‘Bride-habited, but maiden-hearted’: Language and Gender in The Two Noble Kinsmen
King’s College London
The Two Noble Kinsmen (1613–14) is a play fundamentally concerned with questions of sameness and difference; the two eponymous knights are troublingly alike, to the extent that Emilia struggles to choose between them when forced to do so. Their identities are treated as interchangeable by Shakespeare and Fletcher; ‘a husband I have ’pointed, / But do not know him,’ Emilia says, knowing only that she will marry either Palamon or Arcite, and apparently caring little (or beyond caring) as to which (5.1.151–2).1 The play’s collaborative authorship, and evidence suggesting that its two playwrights deliberately set out to imitate one another’s style, has long since placed the issue of likeness at the heart of critical discussions of this tragicomedy.2 More recently The Two Noble Kinsmen’s treatment of gender politics has been the focus of such conversations, with the play’s examination of same-sex friendship – and desire – providing a nexus for the considerations of difference that have dominated readings of the play. In this essay I take up this debate, shifting its terms whilst keeping the key issue of gender firmly in mind. I will argue that the playwrights consciously attempt to play out ideas of sameness and difference through language itself, and that their unusually close engagement with the play’s Chaucerian source, in an edition published by Thomas Speght in 1602, permits them to draw upon the contrasting etymological origins of English vocabulary in order to cast light upon the congruities and disparities that underpin the vernacular in which they write.3
As Ann Thompson notes, Speght’s 1598 and 1602 volumes of Chaucer’s Workes produced a flurry of drama inspired by the medieval poet.4 Notably, Speght appends a list of ‘The hard words of Chaucer, explaned’, using a series of abbreviations to demarcate derivations from Latin, Arabic, Greek, Italian, French, Dutch and ‘the Saxon tongue’.5 Speght’s identification of the etymological origins of the Chaucerian vocabulary he glosses is important because it allows us to begin to address a question that has been little considered in relation to early modern dramatists’ work: where did they think their words came from? In the wake of polemically-motivated attempts to recover the origins of English in Anglo-Saxon led by Archbishop Matthew Parker in the mid-sixteenth century, writers were forced to acknowledge for the first time that their own vernacular was not predominantly classical but rather had more in common with so-called Teutonic languages including German and Dutch.6 Looking at Speght’s glosses, which highlight the often equally unfamiliar roots of borrowed words and those held to be ostensibly ‘native’, one is forced to ask whether all English vocabulary might in fact be regarded as alien in its origins. The wordlist reveals the tension between sameness and difference that was beginning to emerge in early modern understanding of the history of the vernacular, bringing into focus the question of how far even Old English is ‘English’. The perplexing ‘strange likeness’ this unfamiliar form bears to our own language would both trouble and inspire scholars and literary authors throughout the period.7
In introducing the Arden Third Series edition of The Two Noble Kinsmen, Lois Potter describes the ‘mixed’ genre and setting of the play, as well as its more obviously mixed authorship: ‘a Jacobean dramatization of a medieval English tale based on an Italian romance version of a Latin epic about one of the oldest and most tragic Greek legends; it has two authors and two heroes’ (1). We might add to this list the play’s reimagining of gender categories and sexual identities as themselves ‘mixed’. Encountering Chaucer’s English in an edition that makes the diverse origins of his language explicit, Shakespeare and Fletcher can have been in little doubt that they were writing this conspicuously hybrid play in a language that is itself a hybrid. This impetus may account for the numerous compounds that we find in the play, which often juxtapose terms drawn from contrasting roots (as emphasized by hyphenation in modern editions). Emilia’s lament (from which my title derives), ‘I am bride-habited / But maiden-hearted’ (5.1.150–1) is just one notable example of this tendency to combine words in a way that draws attention to the disparate roots of English, compounding terms of Old English, Latin, High German and again Old English derivation, respectively. Shakespeare and Fletcher choose to have Emilia express the ambiguities of her sexuality, and specifically her attitude to marriage, in a phrase that foregrounds the awkwardness arising from attempts to reconcile the contradictory and estranged origins of our language.
Speght’s 1602 glossary offers unique insight not only into how the playwrights might have expected their audience to respond to the vocabulary of this tragicomedy, but also as to the way they themselves understood the history of the language out of which The Two Noble Kinsmen is constructed. Where an entry in Speght’s list corresponds to a word’s usage in the play we can legitimately ask whether the dramatist employs a particular term in a self-consciously archaizing way. At the beginning of the fifth act, for instance, Arcite and Palamon prepare to encounter one another in the combat upon which the outcome of the drama’s events will seemingly depend. Each addresses his prayers to the gods, entreating their assistance in securing victory against the other and thus winning the hand of Emilia. Arcite prostrates himself at the altar first, addressing:
Thou mighty one, that with thy power hast turned
Green Neptune into purple; whose approach
Comets preward; whose havoc in vast field
Unearthed skulls proclaim; whose breath blows down
The teeming Ceres’ foison; who dost pluck
With hand armipotent from forth blue clouds
The masoned turrets
(5.1.49–55)
The curious word ‘armipotent’, which might seem at first glance to be a compositor’s error, or at first hearing to be a malapropism committed by actor or author, is in fact the pivotal term in Arcite’s speech. His god is not ‘omnipotent’, all-powerful, but ‘armipotent’, a Latin term meaning ‘mightie in armes’, Speght tells us. Arcite’s misplaced faith in the gods of war will ultimately destroy him, his own skill in horsemanship helping to bring about his tragic fate. The choice of this adjective is not a slip on the dramatists’ part, but a carefully selected term that anticipates Arcite’s downfall whilst at the same time looking back to the source of his tale. As Potter notes, Shakespeare and Fletcher seem to have borrowed this word directly from Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale (l.1982); Chaucer, in turn, derives the term from Boccaccio’s Teseida (7.32); its ultimate source appears to be Statius’ Thebiad (7.78). The entire history of the story of Palamon and Arcite is encapsulated in this single word, an ostentatious borrowing from Latin that mirrors the borrowing of the play’s key narrative from these diverse sources. The moment causes the listener or reader to reconsider their own awareness of the English language, casting doubt over both the concept of an omnipotent god, which is evoked only to be rejected here, and also towards any notion of masculinity that is over-reliant on military might. Just as the word ‘armipotent’ has strayed far enough from its Latin root as to be unrecognizable to early modern readers, as its presence in Speght’s glossary suggests, so one should ask whether any notion of masculinity that depends on placing trust in the power of arms could lead one similarly astray.
Speght’s list expounds meanings in the playwrights’ words that have since been lost to us, and which would have been at least partly unfamiliar to his first audiences, owing to the processes of language change between Chaucer’s time and his own. In the passage quoted above we find two additional terms that Speght thought worthy of further explanation. The sense of the word ‘foison, f. plenty’ is amplified by the etymological note provided by Speght, looking beyond the word’s primary early modern sense of ‘harvest’, which had come into being relatively recently, and back to the earlier medieval origins of the noun, meaning ‘abundance’ (OED, ‘foison, n’). The French roots of the word contrast with the Anglo-Saxon adjective Shakespeare and Fletcher pair it with here, ‘teeming’ (OED, ‘teem, v’), and using Speght’s list to reconnect the term to its etymology allows us to see it as a characteristic juxtaposition of two terms of different derivations. The other word from Arcite’s prayer that Speght glosses is ‘laude, l. praise’, another borrowing into English from Latin. The presence of this lemma in Speght’s list, despite the fact that it appears to have been in current usage, seems designed to highlight the slight change in spelling by which ‘laude’ (like numerous other Chaucerian words) has lost its final ‘-e’, an important metrical feature of the earlier poet’s work (and one that was notoriously misunderstood in the Renaissance). Whilst neither ‘foison’ nor ‘laud’ would be considered archaisms at the moment the play was written, each of these terms has deviated from its original meaning or spelling as it was first borrowed into Middle English, and as it is listed in Speght’s wordlist. As such, reading this speech with Speght as a guide prompts the reader of the play to consider from a linguistic viewpoint the issue of divergence from these origins, articulating at the level of diction precisely those questions of similarity and difference that concern the playwrights throughout the drama by drawing attention to the issue of how far the language of the past is contiguous with that of the present.
In other cases, the distance between a word’s origin and its usage in The Two Noble Kinsmen is greater. When the First Queen describes the lips of a suppliant woman as ‘twinning cherries’ (1.1.178), the quarto spelling ‘twyning’ recalls Chaucer’s etymological use of the word: ‘twynned, b., parted,’ Speght glosses. The evolution of ‘twin’ into the dual senses of ‘twofold, double’ and ‘sunder, sever, part’ is complex, and they remain intertwined (OED, ‘twin, a and n, 4’; ‘twin, v1’).8 The line is enriched by the residual history of meaning within this word; the image depicts not just a pair of lips but the additional sensuous information that they are parting, moving to speak, to beg, to entreat, and even to kiss, hinting at a sexuality informing the suppliant’s gesture. When Palamon asks ‘What canon is there / That does command my rapier from my hip’ in the service of his hateful uncle Creon (1.2.55–6), a similar etymological echo adds a secondary meaning to what he says: ‘canon, g., a rule’ observes Speght. It is not just the report of a gun that might drive him to act, but rather a complex legal system in which he owes fealty to his ruler.
In both of these instances, Speght’s list can help us to recover additional meanings of the verse, from which we ourselves have been distanced by linguistic change across time. In fact, as the necessary obsolescence of any term appearing in Speght’s list implies, these meanings were already on the verge of disappearing as Shakespeare and Fletcher wrote. But it is worth considering the possibility that having read Chaucer in Speght’s edition the dramatists might have discovered for themselves these semantic echoes in the appended glossaries, and might have chosen to use these terms in such a way as to subordinate their older medieval, and pre-medieval, senses to the service of their own verse. The supplementary significances Speght’s list helps us to extract from such words both amplify and undercut the primary senses the playwrights’ vocabulary evokes (and I have selected here only a few representative examples amongst many instances in the drama). They prompt consideration at a linguistic level of the issues of sameness and difference, convergence and divergence, which are the keynote of the play’s treatment of gender. The audience, in either theatre or print, is forced to re-examine the stability of their most basic assumptions in the light of a new understanding that even aspects of their own vernacular might in fact be alien to them. As such, this richly ambivalent diction is also entirely in keeping with the dramatists’ treatment of other aspects of their Chaucerian source here and elsewhere. The play ‘enters into a continuing and detailed dialogue with its original’, argues Helen Cooper, which not only carries over the complex moral problems of The Knight’s Tale, ‘but makes them sharper; the untied thematic ends of Chaucer’s original are not just left loose but rendered jagged’. This reflects the ways in which Shakespeare and Fletcher produce a version of the tale that problematizes the portrayal of ‘rationality, affection, and passion in both men and women’, Cooper continues, destabilizing gender identities in a way absent from The Canterbury Tales.9
In utilizing Chaucer’s words in such a way as to substantiate, extend, and even challenge the gender assumptions of their source text, Shakespeare and Fletcher also question the status of their primary material and assert their own capacity to make literary history. By thus evoking the history of their language and at the same time reforming their Chaucerian linguistic inheritance in their own image, the collaborators negotiate what Kathryn L. Lynch has called a ‘complicated relationship to poetic authority’, contesting Harold Bloom’s claim that the medieval poet was sufficiently ‘remote in time’ as to be unproblematic for the early modern writers who followed him.10 In fact, Chaucer’s literary reputation was in flux at the time Shakespeare and Fletcher wrote, having not yet attained the status as ‘father’ of English poetry that would be confirmed by Dryden at the start of the eighteenth century, but instead ‘most frequently known simply as ‘master’ or as the inventor, the ‘finder’ of the English tongue’, Lynch and others have shown; ‘Chaucer was a comparatively recent memory, and an overshadowing native one at that’.11 In yet another iteration of the problem of sameness and difference underwriting The Two Noble Kinsmen, the dramatists must find a way of articulating their own distinctive identities in the shadow of their predecessor. And in responding to Chaucer, they must first answer to his language.
One hint as to the way that Shakespeare and Fletcher go about this lies in Speght’s wordlist, I have argued. By demonstrating the extent to which Chaucerian English not only derives from other tongues, both ‘native’ and foreign, but also the degree to which it has since become obsolete, Speght challenges the common perception that the Middle English poet perfected the vernacular, revealing instead that his diction represents just one stage in the ongoing development of the language over time. The playwrights take their lead from this approach, treating their precursor’s vocabulary as flexibly as they treat other aspects of his source material, including its portrayal of gender. Furthermore, by handling English freely and irreverently, coining new terms and reworking existing ones throughout the play, the authors of The Two Noble Kinsmen stage the incompletion of the English language itself, and thus, by implication, challenge the sufficiency of any accompanying notions of sexual identity. They frequently deploy nouns as verbs here, for example, ‘graves’ (1.1.149), ‘scissored’ (1.2.54); recast existing nouns as adverbs, ‘futurely’ (1.1.74); make adjectives into verbs, ‘thirds’ (1.2.96); and coin new words out of old (‘terrene’ (1.2.14), ‘importment’ (1.3.80). Such inventiveness – in the early modern sense of the word – typifies the playwrights’ attitude towards their linguistic inheritance; by dramatizing the incompletion of English and its continuing capacity for development they are able to make the language, plots and characters of the Chaucerian original their own. It is not insignificant that they choose to do so in a play fundamentally concerned with the politics of sameness and difference, an issue that I have suggested is embodied as much in the drama’s language as in its treatment of gender. By showing their familiarity with the roots of the Chaucerian vernacular, and by drawing upon the sense of the historicity of his own language gained from Speght’s glossary, Shakespeare and Fletcher are able to remake English itself, and thus to remake the sexual politics of their source.
Notes
1All references are to William Shakespeare [and John Fletcher], The Two Noble Kinsmen, ed. Lois Potter, Arden Shakespeare, Third Series (London, 1997, repr. 2007).
2See Ann Thompson, Shakespeare’s Chaucer: A Study in Literary Origins (Liverpool, 1978), p. 167, and Potter, Introduction, pp. 19–34, for the generally agreed division of authorial labour in the play.
3Geoffrey Chaucer, The workes of our ancient and learned English poet, Geffrey Chaucer, newly printed, ed. Thomas Speght (London, 1602).
4Thompson, Shakespeare’s Chaucer, p. 30.
5Derek Pearsall, ‘Thomas Speght’, in Editing Chaucer: The Great Tradition, ed. Paul G. Ruggiers (Norman, OK, 1984), pp. 71–92, and Robert K. Turner, ‘The Two Noble Kinsmen and Speght’s Chaucer’, Notes and Queries 27 (1980), 175–6.
6See Eleanor N. Adams, Old English Scholarship in England from 1566–1800 (New Haven, CT, 1917); Carl T. Berkhout and Milton McC. Gatch (eds), Anglo-Saxon Scholarship: The First Three Centuries (Boston, MA, 1982); Timothy Graham, ed. The Recovery of Old English: Anglo-Saxon Studies in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Kalamazoo, MI, 2000).
7The phrase is Geoffrey Hill’s: ‘Not strangeness, but strange likeness’, Mercian Hymns (London, 1971), 133; see also Chris Jones, Strange Likeness: The Use of Old English in Twentieth-Century Poetry (Oxford, 2006), pp. 4–5, and Allen J. Frantzen, Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English, and Teaching the Tradition (New Brunswick, NJ, 1990), p. xi.
8Oxford English Dictionary, ed. John Simpson, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1989). Compare Twelfth Night: ‘An apple cleft in two, is not more twin / Than these two creatures’ (5.1.230).
9Helen Cooper, ‘Jacobean Chaucer: The Two Noble Kinsmen and Other Chaucerian Plays’ in Theresa M. Krier ed., Refiguring Chaucer in the Renaissance (Gainesville, FL, 1998), pp. 189–208, 189.
10Kathryn L. Lynch, ‘The Three Noble Kinsmen: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Fletcher’, in Yvonne Bruce ed., Images of Matter: Essays on British Literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Newark, DE, 2005), p. 72; Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1997), p. xlvi.
11Lynch, ‘The Three Noble Kinsmen,’ 73. See also David Matthews and Gordon McMullan, ‘Introduction’ to Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2007), p. 1.