In 1613, at the very end of his career, Shakespeare collaborated with John Fletcher in writing two plays.
Fletcher was fifteen years Shakespeare's junior and between 1606 and 1625 (he died in the latter year) he wrote, alone or in collaboration, some fifty plays. The most notable of these were with Francis Beaumont, so that "Beaumont and Fletcher" is almost a single word in the history of English literature.
The Shakespeare-Fletcher collaborations have all but vanished, as such. One of them, Henry VIII is generally included in editions of Shakespeare's collected works and is presented as solely by him, with no mention of Fletcher. The other collaboration, The Two Noble Kinsmen, is treated quite the reverse. It is generally omitted from Shakespeare's collected works.
Recent scholarship, however, seems to make it reasonably certain that Shakespeare wrote a major part of it, and it is included as one of the volumes of the Signet Classic Shakespeare. The authorship is given as by "William Shakespeare and John Fletcher."
The play begins with a Prologue (probably written by Fletcher) which gives the source of the content of the drama. Shakespeare had done this once before in connection with Pericles (see page I-181), written some five years earlier.
One cannot help wondering if this sort of thing isn't a sign of a certain insecurity on the part of the playwright. Uncertain as to the worth of the play, does he call on the name of a revered ancient as a shield against criticism?
Thus, the Prologue, hoping (rather timorously) that the play meets approval, says:
—Prolog, lines 10-13
Geoffrey Chaucer was born about 1340 and died in 1400. He was at the peak of his fame during the reign of Richard II (see Richard II). His wife was a lady in waiting to the second wife of John of Gaunt, an uncle of Richard II and an important character in the play of that name. What's more, she was sister to John of Gaunt's third wife.
Chaucer is widely considered the first great writer in English (as opposed to the older Anglo-Saxon or Norman-French languages) and as the father of English literature. Placing him among the most prominent poets of western Europe (between the Po River in northern Italy and the Trent River in central England) is not an undue exaggeration.
Chaucer's masterpiece is the Canterbury Tales, published in the last decade of his life. This pictured a group of twenty-nine varied individuals, united in the accident that all were on a pilgrimage to Canterbury. They planned to amuse themselves on the way by each telling (according to the original plan) two stories, making fifty-eight in all. Only twenty-three stories actually appear, so that less than half the original plan was carried through, but what exists is still splendid because of the wide variety in content and style and because of the interesting characterization of each pilgrim, both in description and in the story he or she chooses to tell.
One of the pilgrims was a knight, and his tale was the first to be told. This "Knight's Tale," which serves as the source of The Two Noble Kinsmen is itself taken from the poem La Teseida of Giovanni Boccaccio.
It is a tale of courtly love, treating with seriousness that artificial game of man and woman popularized by the troubadours of southern France in the time of the Crusades. By the conventions of courtly love, a woman was treated in a semifeudal, semireligious manner, with the lover serving her as both a vassal and a worshiper. The lover had to fulfill every whim of his mistress and suffer the extremes of emotion in a manner that had little if any relation to real life, but has affected storybook romance down to our own day. Such love could not exist in marriage but, according to convention, had to face insuperable barriers, such as the marriage of the mistress to someone else. Courtly love was mock passion, mock heroics, mock poetry, with nothing real but the noise it made.
Near the beginning of his career as a playwright, Shakespeare satirized courtly love rather amusingly in his Love's Labor's Lost (see page I-437). (It was far more effectively blasted in the great Spanish novel Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes, the first part of which appeared in 1605. The love of Don Quixote for Dulcinea del Toboso reduced the conventions of courtly love to ridicule once and for all.)
In The Two Noble Kinsmen Shakespeare and Fletcher treat courtly love seriously, but so lost are its conventions to us of the twentieth century that we cannot-even when Shakespeare asks us to. And at that, perhaps Shakespeare didn't try very hard to win us over. Those portions of the play which he wrote seem to have been pageantlike in nature. Shakespeare was writing "spectacle."
Than Robin Hood
The pageantry and spectacle of the play may even have been forced upon it by the pressure of having to live up to its Chaucerian source (like a modern trying to make a musical out of a Shakespearean play). At least, Fletcher, in the Prologue, begs the audience not to hiss lest Chaucer turn in his grave and say:
—Prolog, lines 18-21
That great folk hero, Robin Hood, was known to the English public through a series of popular ballads which first appear (as far as modern knowledge is concerned) in Chaucer's lifetime. These ballads were enormously popular but as serious poetry were quite insignificant. They were analogous, in a way, to our own enormously popular but literarily insignificant TV westerns.
The play opens with a scene which is thought to be Shakespearean.
Hymen enters. He is the Greek god of marriage, and is a mere personification concerning whom there are no well-known myths. Following Hymen are a variety of nymphs and then a wedding party-a groom, a bride, the groom's friend, the bride's sister. Everything is joyous and springlike and the first words of the play are a song about early flowers:
—Act I, scene i, lines 7-8
"Ver" is an obsolete term for spring, from the French vert (meaning "green"-from which such words as "verdure" and "verdant" are also derived).
The marriage that is being so celebrated is between none other than Theseus and Hippolyta, the same couple who were being married at the start of A Midsummer Night's Dream (see page I-18). In fact, some critics suggest that Shakespeare used Chaucer's "Knight's Tale" as the original inspiration of A Midsummer Night's Dream, borrowing the marriage as the frame and then filling it with his own subplots. Here in The Two Noble Kinsmen he follows Chaucer in the subplot as well.