Chaucer's Jailer's Daughter

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Chaucer's Jailer's Daughter Chaucer’s Jailer’s Daughter: Character and Source in The Two Noble Kinsmen M E G A n S n E L L HAUCER’ S K n I G H T, THE InAUGURAL COnTESTAnT in The Canterbury CTales, tells the story of the captured kinsmen Arcite and Palamon, the latter of whom escapes “by helpyng of a freend.”1 The Knight keeps the account of Palamon’s prison break relatively simple: though “olde bookes” tell this story “moore pleyn” (ll. 1463–64), he says nothing else about the accomplice, only elaborating that Palamon can flee because “he hadde yeve his gayler drynke” (l. 1470). This single line about the helpful “freend” becomes a soliloquy in The Two Noble Kinsmen, Shakespeare and Fletcher’s dramatic adaptation of The Knight’s Tale: Let all the dukes and all the devils roar, He is at liberty! I have ventured for him And out I have brought him; [. ] . And yet he has not thanked me For what I have done, no, not so much as kissed me, And that methinks is not so well.2 The Jailer’s Daughter, a character not found in The Knight’s Tale, thus recounts freeing Palamon from her father’s charge. Yet in Shakespeare and Fletcher’s play, Palamon offers her the same scant attention that the Knight gives the anonymous “freend” in Chaucer’s story. neither thanked nor “so much as kissed,” she eventu- ally goes mad with unrequited love. We never see Palamon and the Jailer’s Daugh- ter converse; they share the stage only once, when she views him from afar in Act 2, scene 1, and he does not acknowledge her existence until the final scene. In a For their generous feedback, I wish to thank Douglas Bruster, Heather Houser, Wayne Rebhorn, and Elizabeth Scala, as well as the readers and editorial team at Shakespeare Quarterly. 1 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales: Fragment 1, in The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd ed. (London: Oxford UP, 2008), l. 1468. Subsequent quotations from Chaucer will be from this edition, cited parenthetically. 2 John Fletcher and William Shakespeare, The Two Noble Kinsmen, ed. Lois Potter, Arden Shakespeare Third Series, rev. ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 2.6.1–3, 21–23. Subsequent quotations from the play will be from this edition, cited parenthetically. Shakespeare Quarterly 69.1 (2018): 35–56 © 2018 Folger Shakespeare Library 36 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY play that consciously models itself on a classicizing Chaucerian precedent, the Jailer’s Daughter seems an uneasy fit, a provincial diversion from its canonical tale. In the Prologue to The Two Noble Kinsmen, Shakespeare and Fletcher directly identify “Chaucer, of all admired,” as its “noble breeder” (ll. 13, 10), and the play generally adheres to The Knight’s Tale in its version of Palamon and Arcite’s story: Duke Theseus, recently married to Hippolyta, jails the two Theban kinsmen in Athens, where each falls instantly in love with the duke’s new sister-in-law, Emilia.3 In the Two Noble Kinsmen, the Jailer’s Daughter, as indicated by her name (or lack thereof ), belongs to a world largely absent from Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale: she is among those “that ruder tongues distinguish ‘vil- lager’” (3.5.103). Initially, she appears to offer a solution to the love triangle’s mathematical dilemma, perhaps allowing for all the young lovers to be paired off. Her low status, however, makes the Jailer’s Daughter an unsuitable match for the nobleman who fails to win Emilia. Once freed from jail, Palamon con- tinues his competition with Arcite, oblivious or indifferent to the Jailer’s Daugh- ter. From that point on, the play seals her off from Chaucer’s story, and she never speaks to Palamon, Arcite, Emilia, Theseus, or Hippolyta.4 After much scholarly debate, the character of the Jailer’s Daughter has been attributed to both Shakespeare and Fletcher.5 Her relative lack of connection to Chaucer, though, has remained largely unexamined.6 She may immediately 3 On Shakespeare and Fletcher adapting Chaucer so directly, see Kathryn L. Lynch, “The Three noble Kinsmen: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Fletcher,” in Images of Matter: Essays on British Literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Yvonne Bruce (newark: U of Delaware P, 2005): 72–91; and Misha Teramura, “The Anxiety of Auctoritas: Chaucer and The Two Noble Kinsmen,” Shakespeare Quarterly 63.4 (2012): 544–76. 4 On the Jailer’s Daughter’s frequent onstage isolation, see Michael M. Wagoner, “The Dra- maturgical Space of Solo Scenes in Fletcher and Shakespeare, or a Study of the Jailer’s Daugh- ter,” Shakespeare Bulletin 35.1 (2017): 97–118. 5 Suzanne Gossett observes that early critics were rather eager “to attribute whatever [they] did not like (for example, the sexuality of the subplot scenes of the Jailer’s Daughter) . to Fletcher.” now, though, “attributions reveal that both authors were involved in all parts.” See “The Two Noble Kinsmen and King Henry VIII: The Last Last Plays,” in The Cambridge Com- panion to Shakespeare’s Last Plays, ed. Catherine M. S. Alexander (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009), 185–202, esp. 190. According to Gossett, the consensus regarding the authorship of the Jailer’s Daughter’s scenes is as follows: Fletcher wrote 2.4, 2.6, 3.4, 3.5, 4.1, and 5.2, while Shakespeare wrote 2.1, 3.2, 4.3, and 5.4 (in which Palamon acknowledges her, though she does not appear). For detailed discussions of the play’s collaborative authorship, see Potter, intro- duction to Two Noble Kinsmen, 18–39; and Brian Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002), 402–32, 491–500. 6 Reflecting the scholarly consensus on the character’s relationship to the source, Teramura describes the Jailer’s Daughter as “the play’s most salient departure from the Tale’s delimita- tions.” Her character can thus represent an “escape” not only for the imprisoned Palamon, Tera- mura suggests, but also for Shakespeare and Fletcher from the “prison” of Chaucer. See “Anxiety,” 571, 570. CHAUCER’S JAILER’S DAUGHTER 37 recall figures from other works, such as Shakespeare’s Ophelia, but The Knight’s Tale does not supply dialogue, a name, or even a gender for this “freend.”7 How, then, to understand and explain her inclusion in The Two Noble Kinsmen? Is she as separate from the source as she is from Palamon? When examining possible sources for a text—in what is traditionally called source study—one usually looks for corresponding formal features. For char- acters, one measures how they correspond to or deviate from other characters: Shylock is like or unlike Barabas; Prospero is like or unlike Faustus.8 Yet such parallels are not the only evidence of a later author’s response to a source. Sometimes, an unprecedented addition can also constitute a creative rereading. As Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith have argued, a Renaissance author’s nuanced reliance on a vital source “may obscure the visibility of that source.”9 In The Two Noble Kinsmen, Chaucer seems visible in almost everything but the Jailer’s Daughter. When the Knight narrates Palamon’s prison break and men- tions the helpful “freend,” he concedes that his own account of the escape is incomplete; as in other romances, “olde bookes” are said to tell the whole story “moore pleyn.” While the Jailer’s Daughter is not hiding in these “olde bookes”—the potential sources behind this source—her addition imagina- tively and intertextually rewrites what Chaucer’s Knight elides. The contem- porarily “English” Jailer’s Daughter intervenes in a classical world, a refraction of Chaucer’s own authorial project as the English adapter of “olde bookes.”10 Through her, Shakespeare and Fletcher refill the gaps in The Knight’s Tale with refigured Chaucerian material and strategies. That Shakespeare read Chaucer now forms the foundational premise, rather than the conclusion, of explorations of the two canonical authors’ link, yet we 7 On the Jailer’s Daughter’s corresponding female characters in other works, see Potter, introduction to Two Noble Kinsmen, 54–59. Chaucer retells the story of one of these analogues, Ariadne (whom Theseus abandoned by the sea), in The Legend of Good Women; see The Legend of Good Women: The Legend of Ariadne, in The Riverside Chaucer, ll. 1886–2227. 8 As Geoffrey Bullough’s conclusion to his foundational work exemplifies, traditional source studies usually track how Shakespeare adapts characters by “preserving where possible the main outlines of a character as sketched in a short story or play, but inventing new twists of situation and motivation to bring out qualities only faintly suggested in the original.” See Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, Vol. 8: Romances (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), 361–62. 9 Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith, “What is a Source? Or, How Shakespeare Read His Marlowe,” Shakespeare Survey 68 (2015): 15–31, esp. 18. 10 On the Jailer’s Daughter’s contemporary Englishness and her clash with the Latin School- master, see Douglas Bruster, “The Jailer’s Daughter and the Politics of Madwomen’s Language,” Shakespeare Quarterly 46.3 (1995): 277–300. On Chaucer’s own sources, such as Boccaccio and Statius, see David Anderson, Before the Knight’s Tale: Imitation of Classical Epic in Boccaccio’s “Teseida” (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1988), 192–224; and Winthrop Wetherbee, “Romance and Epic in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale,” Exemplaria 2.1 (1990): 303–28. 38 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY continue to learn how Shakespeare read his Chaucer.11 As Helen Cooper observes, Chaucer’s larger ideas and structures “gave [Shakespeare] high-octane fuel for his imagination.”12 We can track Shakespeare and Fletcher channeling this amorphous “fuel” through the Jailer’s Daughter.
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