Subjectivity and the Ekphrastic Prerogative Emilia’s Soliloquy in The Two Noble Kinsmen Andrew James Johnston

This article examines Shakespeare’s and Fletcher’s re-writing of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale with respect to the politics of same-sex desire and visual power. Like Chaucer, the two Jacobean col- laborators show how Emilia becomes both an object and a victim of the male gaze and of male discourse. Whereas Chaucer’s Emilye is seen entirely from the outside, the Jacobean Emilia is granted a certain degree of subjectivity, a subjectivity which reaches its peak in the witty homo- sexual flirtation with the Serving Woman and the notion of a political utopia founded on an ideal of female friendship inspired by Montaigne. But that subjectivity is soon dismantled as the play progresses. Emilia’s subjectivity reaches its lowest point when, in her ekphrastic soliloquy, she succumbs entirely to discursive constructions of visual experience following the ideological im- peratives of a masculine cult of sameness. And this message is rammed home by presenting it as a direct contrast to the visual politics of the Knight’s Tale with its self-consciously ekphrastic and voyeuristic narrator. Whatever Emilia may state early on in the play, for a lesbian Amazon, Montaigne might not, after all, be the perfect guide to happiness, just as, contrary to modern concepts, ekphrasis does not automatically grant a position of power.

In what is arguably the most important of the soliloquies in Shakespeare’s and Fletcher’s Two Noble Kinsmen, Emilia studies the images of her two would-be husbands, Palamon and Arcite. Despite having no wish to marry at all, she cannot help but admire the cousins’ portraits. And as she does so in an extended ekphrastic passage, she identifies the two men with Narcissus and Ganymede. This identification of her suitors with classical embodiments of homoerotic desire creates an especially ironic effect: an Amazon whose own erotic desires are characterised as profoundly lesbian is trying to make herself fall in love with two men sharing a strong homosocial and potentially homoerotic bond.1 After first extolling the virtues of Arcite, she moves on to acknowledge the advantages of Palamon, before finally declaring herself incapable of judgement: ‘I have no choice’ (4.2.35).2 This highly ambiguous phrase beau- tifully encapsulates Emilia’s problem. Not only does she feel incapable of choosing on the basis of what she sees in the portraits, she is, in fact, not even

1. Richard Abrams, ‘Gender Confusion and Sexual Politics in The Two Noble Kinsmen’, in Drama, Sex and Politics, ed. by James Redmond, Themes in Drama 7 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 69–76 (p. 72). 2. All quotations from the Two Noble Kinsmen are taken from William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, The Two Noble Kinsmen, ed. by Eugene M. Waith, The Oxford Shakespeare (Ox- ford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 50 Andrew James Johnston permitted to choose at all. It is, after all, the result of the tournament that will decide. Emilia’s ekphrastic soliloquy hence serves as an expression of and as a response to a twofold assault on her subjectivity. She is incapable of choosing from what is on offer and even if she were she is not permitted to do so, any- way. The limitations imposed on Emilia render her a passive object in a world of masculine politics and desire. This essay will attempt to tease out some of the contradictions and paradoxes expressed in Emilia’s soliloquy and to situate these contradictions within the play’s larger politics of gendered sub- jectivity. And this politics of subjectivity becomes not only especially visible but also considerably more problematic, I argue, against the backdrop of the highly complex dialogue that Shakespeare and Fletcher engage in with their source, Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale.3 The main plot of the drama unfolds with a logic of total chivalric absurdity. Looking out of their Athenian prison window, the Theban princes fall in love with Emilia who is strolling in the garden with a serving woman. Instantly, their sworn brotherhood turns into lethal hatred which eventually culminates in a lonely duel in the woods. Here they are discovered by Duke Theseus and his entourage. Theseus orders their immediate execution, but his decision is stayed by the intervention of his wife, Hippolyta, the former Amazon Queen, and by that of her sister, Emilia. Moreover, Theseus’s intimate friend, Pirithous, comes to the women’s assistance. Since Emilia refuses to decide between the two suitors, Theseus ordains that the duel be repeated in public with each prince supported by three knights. The winner gains the right to marry Emilia. For Emilia this is an especially unexpected turn of events, since she had not previously been aware of the princes’ existence, let alone of their love for her. Arcite, Palamon, and Emilia all pray to their respective tutelary deities and — except for Emilia — receive positive signs that their desires will be granted. Arcite wins the battle but suffers an accident with his horse and dies, though not before officially handing over Emilia to his cousin. These events are par- alleled by a subplot in which the Jailer’s Daughter falls in love with Palamon, helps him escape, goes mad, and is eventually healed when her Wooer sleeps with her claiming to be Palamon.

3. There is a long tradition in the criticism of this play of assigning its more nostalgic aspects to Shakespeare and its more cynical moments to Fletcher. However much such an analysis may actually be founded on a close analysis of the two playwrights’ respective contributions to the drama, it is nevertheless legitimate, as Richard Hillman argues persuasively, to treat the Kinsmen, in its finished state, as an artistic unity that generates meaning through the very tensions inherent in the juxtaposition of nostalgia and cynicism (Richard Hillman, ‘Shake- speare’s Romantic Innocents and the Misappropriation of the Romance Past: The Case of The Two Noble Kinsmen’, Shakespeare Survey, 43 [1991], 69–79 [p. 70]).