
DAUGHTER
to Jailer
WOOER
to Jailer’s Daughter
BROTHER
to Jailer
Two FRIENDS
of Jailer
DOCTOR
MAID
companion to Jailer’s Daughter
SCHOOLMASTER (Gerald)
Five COUNTRYMEN
(among them Arcas, Rycas, Sennois)
TABORER (Timothy)
Actor playing BAVIAN
Five COUNTRYWOMEN
Barbary, Friz, Luce, Maudlin, Nell
GENTLEMEN
EXECUTIONER
Two MESSENGERS
THEBANS
Three QUEENS
widows of besiegers of Thebes
cousins, nephews to Creon, King of Thebes
VALERIUS
Three KNIGHTS
supporters of Arcite
Three KNIGHTS
supporters of Palamon
Speaker of the EPILOGUE
Servants, Guards, Attendants, etc.
The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works Page 545