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 eventually 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 continues 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, introduction 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 characters, 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. Rather than assert that Chaucer is the definitive source of her character, I claim that the Jailer’s Daugh- ter exemplifies the play’s layered intertextual relationship with the First Frag- ment of The Canterbury Tales. She inherits the dangerous consequences of lovesickness found in the source and expresses these extreme feelings through a shared metaphorical language: Shakespeare and Fletcher repurpose Chaucer’s persistent liquid imagery in her character’s mad preoccupations with leaks and ships. That Palamon escapes because “he hadde yeve his gayler drynke” under- scores how fluids consistently jeopardize order in The Knight’s Tale. I track the recurrence of this threatening liquid imagery not only in this tale but also across the tales that directly compete with the Knight’s in the First Fragment. Shake- speare and Fletcher mirror the Miller and the Reeve by positioning the Jailer’s Daughter as an irreverent answer to Theseus’s governing of Palamon’s and Arcite’s desire. She embodies the sorrow, humor, and cruelty of the gender relations in the Renaissance play and the First Fragment. More than simply repris- ing Chaucerian characters or patterns, Shakespeare and Fletcher’s addition of the Jailer’s Daughter reshapes their play’s source within The Two Noble Kinsmen.

I. “MAnYE,” “TEERES,” AnD THE “MOPED” JAILER’S DAUGHTER The Jailer’s Daughter is best known for her vivid portrayal of madness as she longs for Palamon.13 Her condition far exceeds what Palamon and Arcite ever experience while pining for Emilia in The Two Noble Kinsmen. Chaucer, however, describes a similarly extreme consequence of frustrated love, far more debilitating than poetic professions of devotion. Banished from Athens by The- seus in The Knight’s Tale, Chaucer’s Arcite develops an affliction:

11 Foundational studies of Shakespeare’s relationship to Chaucer include Ann Thompson, Shakespeare’s Chaucer: A Study in Literary Origins (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1978); and E. Talbot Donaldson, The Swan at the Well: Shakespeare Reading Chaucer (new Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1985). On Fletcher’s own dramatic reworkings of Chaucer, see Helen Cooper, “Jacobean Chaucer: The Two Noble Kinsmen and Other Chaucerian Plays,” in Refiguring Chaucer in the Renaissance, ed. Theresa M. Krier (Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1998), 189–209. For a more recent analysis of Shakespeare reading Chaucer, see Elizabeth Scala, “Dressing Up as a Franklin’s Housewife: native Sources for Shakespeare’s Cymbeline,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 59.2 (2017): 137–61. 12 Helen Cooper, Shakespeare and the Medieval World (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2010), 210. 13 See Bruster, “Politics”; and Susan Green, “‘A mad woman? We are made, boys!’: The Jailer’s Daughter in The Two Noble Kinsmen,” in Shakespeare, Fletcher, and “The Two Noble Kinsmen,” ed. Charles H. Frey (Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1989), 121–32. CHAUCER’S JAILER’S DAUGHTER 39 nat oonly lik the loveris maladye Of Hereos, but rather lyk manye, Engendred of humour malencolik Biforen, in his celle fantastik. And shortly, turned was al up so doun Bothe habit and eek disposicioun Of hym, this woful lovere daun Arcite. (ll. 1373–79) For “a yeer or two” (l. 1381) in his homeland of Thebes, Arcite suffers from this “manye”—a Middle English word signifying uncontrolled “mania”—that turns his life upside down. He wails all night and weeps so much “he myghte nat be stent” (l. 1368). Chaucer’s account of these specific symptoms stresses the physical effects of lovesickness.14 Medical texts in the Middle Ages, according to Mary Frances Wack, usually theorized the condition of amor hereos as an “occu- pational hazard of the nobility,” specifically of aristocratic men like the kinsmen whose idleness risked generating the excessive libido and “humour malencolik” that Chaucer’s Arcite suffers from here.15 Affected in his brain’s “celle fantastik,” Arcite recovers from this madness only after the divine intervention of Mercury in a dream. Physically unrecognizable, he then returns to Athens with his “habit and eek disposicioun” no longer “up so doun.” Shakespeare and Fletcher eliminate this plot point entirely, instead keeping Arcite sane in Athens after his banishment. The playwrights choose for both the kinsmen to inherit from their source only the poetic “loveris maladye,” without its debilitating physical symptoms. Even at its most violent, the noblemen’s condition is easily controlled by the duke; they immediately cease fighting over Emilia and converse rationally when Theseus chastises them as “ignorant and mad malicious traitors” (3.6.132). Shakespeare and Fletcher transfer the true madness of lovesickness to the Jailer’s Daughter, who becomes “so far from what she was,” now answering questions “so sillily, as if she were a fool” (4.1.39–40). This displacement of the symptoms of lovesickness from an aristocratic man to a woman reflects the larger, homologous “downward” trajectory of lovesickness from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance: according to medical texts, as the pri- mary location of amor hereos descended in the hierarchy of the body from the brain to the sexual organs, so too did its sufferers “decline” in the social hierar-

14 On Chaucer’s differentiation of Palamon’s and Arcite’s conditions, see Jacqueline Tasioulas, “‘Dying of imagination’ in the First Fragment of the Canterbury Tales,” Medium Ævum 82.2 (2013): 213–35. 15 Mary Frances Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: The Viaticum and Its Commentaries (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1990), 61. Wack argues that lovesickness “displaced and objectified” the anxiety produced by noble love’s elevation of idealized women over men, an inversion that contravened the established hierarchy of gender relations (171). 40 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY chy to include women.16 With a medieval disease now in its Renaissance form, the Jailer’s Daughter carries this element of Chaucer’s text into new territory.17 Her “wood,” in both meanings of the term—her mad state and the forest setting of her scenes—lies within Athens, yet outside of Theseus’s jurisdiction. The Jailer’s Daughter’s landscape, as Julie Sanders observes, contrasts with the “controlled royal space of hunting and lists that Theseus and the knights prescribe and describe. . . . Her woodland is a frighteningly real one of wolves and howl- ing.”18 What disappears from the plot of Chaucer’s story—Arcite’s disorientat- ing “manye,” suffered in a distant place—reappears locally in the form of the Jailer’s Daughter, with consequences for Theseus. Extremely devoted to her beloved, she plots to release Theseus’s prisoner: Say I ventured To set him free? What says the law then? Thus much for law or kindred! I will do it! (2.4.30–32)

Arcite’s rhetorical question in Chaucer, “‘who shal yeve a lovere any lawe?’” (l. 1164), is answered by the Jailer’s Daughter, who enacts its premise with her subsequent lawbreaking, proving the duke incapable of governing this lover, at least: “Let all the dukes and all the devils roar,” she declares, after freeing Palamon. The Jailer’s Daughter presents her subsequent, uncontrollable “manye” with the same watery imagery that endangers Theseus’s realm throughout The Knight’s Tale, in which extreme emotions are repeatedly conveyed in a liquid form. Weeping threatens to saturate Theseus’s Athens, as Ypolita (ll. 1748–49), Venus (ll. 2470, 2664–66), and Emelye (ll. 1749, 2327, 2342, 2885) all express their inward despair outwardly through tears. All this crying in Chaucer’s text has drawn the attention of E. Talbot Donaldson, who comments that “all the women in The Knight’s Tale produce a portion of tears” and that, as narrator, the Knight “seems to regard women as chiefly distinguished for weeping.”19 Pala- mon and Arcite also weep throughout The Knight’s Tale (ll. 1100, 1221, 1280, 1368, 2817), but the sober duke remains the exception and opposition to this

16 Wack, Lovesickness,123. On the emergent condition of women’s melancholy and the Jailer’s Daughter’s dissemination of it, see Carol Thomas neely, Distracted Subjects: Madness and Gender in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture (Ithaca, nY: Cornell UP, 2004), esp. 69–98. 17 On the rarity of a lower-class character going mad in Shakespeare, see Bruster, “Politics,” 289. 18 Julie Sanders, “Mixed Messages: The Aesthetics of The Two Noble Kinsmen,” in A Com- panion to Shakespeare’s Works, Vol. IV: The Poems, Problem Comedies, Late Plays, ed. Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 445–61, esp. 452. 19 Donaldson, Swan, 60. CHAUCER’S JAILER’S DAUGHTER 41 flood of feeling.20 Theseus’s closing act, to quiet the “infinite . . . teeres” of the townspeople for the dead Arcite (l. 2827), echoes his response to the “sorwe” of the mourning wives at the beginning of the tale, who make such a cry “that in this world nys creature lyvynge / That herde swich another waymentynge” (ll. 901–2). He continually attempts to regulate these outbursts, but the women who “wepen evere in oon” (l. 1771) affect his policies. Theseus’s efforts to dam the overflow of grief even echo Saturn who, in his celestial appeasement of Venus’s tears for Palamon’s loss, spurs Arcite’s horse to kill the victorious nobleman. Uncontrolled liquid emotion directly challenges authority in The Knight’s Tale, from the quotidian to the divine. While a flood of violent tears menaces Theseus’s realm, the Knight presents the court-regulated “loveris maladye” through images of water contained. Leav- ing the worst of his “manye” behind in Thebes, Chaucer’s Arcite returns to Athenian life by disguising himself as Philostrate, exchanging his “wood” state to “hewen wode, and water bere” for Emelye (l. 1422). When Arcite wanders from Theseus’s court to celebrate May, he roams “al his fille” (l. 1528) until Into a studie he fil sodeynly, As doon thise loveres in hir queynte geres, now in the crope, now doun in the breres, now up, now doun, as boket in a welle. Right as the Friday, soothly for to telle, now it shyneth, now it reyneth faste, Right so kan geery Venus overcaste The hertes of hir folk. (ll. 1530–37) Here, the lover’s moods are depicted by images of water under another’s control. From the metaphor of the alternating dry or wet weather (“now it shyneth, now it reyneth faste”), to the “boket in a welle,” continually pulled up and down by someone else, a higher “geery” power rules over the noble lover. When disguised as Philostrate, Arcite hauls water from a position of servitude in Theseus’s Athens, where he must “drugge and drawe, what so men wol devyse” (l. 1416). According to Chaucer’s analogy, Arcite is the bucket on the rope. The regulated balance of “now up, now doun” directly contrasts with his previous mania in Thebes, when

20 On the contrast between the two suffering knights and the physically invulnerable The- seus, see Patricia Clare Ingham, “Homosociality and Creative Masculinity in the Knight’s Tale,” in Masculinities in Chaucer: Approaches to Maleness in the “Canterbury Tales” and “Troilus and Criseyde,” ed. Peter G. Beidler (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1998): 23–35. The medieval religious tradition of crying women, which demonstrates the empowering potential of tears, can suggest how tears threaten the totality of Theseus’s control. On tears in the romance genre, see Andrew Lynch, “‘now, fye on youre wepynge’: Tears in Medieval English Romance,” Parergon 9.1 (1991): 43–62. 42 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY “turned was al up so doun.” Arcite immediately demonstrates the vertical trajectory described here, for soon after “he fil doun in a traunce / A longe tyme, and after he up sterte” (ll. 1572–73). His fainting is dramatic but momentary; he is down but then up again, ready to continue serving in Theseus’s realm. The Jailer’s Daughter’s pre-madness task of bringing her beloved Palamon water (2.4.22) reverses the post-“manye” occupation of Chaucer’s Arcite, who draws water for the court in order to be near Emelye. But if Arcite’s metaphorical “boket” stays steadily on track and unspilled in The Knight’s Tale, the Jailer’s Daughter increasingly saturates herself with water, both literally and metaphor- ically. When Palamon fails to stay “fast by a brook” and instead leaves her for- ever (2.6.6), she describes her emotional state: I am moped. Food took I none these two days; Sipped some water. I have not closed mine eyes, Save when my lids scoured off their brine. Alas, Dissolve, my life! (3.2.25–29) no longer fetching water for her father’s prisoner, she now neglects to eat and consumes only water. Her eyes become crusted in brine, and she wishes her life would “dissolve.” When she declares herself “moped,” meaning bewildered or fool- ish, she uses a word that audibly overlaps with “mop,” a household tool that absorbs liquid.21 Her watery words recall not only her and Philostrate’s shared labor, but also his metaphors of wells and rain. Yet a major difference separates the description of his courtly devotion from her emotional disarray: here there is no external, guiding force pulling a bucket or changing the weather. Instead, her only controlling authority is her own distressed body, whose eyelids scour off their own brine. While the play’s Palamon and Arcite speak of how their passion for Emilia “enclose[s]” them (3.1.30), the Jailer’s Daughter’s reiterated images, according to Carol Thomas neely, are “of an open, penetrable, metamorphic female body.”22 Her overflowing affect more closely resembles the “infinite teeres” that threaten Theseus’s realm than the balanced “boket” of courtly love.

21 OED Online (Oxford: Oxford UP, June 2017), s.v. “moped, adj.”; and “mop, n.4.” Even if not deliberate, the pun could register in performance. A number of “mop” iterations reflect the peas- ant world of the Jailer’s Daughter. “The rude and common word mopish,” according to Michael MacDonald, described a socially pejorative psychological affliction, “the social antithesis of melancholy.” See Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth-Century Eng- land (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981), 162, 161. The name “Mopsa” also belongs to the folk realm of household tools like mops, as seen in Sidney’s Arcadia and Shakespeare’s own The Winter’s Tale. On Sidney’s Mopsa as a jailer’s daughter, see Ann Thompson, “Jailers’ Daughters in The Arcadia and The Two Noble Kinsmen,” Notes and Queries n. s. 26 (1979): 140–41. 22 neely, Distracted Subjects, 85. CHAUCER’S JAILER’S DAUGHTER 43 The Jailer’s Daughter is a distinctly feminine challenge to the containment of liquid affect, a risk reflected in the humoral theory that persisted from source to play. A preoccupation with the body’s internal liquidity underlies the descrip- tions of Arcite’s “humour malencolik” (l. 1375) in The Knight’s Tale and the Doctor’s diagnosis of the Jailer’s Daughter’s “melancholy humour” (5.2.38). Humoralism was chiefly concerned with the proper balance of specific fluids within the body—melancholia was usually linked to an excess of black bile—but of broader significance here is the excess of all sorts of liquids. As a “semiperme- able, irrigated container,” the humoral body is never completely sealed off from its environment, according to Gail Kern Paster.23 Some bodies, however, main- tain their boundaries better than others. Women’s bodies were thought not only to contain more liquid but also to fail more frequently to control their liquids: “the weaker vessel” of the female body is also the “leaky vessel.”24 Such “leaks” car- ried metaphorical power from Chaucer to Shakespeare, showing the “body as beyond the control of the female subject, and thus as threatening the acquisitive goals of family and its maintenance of status and power.”25 The unsanctioned loss of virginity is one of the dangerous “leaks” to be stopped, exemplified by the paradoxical, iconographic trope of female chastity as “a sieve that does not leak.”26 In The Two Noble Kinsmen, the Jailer’s Daughter is just such a “leaky” woman, refusing to stay within the boundaries of patriarchal structures and readily taking charge. In the morris dance scene, rather than allow a countryman to “flu- ently persuade her to a peace” as the Latin Schoolmaster instructs (3.5.88), the Jailer’s Daughter issues an unusual command to her partner: “I’ll lead” (l. 91).27 She not only springs Palamon from her father’s prison, demonstrating that she can penetrate fortified spaces, but also boldly exhibits a desire that transgresses the standards of behavior for any chaste maid. As the Jailer’s Daughter distances herself from male authority, her world becomes increasingly watery. In the first speech that indicates her changed psychological state, her description of a “leak” moves her away from the world ruled by her father and the duke:

23 Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, nY: Cornell UP, 1993), 8. 24 Paster, Body Embarrassed, 24. 25 Paster, Body Embarrassed, 25. 26 Paster, Body Embarrassed, 50. Paster notes that this image—derived from the Roman story of Tuccia’s virginity test—is a repeated motif in portraits of Queen Elizabeth I, as cataloged in Roy Strong’s Gloriana: The Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), 94–107. 27 For a survey of female power in the performance history of the morris dance scene, see Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich, “Women Dancing the Morris in Fletcher and Shakespeare’s The Two Noble Kinsmen, 1613–2015,” Shakespeare 13.2 (2017): 164–79. 44 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY Yonder’s the sea and there’s a ship; how’t tumbles! And there’s a rock lies watching under water; now, now, it beats upon it; now, now, now! There’s a leak sprung, a sound one! How they cry! Run her before the wind, you’ll lose all else. Up with a course or two and tack about, boys! Good night, good night, you’re gone. —I am very hungry. Would I could find a fine frog; he would tell me news from all parts o’th’ world. Then would I make A carrack of a cockle shell and sail By east and north-east to the king of pygmies, For he tells fortunes rarely. (3.4.5–16) Foreshadowing her role as the director of her subsequent nautical fantasies, she constructs and sinks a ship in her mind then concocts a plan to sail to the king of the pygmies in a cockle shell carrack. If her sanity “leaks” away as the imagined ships become increasingly fantastic, the Jailer’s Daughter’s own role in steering her imagination grows over the course of the speech. This flood of words, a quick progression of watery ideas in soliloquy form, suggests the ver- bosity of the “leaky woman” in medical treatises, which “characteristically link . . . liquid expressiveness to excessive verbal fluency.”28 Her body remains dispro- portionately full of water, as her “I am very hungry” reminds the audience that she still has not consumed solid food. Later in the play, her father will confirm that she is “altogether without appetite, save often drinking; dreaming of another world and a better” (4.3.4–5). As her body’s liquidity increases, the Jailer’s Daughter fashions an alternative to the kinsmen’s story of exclusive courtly romance through these intensifying dreams of “another world.” Her line indicating her ship has been penetrated (“there’s a leak sprung, a sound one!”) marks a transition away from a “sound” mind by evoking the loss of virginity, infusing her aqueous imaginings with sexual meaning. Through these visions, her character transports the watery imagery of Chaucer’s threatening weepers and spilled lovers into Shakespeare and Fletcher’s play. The watery Jailer’s Daughter directly contrasts with the unleaky sieve in the play, Emilia.29 Previously devoted to her childhood “play-fellow” Flavina (1.3.50), Emilia is now kept balanced by the pull of opposing, external forces, like Arcite’s controlled “boket in a welle”: if her brother asked her whom she

28 Paster, Body Embarrassed, 25. 29 Helen Barr says that the Jailer’s Daughter is Emelye/Emilia’s “unruly, prevented part, dis- persed . . . amongst her contemporaries” in Shakespeare’s other Theseus play. See “‘Wrinkled Deep in Time’: Emily and Arcite in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Shakespeare Survey 65 (2012): 12–25, esp. 19. CHAUCER’S JAILER’S DAUGHTER 45 loved, she “had run mad for Arcite; / now, if my sister, more for Palamon” (4.2.48–49). By contrast, The Knight’s Tale suggests a tantalizing association between water and Emelye with the occupatio of her bath: This Emelye, with herte debonaire, Hir body wessh with water of a welle. But hou she dide hir ryte I dar nat telle, But it be any thing in general; And yet it were a game to heeren al. (ll. 2282–86) Supplying the beginning of an erotic image of Emelye splashed with well water, the Knight then refuses to elaborate. Shakespeare and Fletcher, however, keep Emilia safely dry and instead have the Jailer’s Daughter answer this occupatio. In an account of the Jailer’s Daughter’s submersion “in the great lake that lies behind the palace” (4.1.53), the Wooer describes finding her sitting in “knee- deep” water as her careless tresses A wreath of bullrush rounded; about her stuck Thousand fresh water-flowers of several colours, That methought she appeared like the fair nymph That feeds the lake with waters. (ll. 83–87) The Wooer’s speech sensuously submerges the Jailer’s Daughter in the lake, describing how flowers “stuck” to her skin, and her “careless tresses” circled the reeds. He likens her to a “fair nymph,” a familiar female figure in medieval romance, often found near a watery portal to an alternative world.30 Cast as the nymph appearing to “feed” the lake its water, the Jailer’s Daughter realizes the Knight’s suppressed image of the woman’s “body wessh with water.” Just as Arcite’s disorienting “manye” moves from Chaucer’s tale into the play through the Jailer’s Daughter, the omission of Emelye’s bathing body reemerges in the form of the Jailer’s Daughter, too. The described, if not staged, image of the maiden and the riverbank drawing on medieval nymphs and fountains appears earlier in Shakespeare’s canon. In A Lover’s Complaint, the poem printed with Shakespeare’s Sonnets

30 See, for example, Marie de France’s Lanval. For more on female realms and water in medieval literature, see Misty Rae Urban, “Magical Fountains in Middle English Romance,” in The Nature and Function of Water, Baths, Bathing, and Hygiene from Antiquity through the Ren- aissance, ed. Cynthia Kosso and Anne Scott (Leiden, netherlands: Brill, 2009), 427–51; and neil Cartlidge, “The Fairies in the Fountain: Promiscuous Liaisons,” in The Exploitations of Medieval Romance, ed. Laura Ashe, Ivana Djordjević, and Judith Weiss (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010), 15–27. 46 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY in 1609, a speaker narrates how a maiden abandoned by her lover wept into a river, “applying wet to wet” (l. 40).31 The image of these fusing twin sub- stances, wet tears and wet water, also runs through Gertrude’s report of the drowned, “mermaid-like” Ophelia in Hamlet, who lies in the water “like a creature native and indued / Unto that element” (4.7.176, 179–80). In response to this account, Laertes vows to forbid his tears because “too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia” (Hamlet, l. 185): the weeping maiden is again associated with the “weeping brook” (Hamlet, l. 175). These watery sites in Shakespeare seem to provide an external representation of the internal liquidity of the distressed virgin body, which was believed to contain an excess of fluids.32 The liquid emotion of The Knight’s Tale becomes similarly associated with brooks, lakes, and seas when transferred to The Two Noble Kinsmen, and finds a local habitation in the Jailer’s Daughter’s attempted drowning and aquatic visions. In channeling such imagery, Shakespeare and Fletcher echo and intensify the example set by Ophelia. While Gertrude carefully attempts to excuse what appears to be suicide by attributing Ophe- lia’s submersion to other agents, including the breaking “envious sliver” of the tree, and the garments “heavy with their drink” (Hamlet, ll. 173, 181), the Wooer unambiguously states that the Jailer’s Daughter “straight sought the flood” (Two Noble Kinsmen, 4.1.95). Ophelia indeed drowns offstage, but the Jailer’s Daughter survives to voice, and later direct, her own vivid preoccupations with a watery world onstage. Water’s history as a general or medical symbol for life’s instability runs deep, of course, and is not limited to Ophelia, Chaucer, or medieval traditions of nymphs.33 However, the aqueous imagery of The Two Noble Kinsmen, over- whelmingly concentrated in the Jailer’s Daughter, finds a Chaucerian precedent in a plot seemingly unconnected to this metaphor. Unlike Shakespeare’s other late romances, the sea does not figure literally in the action of The Two Noble Kinsmen, yet the play features what Steve Mentz calls the “most dramatic exten-

31 All Shakespeare quotations not from The Two Noble Kinsmen come from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans and J. J. M. Tobin, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). 32 See Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004), esp. 92–93. 33 See, for example, Levinus Lemnius’s medical text The Touchstone of Complexions, trans. Thomas newton (1576), British Library, STC 15456, sig. A3, A8v–A9; and Michel Foucault, History of Madness, ed. Jean Khalfa, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2006), 8–12. Shakespeare’s own engagement with water and the sea has long fasci- nated critics, from the classic study by Caroline Spurgeon, Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1935), esp. 92–100; to, more recently, Steve Mentz, At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean (London: Continuum, 2009); and Dan Brayton, Shakespeare’s Ocean: An Ecocritical Exploration (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2012). CHAUCER’S JAILER’S DAUGHTER 47 sion of shipwreck as a literary artifice” in Shakespeare’s canon.34 The water imagery is so ubiquitous that Sanders even identifies the “two dominant images” of the entire play to be “water and horses.”35 While the horse metaphors have an expository function, since Emilia’s borrowed horse eventually kills Arcite, there is little expository justification for the recurrent water imagery. Instead, Chaucer’s portrayal of dangerously liquid feeling seeps into the play by means of the Jailer’s Daughter. Her tragic attempt to drown herself literalizes the description in The Knight’s Tale of “swownynge” (l. 2819) Emelye after she loses her intended husband: What helpeth it to tarien forth the day To tellen how she weep bothe eve and morwe? For in swich cas wommen have swich sorwe, Whan that hir housbondes ben from hem ago, That for the moore part they sorwen so, Or ellis fallen in swich maladye That at the laste certeinly they dye. (ll. 2820–26) After Arcite’s death in the play, Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Emilia pledges to give “this day . . . to tears” (5.4.98), but her plan to cry one day a year for her lost nobleman is highly restrained in comparison to the Knight’s description of women who “sorwen so / Or ellis fallen in swich maladye” that “they dye.” Instead, it is the Jailer’s Daughter’s watery misery over her lost love that echoes this fatal trajectory. Even after the Wooer (disguised as Palamon) agrees to sleep with her, the Jailer’s Daughter’s last words of the play recall the sorrowful “teeres” of The Knight’s Tale: “But you shall not hurt me,” she tells the Wooer, “If you do, love, I’ll cry” (5.2.111, 112). In a possible “textual effect” of the character’s language, analyses of the Jailer’s Daughter repeatedly employ her watery metaphors: Douglas Bruster says that her “mad coinage floats within the play”; Raphael Lyne designates her as “marooned in her darkly comic subplot”; Kathryn Lynch describes how her narrative “buoyantly reimagines” the main plot; and Helen Cooper finds that the cousins’ love for Emilia “comes across as shallow” in comparison to the deep

34 Steve Mentz, “Shipwreck and Ecology: Toward a Structural Theory of Shakespeare and Romance,” Shakespearean International Yearbook 8 (2008): 165–82, esp. 173. 35 Sanders, “Mixed Messages,” 453. Classically, these two volatile forces were neptune’s domain. In addition to Arcite’s deadly steed, uncontrollable horses appear throughout Chaucer’s First Fragment, as when the clerks must recapture their freed mare in The Reeve’s Tale (ll. 4104–5), or in the description of Alisoun as “wynsynge . . . as is a joly colt” in The Miller’s Tale (l. 3263). Helen Barr connects the Jailer’s Daughter to Alisoun through her “sexual imagination [that] reprises Alison’s horseplay” in Transporting Chaucer (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2014), 170. 48 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY passion of the Jailer’s Daughter.36 Furthermore, the words used to describe the Jailer’s Daughter reflect the watery language favored in critical illustrations of the larger relationship between Chaucer and Shakespeare. The Swan at the Well, Donaldson’s landmark study of Shakespeare and Chaucer, borrows two aqueous metaphors from prominent Renaissance writers to characterize the epony- mous authors in its title: Jonson’s “sweet swan of Avon” drinking from what Spenser calls Chaucer’s “well of English undefyled.”37 The Two Noble Kinsmen itself opens with a similar metaphor to depict the flow of ideas from its source author. Shakespeare and Fletcher claim in the Prologue that they, “Weak as [they] are, and, almost breathless, swim / In this deep water” (ll. 24–25) of Chaucer. The Jailer’s Daughter’s relationship to the source allows us to track not only what of Chaucer’s source material the playwrights chose to adapt, but also how Shakespeare and Fletcher read their Chaucer. The overflowing “teeres” and controlled “boket in a welle,” which express the threat and the containment of feeling in Theseus’s realm, would go unnoticed in traditional methods of source study because they attach to a character who has no correspondent, no “source” in Chaucer. The Jailer’s Daughter, though, does not merely reprise these dominant metaphors of The Knight’s Tale. Rather, she actively rejoins the tale of Pala- mon and Arcite by channeling the “teeres” that become all different kinds of leaks in the First Fragment’s responses to the Knight.

II. THE JAILER’S DAUGHTER’S “QUITInG”: LEAKS In THE FIRST FRAGMEnT The Jailer’s Daughter and her explicit desires “follow” Palamon and Arcite’s story in The Two Noble Kinsmen, just as bawdy tales of village life follow The Knight’s Tale in The Canterbury Tales. Even if Chaucer initially wrote The Knight’s Tale separately, he then grouped the romance with the responses of the pilgrims who begin their storytelling contest at the “Wateryng of Seint Thomas” (l. 826), competing for “a soper at oure aller cost” (l. 799).38 After the Knight’s inaugural story, the drunk Miller promises, “‘I kan a noble tale for the nones, /

36 Bruster, “Politics,” 287; Raphael Lyne, Shakespeare’s Late Work (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007), 102; Lynch, “Three noble Kinsmen,” 87; and Cooper, Shakespeare and the Medieval World, 231 (all emphases added). Similarly, neely summarizes Bruster’s reading as saying that the Jailer’s Daughter is “in a kind of backwater” behind the main plot. See Distracted Subjects, 84n. 37 See Ben Jonson’s prefatory poem in the First Folio, The Norton Facsimile: The First Folio of Shakespeare, prep. Charlton Hinman, intro. Peter W. M. Blayney, 2nd ed. (new York: W. W. norton, 1996), 10; and Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene: Books Three and Four, ed. Dorothy Stephens (Indianapolis, In: Hackett, 2006), 4.2.32.8. Donaldson continues to use watery language when he describes how some of The Knight’s Tale’s “spirit of arbitrariness, of randomness, spills over into [Shakespeare’s] comedy.” See Swan, 43. 38 On the independent origin of the Knight’s Tale and its complex integration with other Tales, see Elizabeth Scala, Absent Narratives, Manuscript Textuality, and Literary Structure in Late Medieval England (new York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), esp. 99–133. CHAUCER’S JAILER’S DAUGHTER 49 With which I wol now quite the Knyghtes tale’” (ll. 3126–27). To “quite,” as the Miller boasts he will do, is to requite, repay, match, or even “retaliate” by besting the previous entry in the contest.39 The pilgrims accomplish this “quiting” by imi- tating and parodying the content of the Knight’s tale, and (as Elizabeth Scala argues) by responding to “what the Knight has self-consciously or rhetorically excluded from his narration.”40 This important interplay among the tales, which encourages reading across the tales instead of reading each tale in isolation, has been well documented.41 The Jailer’s Daughter’s structural position parallels these “quiting” tales, allowing that which is excluded from The Knight’s Tale but developed in its responses—madness; secular village life; comic cruelty; and erotic, feminine desire—to seep into the romance frame of The Two Noble Kins- men. If The Knight’s Tale sets a tragic, teary precedent for the Jailer’s Daughter’s watery expressions of madness, her character also draws from other genres, recreating Chaucer’s generic oscillation between stories in The Canterbury Tales. Entered in the Stationers’ Register as a “tragicomedy,” The Two Noble Kins- men fluctuates between generic poles in its retelling of Chaucer’s romance. Audience responses to the Jailer’s Daughter in performance epitomize the mixed reactions that tragicomedy can produce, as her heartbroken sadness can also cause enjoyment: Hugh Richmond reports that the suicidal Jailer’s Daugh- ter on the stage often generates an “intensely positive response” from the audience, and is “more humorous, more dynamic, and more significant than can easily be perceived on the printed page.”42 While the comedy generated by the Jailer’s Daughter might appear to separate her from the noble Knight’s Tale, it brings her closer to Chaucer’s own associations with both high and low genres in the Renaissance: Ann Thompson observes that “Chaucer the philosophical poet and Chaucer the teller of bawdy stories were confused in the often ambiguous references to him in the literature of the time.”43 Shakespeare and

39 See Lee Patterson on the Miller’s “aggressive” reinterpretation of the Host’s invitation to “quite” the Knight’s tale; the Miller cuts in front of the Monk not merely to match the previous entry but to “retaliate” against it. See Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1991), 244. 40 Scala, Absent Narratives, 125. 41 The relationship between The Knight’s Tale and the tales that follow it, specifically within the First Fragment, is well-trodden territory for scholars. See Benson, Riverside Chaucer, 842n3119. 42 Hugh Richmond, “Performance as Criticism: The Two Noble Kinsmen,” in Shakespeare, Fletcher, 163–85, esp. 184–85 (see n. 13). Conversely, her treatment in the play can also be per- formed and perceived as cruel and pitiable. The Jailer’s Daughter’s noted power in performance, especially in contrast to the story of Palamon and Arcite, aligns her with the more overtly the- atrical “quiting” tales. On the theatricality of the later tales, see, for example, Thompson, Shake- speare’s Chaucer, 167; and Beryl B. Rowland, “The Play of the Miller’s Tale: A Game within a Game,” The Chaucer Review 5.2 (1970): 140–46. 43 Thompson, Shakespeare’s Chaucer, 171. See also Barr, Transporting Chaucer, 166–67. 50 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY Fletcher’s Prologue substantiates this duality, professing a “fear” of shaking Chaucer’s bones with “witless chaff ” (ll. 21, 19), but also embracing lewd jokes from its first line, “new plays and maidenheads are near akin” (l. 1). Chaucer’s reputation in the Renaissance as both the serious, fatherly narrator and the raunchy comedian finds textual evidence in Thomas Speght’s folio edition of The Workes of our Antient and lerned English Poet, Geffrey Chavcer, the collection that Shakespeare and Fletcher probably read.44 Here, the multiple genres of the poet visibly converge: a reader cannot finish The Knight’s Tale without seeing the beginning of The Miller’s Tale.45 When the Prologue of the play imagines Chaucer lamenting a writer who “lighte[ns]” his “famed works” (l. 20), the inseparable context created by the adjacent Canterbury Tales invites, even necessitates, a consideration of his conversing “works” in the First Fragment, both “famed” and “light.” Juxtaposed with the “higher” plot of Palamon and Arcite, the Jailer’s Daugh- ter’s structural position in the play mirrors that of the competing, subversive “lower” tales in Chaucer’s First Fragment; her choice to cast herself as the “miller’s mare” to Palamon’s noble horse is especially telling (5.2.67). Recently, scholars such as Margaret Rogerson have also noted that her character challenges the notion that The Two Noble Kinsmen is exclusively focused on Chaucer’s first tale, and they have found “a clear precedent for [the subplot] in the structure of the opening sequence of Chaucer’s story-telling contest in the fabliaux tales.”46 Embodying this “quiting” within The Two Noble Kinsmen, the Jailer’s Daughter leaks through the boundaries of the tale of noble love to explore what the Knight “dar nat telle.” Her madness, Bruster claims, “licenses speech freer than that of any other female character in Shakespeare’s plays.”47 Such verbal freedom also differentiates her from the kinsmen. When Palamon and Arcite drink to their past sexual exploits in the play, Arcite never finishes his story of a seduction in the woods. Instead, he breaks off before its most erotic moment with a “Hey ho,” an occupatio of sorts that Palamon interprets as

44 See Teramura, “Anxiety,” 544–45; and Devani Singh, “‘In his old dress’: Packaging Thomas Speght’s Chaucer for Renaissance Readers,” The Chaucer Review 51.4 (2016): 478–502. 45 In the 1598 edition, the first tale concludes with an indication of what will come next: “Here endeth the Knights tale, and here foloweth the Millers Prologue” (fol. 11). The 1602 edition does not share this connecting inscription, but The Miller’s Tale begins on a page facing the final page of The Knight’s Tale (fols. 10v–11). See The workes of our antient and lerned English poet, Geffrey Chavcer, The Harry Ransom Center, (1598, STC 5077; 1602, STC 5080). 46 Margaret Rogerson, “Reading Chaucer ‘in Parts’: The Knight’s Tale and The Two Noble Kinsmen,” in Storytelling: Critical and Creative Approaches, ed. Jan Shaw, Philippa Kelly, and L. E. Semler (new York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 167–80, esp. 170. See also Barr, Transport- ing Chaucer, 166–73; and Lynch, “Three noble Kinsmen,” 87. 47 Bruster, “Politics,” 288. For a differing view on her “wildness” as a necessary outlet for The- seus’s control, see Green, “‘A mad woman?,” 131–32. CHAUCER’S JAILER’S DAUGHTER 51 a sigh for Emilia (3.3.42). The cousins’ previous promiscuity and current erotic desires are now only hinted at rather than fully articulated, but the Jailer’s Daughter explicitly describes her wish to be seduced by Palamon. When she wonders aloud, “what should I do to make him know I love him? / For I would fain enjoy him” (2.4.29–30), she expresses from the margins what the kinsmen can no longer seem to say or do in Theseus’s realm. In Chaucer’s First Fragment, The Miller’s Tale and The Reeve’s Tale, like The Two Noble Kinsmen, treat The Knight’s Tale as an initial “source” text, mining it for material to incorporate, render more explicit, and parody. Chaucer’s “quiting” provides Shakespeare and Fletcher with a particular strategy: their Jailer’s Daughter humorously, erotically, and theatrically embodies the fabliau responses to the Knight. Though some might recoil, other audience members might laugh when the Doctor instructs the Wooer to dress as Palamon and “please her appetite” in order to “cure” the Jailer’s Daughter (5.2.36, 37). This deception—a switch of the woman’s sexual partner—replays the bed-tricks of The Reeve’s Tale, which themselves comically adapt Emelye’s own partner-swap at the conclusion of The Knight’s Tale.48 In The Reeve’s Tale, a miller (the Reeve “quites” the Miller with this choice of profession) is tricked by two clerks who “swyve” the women of his household without their consent: under the cover of darkness, Aleyn sneaks up on the daughter before she can protest, and John masquerades as the wife’s husband.49 These rapes are explicitly portrayed as part of a “‘wikked jape’” (l. 4201) that gives the women pleasure: the wife is said to enjoy “so myrie a fit” (l. 4230), and the daughter later helps Aleyn deceive her father. When the tale says that John “priketh” the wife “harde and depe as he were mad” (l. 4231), madness is closely associated with sexuality and humor. The Jailer’s Daughter’s cure reprises this logic of sexual deception as a “wikked jape,” replacing her specific desire for Palamon with a deceptive, general fulfillment of sexual desire. Yet she also figures the cruelty in this humor. She tells the fake Palamon that they will sleep together, but she remains in the dark as to his true identity and she fears

48 For a similar reading of the “cure” as a type of bed-trick, see Cooper, Shakespeare and the Medieval World, 231; and Rogerson, “Reading Chaucer,” 170. Tangentially, the prison break in Chaucer’s Boccaccian source features Palamon dressing up as a doctor as his servant takes Pala- mon’s place by wearing his clothes; see Giovanni Boccaccio, Teseida delle nozze d’Emilia, ed. Alberto Limentani, in Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, vol. 2 (Milan: Mondadori, 1964), book 5, canto 25. 49 On rape in The Reeve’s Tale, see nicole nolan Sidhu, “‘To Late for to Crie’: Female Desire, Fabliau Politics, and Classical Legend in Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale,” Exemplaria 21.1 (2009): 3–23. On the relationship between rape and the bed-trick device in drama, see Emily Detmer-Goebel, “Shakespeare’s Bed-Tricks: Finding Justice in Lies?,” in Justice, Women, and Power in English Renaissance Drama, ed. Andrew Majeske and Emily Detmer-Goebel (Madison, nJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2009), 118–39. 52 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY that he could hurt her. Her character thus experiences and reproduces for the audience the conflicting affective possibilities inherent in The Knight’s Tale and explicitly realized in the Reeve’s response to it. Again, liquid imagery in The Reeve’s Tale marks the presence of female sexuality and the realities of the body as the patriarchal figure of the miller is “quited” by his inability to control the “leakage” of the women in his household. His wife, first described “as digne as water in a dich” (l. 3964), goes to bed, “hir joly whistle wel ywet” (l. 4155) with ale, ventures out to “pisse” (l. 4215), returns to find that the cradle where she “yeve the child to sowke” (l. 4157) was moved, then mistakenly has the “fit” (l. 4230) with John. Meanwhile, her daughter jeop- ardizes the purity of her blood “lynage” (l. 4272), about which her father absurdly obsesses. Aiding Aleyn in his flight from her father, she tells him where “Thou shalt a cake of half a busshel fynde That was ymaked of thyn owene mele, Which that I heelp my sire for to stele. And, goode lemman, God thee save and kepe!” And with that word almoost she gan to wepe. (ll. 4244–48) Parting with her beloved in tears, the miller’s daughter deceives her father and undermines his profession by helping to steal his “mele,” just as the Jailer’s Daughter aids Palamon in escaping from her father’s jail, risking not only her father’s job but also his life. The female members of the household thus become the “leaks” through which the “quiting” occurs in The Reeve’s Tale. A woman crossing such boundaries of the home, Paster observes, is a social leak, “even potentially a flood,” defying the confines of the patriarchal structure.50 With no desire to be a leak-proof sieve herself, the Jailer’s Daughter liberates Palamon, infusing the underlying social anxiety in The Two Noble Kinsmen with the imagery of sprung leaks. The Miller takes the excessive tears and “manye” of The Knight’s Tale and chooses to feature a “leaky,” desiring woman and mad delusions of uncontrollable water in his own tale. nicholas, the clerk staying with the carpenter John and his much younger wife, Alisoun, fakes a long trance and warns John of a flood worse than noah’s, a shower so hideous that “‘in lasse than an hour / Shal al be dreynt’” (ll. 3519–20). Ignoring God’s promise in Genesis, John fully believes his clerk’s story, much to the delight of the townspeople who declare him mad. Divine intervention is thus noticeably absent in this tale of a carpenter and his wife awaiting a flood. (Similarly, the Jailer’s Daughter’s world is markedly secular: her provincial story line appears to occupy the space vacated

50 Paster, Body Embarrassed, 46. CHAUCER’S JAILER’S DAUGHTER 53 through Shakespeare and Fletcher’s removal of the intervening gods present in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale.51) With no god in sight, the Miller’s jealous carpenter begins to lose his grasp on reality: Lo, which a greet thyng is affeccioun! Men may dyen of ymaginacioun, So depe may impressioun be take. This sely carpenter bigynneth quake; Hym thynketh verraily that he may see noees flood come walwynge as the see To drenchen Alisoun, his hony deere. He wepeth, weyleth, maketh sory cheere. (ll. 3611–18) Fearful of the prospect of a “dreynt” (l. 3520) Alisoun, the weeping husband envisions the great flood, then dutifully takes the recommended precautionary steps. Alisoun and nicholas “tolden every man that [John] was wood” (l. 3833), and at the tale’s conclusion “the folk gan laughen at his fantasye” (l. 3840). Chaucer’s model of comic, unrequited desire and “wood” behavior in a village setting spills into The Two Noble Kinsmen by way of the Jailer’s Daughter. John’s tubs and the imagined flood are, like the Jailer’s Daughter’s most significant delusions, all about water. Her character is the structural correspondent to these conceptions of madness on the margins of The Knight’s Tale: Arcite’s debilitating Theban “manye,” and John’s laughable “fantasye” of “noees flood.” Like Chaucer, Shakespeare and Fletcher use their nonaristocratic character’s vision of flooding waters and a boat in which to sail them to illustrate madness in their play. The Jailer’s Daughter demands of her father:

DAUGHTER And now direct your course to th’ wood, where Palamon Lies longing for me. For the tackling, Let me alone; come, weigh, my hearts, cheerily! ALL [severally] Ugh! Ugh! Ugh! ’Tis up!—The wind’s fair!—Top the bowline!— Out with the mainsail!—Where’s your whistle, master? (4.1.143–48) She also imagines a world of water underneath her boat, but, unlike the cuck- olded John in The Miller’s Tale, the Jailer’s Daughter directs a crew that ultimately obeys her words: she orders her father, the “master” of the ship and the

51 In contrast, Shakespeare’s other play involving Hippolyta and Theseus, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, prominently stages supernatural intercessions. The choice to remove the gods notably diverges from Shakespeare’s frequent use of god-figures in his other late plays: Jupiter in Cymbeline; “Time” and Apollo’s oracle in The Winter’s Tale; Juno, Ceres, and Iris, as well as god-like Prospero and the magical island inhabitants in The Tempest; even, it could be argued, Gower in Pericles. 54 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY source of the only name the play gives her, to “direct your course to th’ woods,” deftly steering her imaginary vessel toward Palamon. She’s a natural; Bruster observes that “her shouted instructions to the sailors . . . display a strange famil- iarity with the vocabulary of their occupation.”52 Echoing the Prologue’s description of how Shakespeare and Fletcher “tack about” in Chaucer’s “deep water” (ll. 26, 25), the Jailer’s Daughter commands “For the tackling, / Let me alone.”53 Her own scene of nautical delusion does not directly recreate the humiliation of John from The Miller’s Tale: she is not simply his analogue, dropped into the frame of The Knight’s Tale. Instead, the Jailer’s Daughter, a “dreynt” woman herself, causes the imagery and thematic concerns of The Miller’s Tale to ripple through the elite romance of Palamon and Arcite. When John crashes into the hard ground of reality, within the larger context of the First Fragment his “fantayse” and subsequent plunge comically undercut Arcite’s “manye” and fatal fall from his horse.54 Chaucer repeats the exact phrase for John’s fall that he uses to describe a knight’s ominous collapse when a horse stumbles in the tournament for Emelye: “doun gooth al” (ll. 2613, 3821). Simi- larly, the Jailer’s Daughter’s parallel moment of madness on public display— when she sails her own boat in imagined waters—directly “quites” the “vessels” of Arcite and Palamon. In the play, Pirithous recounts how Arcite was bucked from Emilia’s horse: Backward the jade comes o’er and his full poise Becomes the rider’s load. Yet is he living, But such a vessel ’tis, that floats but for The surge that next approaches. (5.4.81–84) Arcite may avoid succumbing to “manye” in Theseus’s realm, but he ultimately, and fatally, cannot steer his “vessel” in Athens. While the Jailer’s Daughter commands her imaginary ship, he “floats” passively, vulnerable to “the surge that next approaches.” Arcite initially advised Palamon that they leave Thebes and its temptations because it was useless to “swim” against its “common stream” (1.2.7, 10), but in Athens they also cannot escape their fate as “vessels” subject to external powers. Lamenting this lack of agency before the contest for Emilia, Arcite tells Palamon how they hoist “the sails that must these vessels port, even where / The heavenly limiter pleases” (5.1.29–30). The two kinsmen indeed prove powerless within the “limiter’s” already written script; they are pulled by the

52 Bruster, “Politics,” 284. 53 On the possible sexual connotations of “tacking,” see Barr, “Wrinkled Deep,” 19. 54 See Tasioulas, “‘Dying of imagination,’” for more on the connections between John’s “fantasye” and Arcite’s “manye” in the First Fragment. CHAUCER’S JAILER’S DAUGHTER 55 “surge” of an established source story, like the controlled “boket in a welle” moving up and down. The Prologue initially attempts to figure its text like com- modified, “compliant women (‘new Playes, and Maydenheads are neare a kin’),” as Jeffrey Masten observes.55 Ultimately, however, it is the kinsmen who follow Chaucer’s set tale as one-to-one correspondents with their predecessors, while the Jailer’s Daughter contains many different “quiting” possibilities. By reading beyond direct character analogues, we see how her particular relationship to the First Fragment challenges the gendered conclusions of the story it recreates. The Jailer’s Daughter’s “quiting” wetness refracts the joke at the climax of The Miller’s Tale: men’s comic inability to predict or control both water and a wet woman. Motivated by the threat of “reyn . . . so wilde and wood” (l. 3517) that comes “to drenchen Alisoun” (l. 3617), John fears a flood that never materializes. He assumes, “now comth nowelis flood!” (l. 3818), after nicholas cries desper- ately for “‘water!’ as he were wood” (l. 3817) because his “toute” has been scorched (l. 3812). The tale’s climax hinges on this call for “Water!” as the word causes the separate story lines to comically converge. no flood absorbs John’s fall when “doun gooth al,” and no water comes to relieve nicholas’s pain. Alisoun, meanwhile, in a bawdy play on female “wetness,” never requires water but rather exudes it. She mocks her aspiring courtly lover, “amorous Absolon” (l. 3657), by tricking him into kissing her “nether ye” (l. 3852). This intimate encounter with a woman’s body is far too wet for Absolon, who tries to dry his lips by rubbing them “with dust, with sond, with straw, with clooth, with chippes” (l. 3748).56 Alisoun, like the Jailer’s Daughter, does not end up with her story’s courtly lover.57 In each case, the earnestness of a noble (or would-be noble) lover’s abstract “love-longynge” is incompatible with the real, unideal “wetness” of a woman’s body. At the conclusion of The Miller’s Tale, John is “aswowne,” “Absolon hath kist hir nether ye, / And nicholas is scalded in the towte” (ll. 3852–53). The pilgrims, however, hear nothing of Alisoun. Similarly, the fate of the Jailer’s Daughter remains ambiguous in the final scene of the play: she is not required to appear onstage again after leaving with the Wooer.58 Theseus definitively eulogizes Arcite by remarking that “his part is played and, though it were too short, / He did it well” (5.4.102–3). If Arcite’s role in Theseus’s play is finished, the Jailer’s Daughter continues to gloss the Miller’s and Reeve’s responses to the

55 Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), 8. 56 Even Absolon’s disgusted response to the encounter has an aqueous dimension. The Miller tells us that “of paramours he sette nat a kers” (l. 3756): a “kers” is a watercress. 57 On Alisoun’s rebuttal of Absolon’s “courtly” love, see Peter G. Beidler, “Art and Scatology in the Miller’s Tale,” The Chaucer Review 12.2 (1977): 90–102. 58 Some modern productions have chosen to show that the “cure” fails by adding a final, mad reappearance for her. See Potter, introduction to Two Noble Kinsmen, 98, 106. 56 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY Knight’s portrayal of masculinity and romance. The last time we hear of her is when Palamon, before his scheduled beheading, finally recognizes that the Jailer’s “gentle daughter gave me freedom once” (l. 24). When the Jailer tells him that she is “well restored / And to be married shortly” (ll. 27–28), Palamon asks:

PALAMOn Commend me to her and, to piece her portion, Tender her this. [Gives him his purse.] 1 KnIGHT nay, let’s be offerers all. 2 KnIGHT Is it a maid? PALAMOn Verily I think so. A right good creature, more to me deserving Than I can ’quite or speak of. THE KnIGHTS [to Jailer]: Commend us to her. They give their purses. (ll. 31–35) Using the very term that structures The Canterbury Tales, Palamon acknowledges that he cannot “’quite” this maid, for she is more “deserving” than he can “speak of.” The drunken Miller had aimed to “quite the Knyghtes tale,” and here we see that the Jailer’s Daughter, though she has not won Palamon, makes good on the Miller’s claim and wins the “quiting” contest. Rather than “a soper at oure aller cost,” as promised to the victorious pilgrim, all “give their purses” to the Jailer’s Daughter. She desires and liberates Palamon’s Chaucerian figure, but then ultimately out-“quites” him and the myth of courtly love. “Dreynt” Allison, “wood” John and his “fantasye” flood, the permeable daughter and wife in The Reeve’s Tale, the Knight’s “blubbered queens,” the bathing Emelye, and the “al up so doun” Arcite in Thebes: the Jailer’s Daughter unites this array of Chaucerian characters and motifs. Shakespeare and Fletcher channel the “quiting” strategy of the First Fragment through her character, splicing together elements from the tales to underscore its inherent antagonisms. She is the mad, desirous lover and the leaky woman as figured across the First Fragment, but she also replays the source collection’s movement from tragic sorrow to comic bawdi- ness, manifested in the watery imagery that runs through each of the tales: the “infinite” tears (l. 2827) of The Knight’s Tale, the “fantayse” flood of The Miller’s Tale, and the female bodily leaks of The Reeve’s Tale.59 In The Two Noble Kinsmen, Shakespeare and Fletcher reproduce and repurpose the First Fragment, drawing together its diverse genres, social positions, and texts in the single character of the Jailer’s Daughter. By tracking the Jailer’s Daughter’s relationship to the source, we chart how Shakespeare and Fletcher “swim / In this deep water” of Chaucer.

59 Even the short Cook’s Tale, the unfinished final text in the First Fragment, is about a food merchant’s apprentice who “loved bet the taverne than the shoppe” (l. 4376), and thus, like the Jailer’s Daughter, forsakes food for liquid.