Early on in act 4 of The Two Noble Kinsmen, the young Wooer tells the story of how he came upon the Jailer’s Daughter, disturbed, florally bedecked, and singing by a river. She was distraught that Palamon, one of the two imprisoned suitors of Emily, had disappeared, for she had fallen in love with him. The Wooer, who had been fishing in the river, puts his angling away and listens. “Palamon is gone,” she sings, and he continues in her voice:
“His shackles will betray him, he’ll be taken;
And what shall I do then? I’ll bring a bevy,
A hundred black-eyed maids that love as I do,
With chaplets on their heads of daffadillies,
With cherry-lips and cheeks of damasked roses,
And all we’ll dance an antic ’fore the Duke
And beg his pardon.”
. . .
Then she sung
Nothing but “Willow, willow, willow” . . . (4.1.70–80)
The play’s most recent editor, Lois Potter, calls this “an astonishing lyrical speech”—astonishing, at least in part, because it differs so dramatically from the verse of Shakespeare’s named collaborator for the play, John Fletcher.1 It is astonishing, however, not just in its contrast but its content. The Wooer takes us back to a whole history of lyric voices. The scene of listening by the river, with reeds and rustling sounds, evokes Ovid’s Midas, washing out his golden touch and, later on, his barber whispering the secret of the King’s deformed ears to the sedge grass. The black-eyed maids and daffodils and cherry lips and damasked cheeks recall the phrasings of a generation past: the pastorals of England’s Helicon and the familiar tropes of lute song. The Jailer’s Daughter’s “willow, willow, willow” brings to mind Desdemona’s famous “Willow Song” from Othello—a song that, in fact, predated Shakespeare and that would have been familiar to the parents and grandparents of those readers who had bought the Quarto of this play, first published in 1634.2
Like many of the lyric moments I have studied in this book, this is a mediated song: a memory of someone else’s singing, a performance of the aesthetic consciously aware that it is a performance, distanced, emotively charged, attentive to the voice of someone who has gone. The whole scene with the Jailer’s Daughter has no counterpart in the play’s source. Explicitly based on Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, The Two Noble Kinsmen takes the old Theban story and replays it through the courtly conventions of Jacobean spectacle.3 In the scenes between the Jailer’s Daughter and the lovers, and in the otherwise-unnamed Wooer’s desires, Shakespeare (for we assume it was he, here) adds something unique to his source. Some critics have seen this addition as a response to the rising fashion for melodramatic rhetoric and the taste for newly powerful female dramatic roles. Some have seen it as a bit of classical allusion complicating a contemporary tale, as if, somehow, an abandoned Ariadne were transported from her Greek to a new English island. And some have seen it as a story of powerful, explicit sexuality in an otherwise carefully coded drama of desire. Whatever the dramatic, social, or political reasons for these episodes, they provide an occasion for another moment of lyric performance, one last shot at juxtaposing old forms with new speakers, one more charge to remind us that at the heart of character in late Shakespeare is the way in which an actor speaks, responds to, and reworks the ravishments of song onstage.4
“And all we’ll dance an antic ’fore the Duke.” All of us, she says (as quoted by the Wooer), will perform an old dance in celebration: an “antic” or, rather, an antique show, whose age and stateliness will mark the power of her memory and her respect for her noble audience. “Antic” had always been a strongly marked word in the plays. Most famously, it rears its punning head when Hamlet speaks of putting on his “antic disposition.” Does it mean full of movement, charged with feeling bordering on madness; or does it mean old and artificial? How does it compare with Horatio’s last declaration that he is more “an antique Roman than a Dane”? For Ben Jonson, the word carried a comparable double edge. His masque of Oberon (1611) has the Satyrs “leaping and making antique action” and falling “into an antique dance.” As Mary Ellen Lamb puts it, in terms that may apply to Shakespeare as much as to Jonson: “This odd mixture of classical and rural English contributes an added ambiguity to the term ‘antique’ repeated in the stage directions, as meaning ‘old’ and also ‘antic’ or clownish. Do these ‘antique’ satyr dances ennoble the countryside with a sense of continuing ancient traditions? Or are the satyrs simply rendered as cloddish clowns?”5
Shakespeare’s lyric stage had always hovered on the borderlines between the antic and the antique, and this moment with the Wooer invites a review of what I have tried to accomplish in this study. My book has argued for the lyric as the scene and source of metamorphic transport in late Shakespeare. It has shown how the late plays review strategies of lyrical performance—exemplified in Dowland’s music, in his publications, and in documented reputation—in order to create a sense of temporal displacement in dramatic narrative. Such performance calls attention to the reach of art at times of loss of power or control. The lyric voices of the past come back, in the last plays, to announce visions of the dead, revivals of the suspended, and anticipations of release. Lyric performance, too, serves as a test for audiences. Cloddish clowns like Cloten jar against what we may hear as melody. Autolycus performs his ribald songs. Do we, as readers and spectators, hear the Orphic voices in the plays, ennobling the countryside? Do we sit in reverent stillness with the rivers at their song? Or do we rise up with the Maenads and dismember?
Shakespeare’s last plays, I argued, share in an embodied lyricism drawing on the myths of Orpheus, but also on the practices of court and theater. They respond to and participate in the turn to interior staging, to the rising use of masque, and to the unique resources of stagecraft at the court. They resonate, thematically and socially, with changes in the Jacobean family structure and the habits of royal spectatorship. And they incorporate, as well, a new mythography of kingship, with the political allegories of harmony and touch.
Finally, I suggested that the last plays have a meaningful position in the First Folio. That meaning lay not only in the volume’s placement of the texts but in how it prefaced them, scripting out instructions to a readership in language drawing on the mythic stories of dismemberment and revival. What readers have long seen as characteristic of the late plays I saw in the First Folio itself: an image of the theater’s power charged with the abilities of actors to die and come back reborn, for Shakespeare, dead, to rise again, and for the scattered limbs of play and person to come back together.
For Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen, we do not have the aegis of the Folio to guide our readings. The plays were not included in the volume, possibly for matters of ownership or availability, possibly because the editors saw their collaborative origins as excluding them from a canon of Shakespearean drama (a matter they either elided or excused for Henry VIII). Pericles appeared in Quarto in 1609, in a form so garbled that almost everyone who has encountered it has thought it poorly printed, half-Shakespearean, and mis-transmitted.6 When The Two Noble Kinsmen was printed in 1634, its title page announced it as the work of “the memorable Worthies of their time: Mr John Fletcher and Mr William Shakespeare. Gent.” Both of these plays have been included—sometimes enthusiastically, sometimes grudgingly—in the late Shakespeare canon, and they participate in what we now have come to see as the characteristics of the group. They share the scenes of recognition; the displacements of families; the narratives of voyage, storm, and rescue; the complex daughterly roles; and a poetic diction increasingly experimental in its challenges to ordinary syntax. Like other late plays, they use music for celebratory and for philosophical purposes, investing in a language of performance designed to question how the harmony of public life can echo in a lyric form. They dramatize musical making and reception to ask what the place of artistry is in the exercise of power.7
In the process, both plays confront vernacular literary antiquity in new ways. They participate in a broader Jacobean turn to the English poetic past as an antiquarian enterprise. In this move, they balance old and new. On the one hand, masque and dumb show fill their scenes, and their stage directions elaborately describe performances as fully as anything in the First Folio Tempest. But on the other hand, dead authors vie with living practice for authority. The plays take us back, as the title page of The Two Noble Kinsmen put it, to a time of “worthies”—a word that had come to stand, in the vernacular, akin to Latin poetae, describing writers whose authority lay precisely in their absence.8
Worthy though their authors may have been, these two plays remain arrestingly uneven. Scenic form and verbal control vary markedly throughout their acts, and such unevenness has long been taken as the evidence for shared authorship. While The Two Noble Kinsmen identifies Fletcher along with Shakespeare on its title page, Pericles offers no such guide to collaboration. As in the case of Henry VIII, scholars have sifted through the play for evidence of word and idiom, spelling and sense, to mark the Shakespearean from the non-Shakespearean.
Modern scholarship scripts out a romance of recovery for these two plays. The editor confronts a text of bafflement and enigma. He or she sets out to solve a riddle and, in the course of that solution, prepares a document for us to stop in awe when we find Shakespeare. For the scholar of Pericles, such a moment may appear at the beginning of the Quarto’s scene 12 (act 3 in some editions), when Pericles emerges to speak lines of such rich tenor and controlled prosody that we must announce: Shakespeare. For The Two Noble Kinsmen, such a moment is the episode of the Wooer and the Jailer’s Daughter, a scene that, as Douglas Bruster put it, self-awarely “embodies changes in both dramatic representation and the larger culture of early modern England.”9
My purpose in this Epilogue, therefore, is twofold. First, I locate these two plays in the broad arc of mythic lyricism I have traced thus far. I look at episodes that strive for heightened diction and emotional effect, tracing their verbal sources in earlier texts by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Such episodes come off less as scenes of creation than reception. They illustrate what could be done with previous material, and their literary effect depends on recognizing echoes of a literary past. Second, I want to show how the romance experience of lyric recognition has become the very means of reading and writing about the plays. There is both an internal and external tale of recognition and revival here, and we often find the truly Shakespearean in their texts not in the acts of character but in the voicings of the lyric. Shakespeare becomes, in Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen, our lyric poet, and modern criticism has created its own myths of ravishment to chart our uneasy feelings for these texts.
Pericles begins unsteadily. Gower’s tetrameters step uneasily forth. His rhymes are off. The lineation, prosody, and spelling of the first scene appear insecure.10
To sing a Song that old was sung,
From ashes, auntient Gower is come,
To glad your eare, and please your eyes:
It hath been sung at Feastiuals,
On Ember eues, and Holydayes: (A2, scene 1)
Editors have long been unhappy with the Quarto text. Some have attributed its weakness to the work of George Wilkins, the author of an earlier prose version of the tale of Palamon and Arcite and, it has been mooted, Shakespeare’s coauthor on the play. Some have found the Quarto’s challenges in gaps between the authors and the printer: memorial error, compositor negligence, or the whims of actors seeking a fast publication have all been adduced (as they have been for the “bad” quarto Hamlet). Some have, instead, sought to see in the Prologue’s verbal awkwardness—the off-rhyme of “sung” and “come” and the non-rhyme of “Feastiuals” and “Holydays”—a lame attempt to evoke the old sounds of Middle English, as if Gower had not quite brushed off the ashes of his ancient vowels.11
Whatever textual problems remain, there is a clear poetic hand behind these lines, as they spin out in a sibilance of renewal. Sing, song, sung. There is an arc to his announcement, a rack of vowels, a conjugation of past and present, a balance of the verb and noun. Gower’s lines have an almost nursery-rhyme quality to them. Sing a song; ashes, man’s infirmities. If this is not a poetry of power, it is a poetry of old familiarity, of ancient things designed to set us all at ease. Why should we listen to “an old man sing”?
Gower remains the voice of vernacular authority.12 The play that follows retells one of his stories from the Confessio Amantis. But that acknowledgment means more than just a statement of the source. It shapes the text itself, and Pericles becomes a play full of retellings. It repeats, again and again, what someone else had sung, as if the whole play comes off in quotation marks.
Everything that could be said has already been said. In Hamlet, this sense of the already-quotedness of life evoked old songs and stories. Tales of Dido and Aeneas, shards of bawdy ballads, bits and pieces out of Tottel’s Miscellany, an old man’s memory of playing Caesar—all worked together in the play to show how, at least in Elsinore, everything is an allusion. Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you. But here, in Pericles, the quotedness of life is not a matter of ironic distance or of generational displacement. It is a question of pastiche.
After Gower’s uneasy tetrameters, the play immediately asserts the need to phrase its antique action in the blank verse of the English stage. The characters’ pentameters begin in fits and starts.
Musicke bring in our daughter, clothed like a bride
For embracements euen of Ioue himselfe; (A2v, scene 1)
Antiochus’s call for music seems, at least to modern editors, a mistake. Perhaps it was a stage direction erroneously placed in the mouth of a character. Or perhaps it was a freestanding call, to be followed by a full metrical line. The irregularities here match the stagy invitation for Antiochus’s daughter’s entry. “Bring in our daughter,” he announces, as if prompting both the actor and the reader to recognize an entrance. Pericles repeats this call, and his first major speech in the play describes the woman as if she were more a statue than a living being, a description that comes off more as a florilegium of Shakespearean devices than a fully fledged paean to beauty.
See where she comes, appareled like the Spring,
Graces her subjects, and her thoughts the King,
Of every Vertue giues renowne to men:
Her face the book of prayses, where is read,
Nothing but curious pleasures as from thence,
Sorrow were ever racte, and teastie wrath
Could never be her milde companion.
You Gods that made me man, and sway in loue;
That haue enflamde desire in my breast,
To taste the fruite of yon celestiall tree,
(Or die in th’ adventure), be my helpes,
As I am sonne and seruant to your will,
To compass such a bondlesse happinesse. (A2v–A3r, scene 1)
There is a difference between the speeches that look back to older forms of language and to earlier Shakespearean phrasings (such as those of The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline) and this speech, where the bits are undigested, blocked together piecemeal. For any reader of 1609, these lines would be immediately recognized as an assembly of the Shakespeare of a decade and a half before. “See where she comes.” The phrase had been a trick of the early plays, a way of announcing the entry of a beauty. The Nurse, in Romeo and Juliet, begins act 4, scene 2: “See where she comes from shrift with merry look.” In The Taming of the Shrew, Petrucchio finds his now-tamed Kate entering, “See where she comes and brings your froward wives” (5.2). And in the last act of the Two Gentlemen of Verona, Eglamour welcomes Silvia to the stage, “See where she comes” (5.1).
“Her face the book of praises.” We may remember Lady Capulet to Juliet, “Look o’er the volume of Paris’s face,” and read his book. We may remember The Rape of Lucrece: “Poor women’s faces are their own fault’s books.” The editors of the New Cambridge edition of Pericles recall so much they cannot find the time or space to name each instance: “eighteen instances in Shakespeare,” they record.13
Each line seems familiar—not, here, the haunting reminiscences of old songs in new mouths, but the raw building blocks of praise, unearthed, as it were, from the 1590s and repurposed for this tale. The gods, the fruit, and then Antiochus’s reference to the Hesperides in his following speech, all taste of Venus and Adonis, or The Rape of Lucrece, or the early plays, or even Marlowe. This is the feel of much of Pericles, and deliberately so. Its power lies in its familiarity of idiom, an old tale told in an old language, not distanced, ironized, or framed for character, but flat out.
Whatever showed up on the stage, the Quarto’s pages offer up a set of old words, quoted and re-quoted, that invite the reader to familiar turf. So, too, Antiochus’s Riddle is an old text, an embedded lyric brought in to be read, headed as a separate document, printed in italics, and distinguished from the surrounding pentameter by its meter, rhyme, and layout. “What makes me pale to read it?” Pericles asks, and his question may be one for us as well. The reader is half a step away from the hero. We know, if we know Gower, that this is a tale of incest, and the Riddle codes a level of transgression that could only be expressed, here, in enigma. Pericles, however, must read afresh. He must interpret this text for the first time.
How does he do it? First, he addresses Antiochus’s daughter: “Fair glass of light, I loved you.” From the start, he turns to metaphor, turning the living woman into a classic figure of reflection. “Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest.” “The glass of fashion and the mold of form.” “Give me the glass, and therein I will read.” These lines that even I can quote from memory come back here, as if Pericles—the character and play—are summoning up all the tropes of Shakespearean self-reading. But this is not enough. From glass, Pericles turns to music, transforming the daughter from an image of reflection to an instrument of desire.
You are a fair Violl, and your sense, the stringes,
Who finger’d to make man his lawfull musicke,
Would draw Heaven downe and all the Gods to hearken;
But being playd vpon before your time,
Hell oney daunceth at so harsh a chime. (A3v, scene 1)
Now, we are back in Dowland’s world, in images of music, fingering, and sound. Remember Thomas Campion’s praise:
O qui Sonora coelites altos cheli
Mulces, et umbras incolas astrae Stigis,
Quam suave murmur?
O you who on the tuneful lyre charms the dwellers of high heaven and the shades that inhabit gloomy Styx, how sweet is your sound?
Remember Joshua Sylvester’s, too:
For an old, rude, rotten, tune-less Kit,
If famous Douland daign to finger it,
Makes sweeter musick than the choicest Lute
In the grosse handling of a clownish Brute.
To read Pericles’s lines at the close of my study is, for me, to see the range of images come back, to hear the old metaphors and murmurs. It is to recognize, to watch Pericles pursue his line of image-making and his struggle to read the Riddle in terms of myth and power (“And if Jove stray, who dares say Jove doth ill?”). We will react much as Antiochus: “Heaven that I had thy head; he has found the meaning.”
To find the meaning in late Shakespeare has been challenging his readers since Dryden and Johnson. As his career progressed, his language grew increasingly metaphorical, experimental, idiosyncratic. There is, in Stephen Orgel’s words, a “poetics of incomprehensibility” in many of the late plays, and I have attempted, throughout this book, to explore some of the resonances behind this exceedingly difficult language. Shakespeare invests in new words and changes old ones; his syntax stretches grammar to the point of fraying; his extended metaphors compel us to ask whether anything in speech or song can be truly straightforward, literal, direct, or whether everything in the world of the late plays is a figure.14
These are the strategies that the first scenes of Pericles do not pursue. The language there consistently is old. These are remembered ravishments, dusted off for a new audience. Lyric poetry in the first portions of the play is the poetry of reminiscence, the familiarity of trope, the easy shoe of well-worn idiom.
These scenes that critics find to be non-Shakespearean are precisely those that feel stale, old, and trite. Raphael Lyne makes this point when he compares Pericles’s speech about the storm in scene 11 with his earlier performance in scene 5. “Here the syntax and structure are nothing like as storm tossed. The language is sterile in comparison with the relentless fertility of the other.”15 Notice Lyne’s language: the difference between sterility and fertility is the difference between the trite and the new, the non-Shakespearean and the authentic Shakespeare. But his is a telling image, too, for at the heart of this play is the very idea of fertility, the very notion that people can reproduce. Within the play’s fiction, just as outside in its Jacobean playhouse, a once-sterile ruler had been replaced by a fertile king.
Such critical metaphors pressure us to see the late plays, and Pericles in particular, as somehow aligned not just with the idea of Shakespearean fecundity, but with the themes of birth, progeniture, and inheritance that possess their fictions. It is a pressure on the modern reader: just what is this strange play like; how does it fit in the genealogy of Shakespeare’s making and, in turn, the social concerns with childbearing and child-rearing that had marked the early Jacobean years? To answer questions of this kind is to search through the literary and political landscape surrounding Pericles’s publication, and for many recent readers, the landmark is King Lear.
That there is a Lear-like ambiance to Pericles has been more felt than argued. Orgel’s introduction to his Pelican edition tantalizes. He tells a story of a group of Catholic players in Yorkshire who, in 1610, were arrested for performing Lear along with Pericles, “which the authorities claimed were (or had had introduced to them) Roman Catholic propaganda.”16 “Pericles,” Orgel summarizes, “in its concern with suffering and the extremes of experience has much in common with King Lear,” and Lyne echoes something of this intuition: “In fearing that he is being mocked by a cruel god, Pericles resembles Lear.”17
What is the language, though, that links these plays? Can we find something other than coincidence (the proximate publication of the Lear early Quarto and Pericles), the performing of both, the feel, for lack of a better term, of idiom they share? What are the differences?
In scene 5, Pericles enters immediately after Gower’s Prologue, wet and troubled by the storm on shipboard. Much in these lines recalls Lear and his companions on the raw heath.
Yet cease your ire you angry Starres of heauen,
Wind, Raine, and Thunder, remember earthly man
Is but a substaunce that must yeeld to you: (C1v, scene 5)
Wind, rain, and thunder collocate three times in Lear. Pericles’s verbal fist-shaking to heaven would be easy in the King’s mouth. But there is a difference. Lear rages; Pericles postures. His words evoke not so much the King himself but his play, as if he had picked and chosen what he needs. His sense of loss, for example, recalls less Lear alone than Edgar and Gloucester:
Hadst thou been aught but goss’mer, feathers, air,
So many fadom down precipitating
Thou’dst shiver’d like an egg. But thou dost breathe;
Hast heavy substance, bleed’st not, speak’st; art sound.
Ten masts a-length make not the altitude
Which thou hast perpendicularly fell.
Thy life is a miracle. (History of King Lear, scene 20, 49–55)18
Together on this strange, imagined cliff, Edgar speaks to his father like a man less in the air than on the sea: fathoms, breathe, substance, fell. Pericles’s speech takes bits and pieces out of Edgar and makes its metaphors literal. Instead of an imaginative sea, we get the wetness of the storm. Instead of falling through the unseen air, we get the speaker thrown from a watery grave. And now, instead of affirming “thy life is a miracle,” Pericles speaks of “death in peace.”
The storm scene in scene 5 of Pericles comes off as a kind of block-book Lear, transposed from heath to shipboard. And even though the storm speech in scene 11 may appear more vivid, more lithe, more sophisticatedly Shakespearean, familiar bits and pieces erode out of the earlier scene’s mortar.
The God of this great Vast, rebuke these surges,
Which wash both heauen and hell, and thou that hast
Vpon the Windes commaund, bind them in Brasse;
Hauing call’d them from the deepe, o still
Thy deafning dreadfull thunders, gently quench
Thy nimble sulphirous flashes. (E1v, scene 11)
Lear is here again: his own apostrophe to “nimble lightnings,” and Cordelia’s poignant moment with her sleeping father:
Was this a face
To be exposed against the warring winds,
To stand against the deep dread-bolted thunder
In the most terrible and nimble stroke
Of quick cross lightning . . . (History of King Lear, scene 21.29–33)
And Lear alone,
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drenched the steeples, drown’d the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head; (History of King Lear, scene 9.2–6)
Yes, Pericles in scene 11 seems more in control of verse than in scene 5. His speech chimes with alliterations (“deafning dreadful,” “whistle is as a whisper,” “bind them in brass”) and displaced rhymes and assonances (vast / hast / brass). His sonic effects work far more powerfully than the end rhymes of scene 5. Do these differences mark authentic Shakespeare from the imitator? Or are they but better versions of ventriloquism?
I want to realign the discussion of Pericles’s varied quality away from limited discussions of authorial command and toward a broader sense of how the play’s scenes speak, directly, to the expectations of an audience or readership familiar with the Shakespearean idiom. It is the music of Pericles that will differentiate it from King Lear, and it is in that music that I find its comically restorative response to tragic rule.
In scene 12, Ceremon, the medic on the shores of Ephesus, enters with his attendants. Someone (the Quarto is unclear here) brings in a great chest, washed up on the beach, all closed and caulked. They open it, they find a written message, and inside they see Thaisa, whom we know to be Pericles’s former wife, thrown overboard and left for dead years earlier. Ceremon tries to revive her, first with ritual and medicine and then with music. The Quarto prints this scene in garbled lineation, but the sense remains:
the rough and
Wofull Musick that we haue, cause it to sound beseech you:
The Violl once more; how thou stirr’s thou blocke?
The Musicke there: I pray you giue her ayre:
Gentlemen, this Queene will liue,
Nature awakes a warmth breath out of her; (E4, scene 12)
She stirs, Ceremon cries, “She is aliue,” and his attendants comment: “Is not this strange?” “Most rare.”
As in the other late plays, music comes to arouse and vivify. Playing is as much a rite as a performance, and editors, I think, have brushed away its echoes.19 The sound of viols here (often emended to the word “vial”) recalls the imagery with which Pericles had addressed Antiochus’s daughter (“you are a fair viol, and your sense the strings”). The “ayre” that they will give to Thaisa may, of course, be air to breathe. But it is also melody, much like the “sweet airs” that would delight Caliban, or the “wonderful sweet air” that Cloten would command to wake up Innogen.20 And Thaisa’s warm breath emerges, giving her an almost Miranda-like thrill: “What world is this?”
There may be many resonances to the later plays, but there are also resonances to King Lear, and Thaisa’s revival comes off as a kind of musically restorative rewriting of Cordelia’s death. There, Lear had looked for signs of breath. There, he had looked for signs of stirring. He cries, he touches, he examines. But he does not sing.
To read Pericles against Lear, I suggest then, is to read it for the moments when music revives—that is, when the sounds of art make someone speak and, in that speaking, enable a new life in a lyric voice.
Turn, now, to scene 20. Gower shifts from his old tetrameters to new five-stress lines. He speaks in quatrains rather than in couplets. He invites us not just to observe, but listen, and the sonic and prosodic world of the play moves to restorative performance: “Please you sit and hark.” Now, the play moves from silence into sound. Scene 21, and Pericles is revealed, not having spoken for three months, lying on a couch, inert. Lysimachus calls in Marina in the hope that she may rouse him. “Sir,” she avers, “I will vse my vtmost skill in his recouerie.” The Quarto does not tell us what she does. It only prints “The Song” among the speeches. There are no words, and we can only speculate what would have appeared in performance (an Orphic tune like that in Henry VIII? A call to rising as in Cymbeline? A Dowland-like “awake, awake”?). Something must have been sung, for when Lysimachus asks, “Marke[d] he your Musicke?” Marina replies, “No, nor lookt on vs.” But then she prods a little more, and much like Gower in his last scene (“sit and hark”), she invites Pericles to “lend eare.” Now, Pericles speaks; it is not in the form of words but only sounds: “hum, ha.”
The purpose of this scene is to bring language back from silence. It is to evoke a cure with song, and getting Pericles to speak is like restoring voices from the dead. Marina and her father now go back and forth, goading each other into speaking and listening:
If I should tell . . .
Prithee, speak . . .
Report thy parentage . . .
Tell thy story . . .
It goes on, like a dreamt interrogation, Marina and Pericles teasing out their identities, until Pericles himself (in another moment of his riddle-solving) understands.
Oh Hellicanus, strike me honored sir, giue me a gash, put me to present paine, least this great sea of ioyes rushing vpon me, ore-beare the shores of my mortalitie, and drowne me with their sweetnesse. (I1, scene 21)
To drown in sweetness was the powerful effect of Dowland’s music. The rush of sound and the image of present pain are the hallmarks of his lyricism and his reputation. In this episode of profound self-revelation (“I am Pericles of Tyre”), the play goes back to the moment of musical ravishment, the drowning in the sweetness of performance. Pericles has indeed marked Marina’s music.
What is the place of lyric in the exercise of power? Pericles answers that question in a powerfully meta-dramatic way. It illustrates how reconciliation comes through song. It shows how a Lear-like tragedy of misunderstanding can be transformed into an affirming happy ending. If only Cordelia could sing.
Pericles ends with affirmations of the seeming-dead come back to life. Now, when the King gets up, he asks for his robes, and it is as if he is looking in a mirror when he says, “I am wild in my beholding.” Lear-like, he once again is calmed: “But hark what music?” Nobody else can hear it. It is, he says, “the music of the spheres,” and he elaborates: “Rarest sounds, do ye not hear,” and then,
Most heauenly Musicke,
It nips me vnto listning, and thicke slumber
Hangs vpon mine eyes, let me rest. (I1v, scene 21)
These penultimate moments of the play take us back, once again, to Dowland and desire. These “rarest” sounds recall the “rare” music that had revived Thaisa, and that word, “rare,” conjures up an emerging aesthetic world for the play’s audience. “Rare” was not just unusual. It was compelling, powerful, artistically controlled. It is the word that Dowland himself would deploy to describe the sounds of the Muses themselves “yet so rare.” It is the word that Henry Peacham would use to describe Dowland’s own playing, “a rare lutenist.” It is the word that William Webbe would use to categorize the canon of “our rare artists,” Bird, Bull, Dowland, and Morely. And it is the word that listeners would increasingly rely on for that sense of ravishment that they would feel at performance: the “rare music and songs” that William Bonner heard in 1602, or the “rare consort of music” that would play in Webster’s The Devil’s Last Case.21 Pericles ends in ravishment—in the display of lyric art that would recall the powers of performance to revive. Voices emerge anew to sing; ears prick to listen. The goddess Diana appears out of nowhere, like a masquer walking onstage from another show, briefly to dazzle and command the visionary to “awake and tell thy dreame.”
No one awakes to tell such dreams in Lear. There are no goddesses to sway, no lutes or viols to arouse. There is no song to bring the dead back to the living. There is no music to wake the sleeping. Lear himself hears no melodies. Instead, it is the sound of raw, almost nonverbal pain: “Howl, howl, howl, howl!” Lear ends with fantasies of breath: with his rough yells, with the imagination that the feather stirs before her mouth, or that the mirror fogs. The Fool is dead, as well, “no breath at all.” Pericles is garbled, badly printed, pastiched and patched together. But something still emerges at its close. If music does anything in this play, it shows us how little music there had been in Lear. If Dowland’s sweetness, pain, and drowning appear at the close, it is to show not simply how song can entertain. It is to show how music can turn tragedy into comedy, how rare sounds can bring back the dead—whether they be vanished queens or buried English poets. To sing a song that once was sung.
The Two Noble Kinsmen may well include Shakespeare’s final writing for the stage. We open the old Quarto and find many familiarities: song and story, lovers’ quarrels, mad girls, sad boys, dumb shows, rustics, nobles, fools. At times, the play reads as a retrospective of the playwright’s moves. At others, it comes off as more of an impersonation, as if John Fletcher were (in the words of the critic Misha Teramura) “creating an anthology of Shakespearean moments, performing his own protean acts of appropriation and parody.”22
This is a play that dances the antique in a host of ways. Its title page announces that it is a work of “worthies,” and that word (as I have already noted) had become a signpost for the literary dead. “Worthy” had been a marker of Chaucer’s reception through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. “Worthy Chaucer” is a phrase that fills editions, commentaries, and histories. “England’s Worthies” was, by the mid-seventeenth century, a title that conveyed the scope of a literary history that explicitly began with Chaucer himself, and the title page of The Two Noble Kinsmen explicitly inscribes Shakespeare and Fletcher into this canon.
What makes an author worthy, in this world, is not just skill or virtue. It is death. The Two Noble Kinsmen opens as an elegy for past poets and traditions. Turn the Quarto’s page and find the Prologue arguing precisely for the afterlives of the deceased and for the power of the past to come alive again.
New plays and maidenheads are near akin:
Much followed both, for both much money gi’en,
If they stand sound and well. And a good play,
Whose modest scenes blush on his marriage day
And shake to lose his honour, is like her
That after holy tie and first night’s stir
Yet still in Modesty and still retains
More of the maid, to sight, than husband’s pains. (Prologue, 1–8)
Old institutions and old poets remain fertile, and Raphael Lyne’s critique of Pericles’s speeches comes back to me, now, as the flourish of Two Noble Kinsmen opens up the book about legacies and lineages. “New plays and maidenheads are near akin.” The challenge of theatrical invention is the challenge of the matter of the plays themselves. For all these dramas have been tales of maidenhead: what is the status of the young girl’s body; how is her virginity a matter both of virtue and of value; how is the “first night’s stir” of a wedded couple comparable to the opening night at the theater? One could imagine the bold similes of this Prologue in Autolycus’s brash mouth, or (more coarsely) in Cloten’s goads.
But then, the Prologue shifts its tone. Chaucer emerges, famous, everlasting, influential even in his death.
How will it shake the bones of that good man
And make him cry from under ground, ‘O fan
Me from the witless chaff of such a writer
That blasts my bays and my famed works makes lighter
Than Robin Hood!’ (Prologue, 17–21)
Chaucer complains from the grave—these later imitators are but chaff before the grain of his imagination. And if we are “too ambitious to aspire to him,” at the very least the audience may help out such new writers.
Do but you hold out
Your helping hands and we shall tack about
And something do to save us. You shall hear
Scenes, though below his art, may yet appear
Worth two hours’ travel. To his bones sweet sleep; (Prologue, 25–29)
Helping hands, two hours’ travel, sleeping bones. These are the tropes, now, not of Chaucer’s praise but of Shakespeare’s. The Prologue’s lines recall much, but what they now recall is the language of another Shakespeare book, the First Folio, and in particular Ben Jonson’s eulogies. His “To the Reader” frames the volume as outstripping the engraved image of Shakespeare himself on the frontispiece. The engraver tried, but:
O, could he but have drawne his wit
Ass well in brasse, as he hath hit
His face, the print would then surpasse
All, that was ever writ in brass.
That “O” comes back, I think, in Chaucer’s voice in The Two Noble Kinsmen: we have originals and copies, past examples and new attempts to present them. We have a poet in the Prologue who complains about base writers (a complaint redolent with Jonsonian invective), and whose vision of his imitators breaks his laurel into bits of doggerel like tales of Robin Hood. Measuring up against another set of writers had been one of Jonson’s classic moves, nowhere more powerful (or poignant) than in the long poem to the First Folio on Shakespeare’s memory. Now, the poetic praise takes on a special resonance when read against the opening of The Two Noble Kinsmen. New plays may be like maidenheads, but sex and bodies are not far from critical responses to the old. How worthy, Jonson asks, are we to speak of Shakespeare?
These are, as some infamous Baud, or Whore,
Should praise a Matron. What could hurt her more?
Is writing whoredom? Does the dramatist present two hours’ pleasure only for the cash? This, to return to the Two Noble Kinsmen, is the fear we bring. But Jonson moves ahead: “I, therefore will begin, Soule of the Age!” He calls upon the playwright, dead now, to return:
The applause! Delight! The wonder of the stage!
My Shakespeare rise, I will not lodge thee by
Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lye
A little further, to make thee a roome;
Thou art a Monument without a tombe,
And art aliue still, while they Book doth live
And we have wits to read, and praise to give.
Whatever the performance origins of The Two Noble Kinsmen, its printed Prologue resonates with printed praise of Shakespeare. Even John Mabbe’s brief lines in the Folio echo in the appeal to applause and in the purpose of the play to bring the buried poet back to life.
Wee thought thee dead, but this thy printed worth,
Tels thy Spectators, that thou went’st but forth
To enter with applause.
The new play’s Prologue displaces praise of the dead Shakespeare on to Chaucer. As in the First Folio’s encomia, it enjoins the reader to appreciate the body behind the text, to recognize that reading and performing bring old worthies back to life. But in the end, that life lives only in imagination—between covers of a book or curtains on a stage. To his bones, sweet sleep.
We turn the Quarto’s page and find the rituals of new fertility to bring back life, to break the maidenhead that separates the audience from the actors (or that keep the uncut pages of a new book from its reader). The first figure of the play is Hymen, entering with his boy and nymph, “singing and strewing flowers.” Unlike A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where the marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta played itself out through idioms of male conquest and compulsion (“I wooed thee with my sword,” Theseus announced), here it becomes the occasion for ritual and song. The first words offered in the play are sung. The first text is aligned as lyric, full of roses, primrose, oxlips, and marigolds. These are the markers of old celebration. They were everywhere in Shakespeare, everywhere in lute song and in verse anthology. The poem bursts with cliché, and I think that is the point. For as in Pericles, this is a ritual enactment of an older form of lyricism, a dramatic move to place the action’s opening in a poetic past. Just as Gower’s halting tetrameters evoke an ancient worthy come back from the grave to speak anew, so Chaucer’s characters emerge with all the trappings of old poesy. To sing a song that once was sung.
And in that singing, The Two Noble Kinsmen becomes a play of elegies. From Chaucer’s passing, through the funeral of Theban warriors, to the sorrows of the Jailer’s Daughter, songs emerge to mark the lyric dead and take us back to earlier performances of mourning. The dirge that closes act 1 rings against a reader’s memory of the lament over Fidele’s body in Cymbeline.
Urns and odours bring away;
Vapours, sighs, darken the day;
Our dole more deadly looks than dying—
Balms and gums and heavy cheers,
Sacred vials fill’d with tears,
And clamours through the wild air flying. (1.5.1–6)
The double syllables of rhyme (dying/flying) break the steadiness of the stanza, just as in Guiderius’s song the rhymes’ rhythm undermines our ease:
Fear no more the heat o’th’sun
Nor the furious winter’s rages.
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages. (Cymbeline, 4.2.259–62)
Such music recalls less a scene in Chaucer than in Shakespeare, but it is a Shakespeare upside-down here, as the earth and dust that would inhume Fidele are transformed into the smells, the vapors, and the sounds that lift themselves through air.
The purpose of these songs may be to motivate the drama. But it is, as well, to move us. Sad though these lines may be, sung well they elevate us along with the smoke and smells. The Jailer’s Daughter tells us how to feel. She enters in act 2, scene 4, alone, reflecting on her love for Palamon, and what she says about his skill models a way of speaking about lyric poetry itself.
To hear him
Sing in an evening, what a heaven it is!
And yet his songs are sad ones. (2.4.18–20)
This is as much a statement of musical ravishment as anything in Dowland’s world. Recall, again, Campion’s praise of how the lutenist charmed heaven’s populace (O qui sonora coelites altos cheli / Mulces). Recall how Dowland’s own name would be played on for the sadness of his songs and for the sweetness of his verse. Semper Dowland semper dolens, always Dowland always sad. Such was the dole of the grieving Theban women. Such is the dolor of the Jailer’s Daughter.
Increasingly, the Jailer’s Daughter comes off as a marker of aesthetic value—a figure of mad song, not just an Ophelia or a Desdemona, but a Queen Alcyone, watching the waves for any sign of her king’s ship.
Yonder’s the sea and there’s a ship; how’t tumbles!
And there’s a rock lies watching under water;
Now, now, it beats upon it; now, now, now!
There’s a leak sprung, a sound one! How they cry!
Run her before the wind, you’ll lose all else.
Up with a course or two and tack about, boys!
Good night, good night, you’re gone. (3.4.5–11)
Like Ovid’s sad queen on the beach, she sees in her mind’s eye the shipwreck, hidden rocks, the sound of storms and leaks, and then the voices of the shipmates, crying in their fear. Remember Golding’s Ovid:
Anon the Mayster cryed: Strike the toppesayle, let the mayne
Sheate flye and fardle it to the yard. Thus spake he, but in vayne,
For why so hideous was the storme uppon the soodeine brayd,
That not a man was able there to heere what other sayd.
And lowd the sea with meeting waves extreemely raging rores.
. . .
And looke, how many surges came theyr vessell to assayle,
So many deathes did seeme to charge and breake uppon them all.
One weepes: another stands amazde: the third them blist dooth call
Whom buryall dooth remayne. To God another makes his vow,
And holding up his handes to heaven the which hee sees not now,
Dooth pray in vayne for help. (11.557–61; 620–25)
All this, of course, is only in the Jailer’s Daughter’s mind. There is no shipwreck that dispatches Palamon, save in her fears. She comes off as some Alcyone in fear, or perhaps as Miranda, dreaming of the tempest that her father conjured, and the cries of the seamen. And yet, unlike Alcyone or Miranda, there is no peace in dreaming or in waking. Instead, she breaks and sings her ballads, as if she had come across a cache of Autolycus’s sheets and, ranging from the bawdy to the burlesque, offers up a string of half-familiar tunes.
“For I’ll cut my green coat,” echoes the surviving ballad “Childe Waters.” Her later song, about the “George Allow,” recalls a song about a sunken ship. It goes on: “There were three fools”; “willow, willow, willow”; and a clutch of lyrics that she does not sing, but only mentions. With the exception of the song and dirge of act 1, all the stanzaic lyrics of the play belong to her, and like Autolycus, she emerges as a walking anthology.23
For any reader of the play’s Quarto, these songs bring back an early time. The scholar works to locate their sources. But the reader would have recognized and remembered. Music brings back the past, evokes the worthies of an older stage, the boy actors and their female roles, a time when sad songs could sound like heaven. The Two Noble Kinsmen, in the end, remains a book of the dead. It offers a memorial to ancient writers, lost heroes, past actors, masques, and musicians. Its “Chaucer” was, by the 1630s, a writer of black letter, a poet ensconced in the editions of Thomas Speght, reprinted in archaic typeface, annotated with explanatory glosses, and framed by elaborate genealogies of his family and his patrons.24 Pericles may have survived in garbled form; nonetheless, it survives as some form of a play performed by living men for living people. The Two Noble Kinsmen comes to us as something far more carefully curated. But it is the curatorship of the antiquarian rather than the dramatist. This is an artifact of an age gone by, a bit of Jacobean theater with Elizabethan turns, based on a Middle English poem, for the age of Charles I.
Together with Pericles—and as I have suggested, to some extent, Henry VIII—it proffers examples of creative Shakespearean reception and appropriation. What matters less to me is just who wrote each line than how those lines sound more or less Shakespearean. These are anthologies of authorship, at times deft, at times awkward, highly mediated by their printers, good and bad. I treat them less as plays than as books. They may have some attenuated relationship to earlier performances, but they come to us as products of a printer, meant for readers rather than for actors. These are not scripts. They are, in various ways, memories of scripts. They invite us to recognize and to remember.
What is the romance of our scholarship? From the beginning, we have been enjoined to read and read again. The search for an authentic Shakespeare has, since the First Folio, taken many forms, and we still wish to listen for a rhythm or a rhyme that we can assuredly say is his. Any encounter with the splay of modern editions will raise these questions, most acutely in Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen, where we have neither the authority of the First Folio nor the reliable accounts of performance to go on. My sense, as I complete this book, is that our search for Shakespeare remains not a search for character or class, modernity or motive. It remains a search for something lyrical. We come upon a line much as a romance king would come upon his child. What brings it back to life? What takes us to the heaven as we hear it? The romance motif of travel, shipwreck, loss, recovery, and return shapes the arc of the last plays. It shapes, too, as I have suggested, the arc of an artist’s career—that of a Dowland who imagines his songs trapped on rocks of misappropriation, who returns from a decade away to find musicians in the court unworthy of their name. King Ceyx comes back only as a simulacrum and a dream. Actors die only to stand up again the next night. The late plays haunt. Like Hamlet’s urgent ghost, they ask us to remember, and in that remembering we go back to read and make him rise.