Wissenschaftliches Seminar Online 1 (2003) - Shakespeare ...

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Irmgard Maassen
the ‘love’, which is fuelled by the courtly code of honour as primarily sexual is an
anachronistic fallacy. Next to love as sexual passion, standing under the aegis of Venus,
the play explores the power of a desire, also figured as ‘love’, which is directed at
the gratification honour can provide. Instead of leading to conquest and possession,
this love is enacted in competition and emulation. 20 Rather than be content to uncouple
sexuality from gender difference, as is customarily done in those readings of early
modern plays that tease out covert homosexual meanings, I suggest we need to uncouple
desire itself from sexuality. This will enable us to acknowledge the presence in
these plays of an attraction emanating not from difference of gender but from sameness
of rank and honour. What draws Palamon and Arcite to each other can then be
seen to be their outstanding knightly valour – each loves in the other the ideal type he
himself represents. In the early modern period romantic love tends to confirm the naturalness
of the aristocratic hierarchy of rank, manifest in the visibility, often through all
disguises, of virtue and honour 21 , rather than the naturalness of the heterosexual order
as in today’s Mills and Boone romance, which celebrates the triumph of eroticised
gender difference over class difference. The Two Noble Kinsmen teaches us to be alert
to the plural intersections and overwritings of sexual difference with rank difference in
the early modern construction of desire.
IV
The subplot mirrors the Amazon Emilia’s predicament in telling ways. Contrary to
Emilia, the Jailer’s Daughter initially has no difficulty distinguishing Palamon from
Arcite. While this might be read as gesturing towards the more modern concept of love
as a passion that individualises, the fate of her love contradicts this interpretation. By
contrast to Ophelia, an analogy which is often drawn, her love sickness, which grows
into melancholy, is not elevated into an ennobling passion. While in Hamlet madness
and melancholy become the mood/mode in which an interiority asserts itself that exceeds
the preordained forms of social ritual and convention, The Two Noble Kinsmen
allows no space for such interiority to the Jailer’s Daughter. Instead, she is recruited in
to act the madwoman in the morris dance, a popular entertainment that neatly contains
her excessive passion in the mould of an approved ritual, effectively de-individualizing
the emotion. In making her perform what she is – mad – the morris dance precludes
any opening of a gap between being and seeming.
turwissenschaft. Eine Einführung in neue Theoriekonzepte (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2002), pp. 267–297,
and to illuminating discussions with Jutta Eming and the gender workshop of the Sfb Kulturen des
Performativen in Berlin.
20
Imitation is the mode of Emilia’s and Flavina’s love, see 1.3.64–78. For masculine rivalry, see
Donald K. Hedrick, “‘Be Rough With Me’: The Collaborative Arenas of The Two Noble Kinsmen”,
in Charles H. Fry ed., Shakespeare, Fletcher and The Two Noble Kinsmen (Columbia: University of
Missouri Press, 1989), pp. 45–77.
21
As when prince Florizel’s love of the shepherdess Perdita in The Winter’s Tale correctly signals that
she is a lost princess.
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