Shakespeare's Haunting Farewell

The Two Noble Kinsmen
The Stratford Festival
The National Post

Theseus and Hippolyta are getting married, again, and, just as in A Midsummer Night's Dream, their progress to the altar is interrupted by a bunch of people asking favours. This time the suppliants are a trio of widowed queens whose husbands fell in the war of the Seven Against Thebes (read your Sophocles) and whose corpses, by decree of the victorious Theban tyrant Creon, lie still unburied. (Cf. Sophocles again.) The queens urge Theseus not to get married until he has put this right. His bride and her sister Emilia, who as Amazons know something about codes of honour, back the ladies up.

That's the first scene of The Two Noble Kinsmen. The second takes us to Thebes, where the title characters, Palamon and Arcite, both immaculate heroes, lament the state of their city but prepare to do their patriotic duty nonetheless. Battle is joined, Theseus wins, the kinsmen are captured and imprisoned, the bodies buried and the queens appeased. And at this point the action starts. What we have seen up to now has been mere prelude, a peculiarly luxuriant shaggy- dog story.

The Two Noble Kinsmen was published in 1613 as the joint work of John Fletcher and William Shakespeare, an attribution that most scholars have supported. It was left out of the First Folio, and only in the last 30 years have complete editions of Shakespeare begun routinely to include it.

Shakespeare wrote the first and last acts and one scene in the middle. It was his last writing for the theatre, and he seems to have been experimenting even beyond the corkscrewing verse monologues of Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale. The poetry this time is still more complex, but it's formal and outwardly directed, since the characters have no souls to search; they are figures in a chivalric story derived from Chaucer (who gets an unusually generous credit in the prologue). It's magnificent, but it is very hard to absorb in the theatre, and listening to those introductory scenes, in particular, is like groping your way through swathes of heavy silk.

It's a positive relief when Fletcher takes over. Palamon and Arcite, through their cell window, catch sight of Emilia and fall instantly, irrevocably, and almost simultaneously (not quite -- "I saw her first!" protests Palamon) in love. Immediately they are mortal enemies, trading insults in the same vein of high courtesy in which they once exchanged compliments.

Fletcher seems to have enjoyed taking them down several pegs, or maybe he couldn't help himself. He is -- at least in his comic mode - - a much underrated author, and still highly playable, sexually aware in a way that the Victorians thought decadent but now seems rather cool and funny. Sympathetic, too: There is a sub-plot concerning a Jailer's Daughter who falls for Palamon and sets him free (thereby anticipating the behaviour of future Jailers' Daughters from The Beggar's Opera to The Wind in the Willows), then, realizing she cannot have him, runs mad.

A program note suggests that the original audience would have found this a hoot. I doubt it. Did they laugh at Ophelia? (The echoes of Hamlet's girlfriend in these scenes, and of the Dream in some episodes involving a troupe of Athenian morris-dancers, are the clearest evidence that Shakespeare didn't write them; they're the work of an admiring but ambitious disciple.) The mad speeches contain some coded erotic truths. The Jacobeans would have laughed with the girl, not at her, and so do we.

We also like her a lot. She is saved when her doctor, a progressive mixture of psychologist and sex therapist, suggests to her workaday lover that he pretend to be Palamon. They live happily ever after, though under what identities remains unclear.

Obviously this is a play that Stratford should do, and Stratford, having waited for 50 years, has done it well: better than the Royal Shakespeare Company, which inaugurated its Swan Theatre with it, and which gave it a thoroughgoing Japanese appearance that merely made the play's own arcane conventions that much harder to get at.

There are samurai traces in the martial scenes here, but they are laid on lightly; the overriding style of David Gaucher's designs might be described as mixed heraldic. A sculptured horse's head protrudes provocatively from a pool, like the top half of a knight in some submarine game of chess. The set consists mainly of a forest of upturned spears, very suggestive when the scene is a forest, or indeed a prison, but distracting when the actors have to shoulder their way through it on other occasions.

The director is David Latham, principal of Stratford's five-year- old conservatory, and the cast is composed entirely of its graduates. They are a credit to the school, maintaining a high standard of liveliness and lucidity.

That is not to say they are all ideal. This is one of those plays with a built-in casting problem: Actors capable of meeting its technical demands are unlikely to be tempted by roles so thin. One would like to see Martha Henry, Seana McKenna and Domini Blythe parachuted in to lend proper weight to the bodeful queens. Colm Feore might make a superb Theseus, a role in which Jonathan Goad makes the common mistake of confusing authority with bad temper.

The verbal intricacies of Palamon and Arcite themselves might be unravelled by Graham Abbey and I'm not at all sure who else. The present duo, Rami Posner and Brendan Murray, seem to know what they're talking about in their first scene but can't communicate it. They improve immeasurably when they're given something immediate to act, alternating handily between the heroic and the absurd. (At least Murray does; Posner comes off rather sulky.)

The best in the main plot is Michelle Giroux's Emilia, whose voice drips with honeyed concern but whose demeanour is that of a Sphinx, as befits a heroine whose two suitors never think to ask her which of them she might prefer, and who doesn't seem to mind.

Deborah Hay, as expected, romps off with the play as the Jailer's Daughter, comic, pathetic, vulnerable and determined. She has great support from Michael Schultz as her shy Wooer; from Michael Therriault who does a whimsical double of doctor and schoolmaster, and who also delivers the prologue and epilogue with enormous charm; and from Thom Marriott as her father, a man-mountain with a lisp, at first sight a tyrannical clown but later a huge vat of concern, and not just for his daughter. Indeed, in there is a feeling of involvement from everybody in these scenes, both as actors and characters, and it's most welcome.

Fletcher's humanity softens us up for the return of Shakespeare, who proves as imposingly chilly as before, though more comprehensible. Palamon and Arcite fight a tournament for Emilia's love, the loser to forfeit not only his own life but those of his friends.

I don't know why Latham describes the sub-plot as "a dark strand." The darkness is all in this main action, with its kings and queens, knights and ladies, who talk of love but think only of death. A couplet that might serve as the play's leitmotif must haunt everybody who has read or heard it:

“The world's a city full of straying streets,
And death's the marketplace where each one meets.”

This is the last play of a supreme writer who was about to give it all up despite having three more years to live. There is no parallel renunciation in world literature.