(Upbeat folk music plays)
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Hello and welcome to our third YouTube premiere
from Shakespeare’s Globe:
The Two Noble Kinsmen, directed in 2018 by Barrie Rutter.
I’m so excited for this show because it’s always a joy to share a play that might be a little less familiar
than some of the classics like Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, which we screened last month.
If you haven’t seen or read this play, you’re
in for a treat. We’re back in the kind-of
mythic, kind-of chivalric world of ancient
Athens that you might know from
A Midsummer Night’s Dream – and just like in that play, we arrive in the build up to the marriage
between Theseus and Hippolyta. There might
be twenty years between the composition of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Two Noble
Kinsmen, but Theseus still isn’t hitched…
The nuptials are delayed yet again by the
arrival of three grieving queens who ask the
Athenian duke to avenge their losses, and
in the ensuing battle two upright young fellows
from neighbouring Thebes – Palamon and Arcite
– are taken prisoner, and thrown into jail for life.
There, they pledge their eternal love to each other,
cousins and lovers for ever, until they spot the beautiful Emilia outside their cell,
and the bromance begins to crack…
The play’s neglect is a bit of a mystery
to me, because I think it’s got lots going for it.
As a collaborative piece written by
William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, and
a play that wasn’t included in the famous
First Folio of 1623, it’s always been a
bit of an outsider. But there’s no good
reason why this should be so: as we’re increasingly
discovering, Shakespeare was a very collaborative
writer, particularly at the start and end
of his career, and he had a hand in numerous
works that didn’t make it into the First Folio.
I’m a huge fan of Two Noble Kinsmen,
and happy to campaign for #TeamTNK.
I’m going to offer you three reasons why
I think you’ll love this play.
The first is that it’s funny. Shakespeare
and Fletcher took an already witty source
– medieval English writer Geoffrey Chaucer’s
‘The Knight’s Tale’ – and turned it
into a tightly-triangulated romantic comedy:
Palamon and Arcite fall out over Emilia,
who remains more or less indifferent to them both,
while the daughter of Palamon’s Jailer falls
headlong in love with the imprisoned Theban
– a love affair that she narrates herself
through a series of passionate soliloquies.
And while you like me might be wary of anything
with Morris dancing in it, you’re going
to get quite excited about the central Morris in this play
choreographed by Gerrold the stage-struck
schoolmaster.
The second reason for being TeamTNK is the
play’s profusion of interesting female roles.
You’ll see it starts with a fairly long
scene in which five out of the six principle
voices are female – which by my calculation
is something of a record in Shakespeare.
Why is this unusual? Remember that female parts
were taken by boys or very young men in
Shakespeare's time, so this female-dominated opening scene tells us that Shakespeare and Fletcher’s
company had five exceptionally strong boy
actors able to carry the start of the play
as Emilia, Hippolyta and the three mourning
queens.
We might notice that Shakespeare’s later plays like The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest
also feature scenes with a large number of female characters,
as do plays written by other dramatists for the company:
perhaps this was a particularly fortunate time for
the King’s Men’s when they took advantage
of their company’s skills to produce increasingly 
female-focussed stories.
And the third reason I’m going to offer
for getting into The Two Noble Kinsmen is
its amazing queerness, which runs through
so many of the play’s relationships.
A key part of the story is Theseus’s ongoing intimacy
with Pirithous, his closest friend.
An unfazed Hippolita says in Act 1 Scene 3 of her own position within this ménage à trois,
‘I think Theseus cannot be umpire to himself, cleaving his conscience into twain
and doing each side like justice, which he loves best.’
And Emilia, soon to be the subject of an intensive
sexual competition, reveals a passionate earlier
relationship with the long-dead Flavina that
lives in her memory as an unmatchable ideal.
The two girls loved ‘like the elements’,
more indeed than Emilia will ever ‘love
any that’s called man’. As she concludes,
‘the true love ‘tween maid and maid may
be more than in sex dividual.’ We learn
from Hippolyta and Emilia that marital relationships
exist within the context of a wide variety
of passionate connections.
And that’s before we get to the noble kinsmen
themselves, whose intense feelings for each
other are put to the test when they catch
sight of Emilia. Listen out for the ironic
declarations of love between the two men in
Act 2 Scene 2: ‘We are one another’s wife,’
promises Arcite, shortly before it all goes
horribly wrong. But that’s not to say that
the play is unconvinced by same-sex intimacy.
Early modern culture had considerable space
for homoeroticism in both approved and illicit
contexts, and if Palamon and Arcite don’t
quite measure up as perfect friends and bromantic
lovers, that doesn’t mean we’re supposed
to disapprove of the feelings. Let’s return
to Emilia’s celebration of her love for
Flavina to find an example of celebrated same-sex
love done properly.
Experienced at the cusp of maturity, Emilia
and Flavina’s relationship was potent, exclusive,
stirring, unrepeatable – and not to be tidied
away into the category we now call ‘Platonic’.
When she recalls her love in conversation
with her sister, Emilia’s body betrays her
intense feelings, something not lost on the
observant Hippolita.
‘You’re out of breath,’ she remarks, knowingly.
Thank you so much for watching, and enjoy
the show. The Globe is temporarily closed
but our hearts and minds are open. We don’t
receive any regular government subsidy so
please donate if you can to help us continue to share
Shakespeare’s gift of stories in this Wooden O.
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