The Two Noble Kinsmen is an English tragicomedy of the beginning of the 17th century, a dramatic adaptation of The Knight's Tale from Jeffrey Chaucer 's Canterbury Tales . It was written and staged in 1613-1614; played at the London Blackfriars Theater with the King ’s Servants cast, which included William Shakespeare .
| Two noble relatives | |
|---|---|
| English The Two Noble Kinsmen | |
 Title page of the first edition | |
| Genre | tragicomedy |
| Author | John Fletcher William Shakespeare |
| Original language | English |
| Date of writing | 1613-1614 |
| Date of first publication | 1634 |
| Electronic version | |
In 1634, it was registered in the register of the guild of book publishers as a work of William Shakespeare and John Fletcher , Shakespeare's junior contemporary, who co-authored with him also Henry VIII and Cardenio , and after Shakespeare left the business, he became the main playwright of the troupe. In the same year it was first published ( in-quarto ); The next time it was published as part of the second collected works of Fletcher and his various co-authors in 1679.
For a long time, the authorship of Shakespeare was considered dubious - primarily for artistic reasons [1] ; At present, a consensus has emerged in literary criticism that Shakespeare actually participated in the creation of the play [2] .
Content
- 1 Contents
- 2 Text Attribution
- 3 Russian translations
- 4 notes
- 5 Links
Contents
By style, the play closely adjoins other romantic dramas of the last, “tragicomic” stage in Shakespeare's work - Pericles (also co-authored), Cymbelin , The Winter's Tale and The Tempest , with the characteristic features of the dramaturgy of the crisis period English humanism [3] in "Two Noble Relatives" are even more pronounced [4] . One of the manifestations, in the words of Igor Ratsky , of “disharmonious alienation”, in particular, can be seen in the fact that lovers in the play declare their feelings, but practically do not communicate with objects of their love.
Illustration for Act I, scene 5. Around 1895.
The main plot is borrowed from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the works of which Shakespeare had already addressed earlier in Troilus and Cressida .
Theseus , Duke of Athens , celebrates the marriage of Queen of the Amazons Ippolita . The wedding ceremony is interrupted by three queens - the widows of heroes who died during the siege of Thebes ; they plead with Theseus to go to war against the ruler of Thebes of Creon , who wickedly refused the burial of dead enemies.
Theseus agrees to help the queens, defeats Creon and captures two of his nephews - cousins and close friends of Arquit [5] and Palamon (“relatives” from the title). Queens bury their husbands; Arkita and Palamona are imprisoned for noble prisoners. Seeing from the window the sister of Hippolyta Emilia walking in the garden, they both fall in love with her, becoming friends from friends.
Theseus frees Arkite and expels him from Athens. Then Palamon succeeds in escaping from captivity. Having met, the brothers continue the rivalry. Theseus decides that their dispute should be decided by a public duel: Emilia will get the worthy of the two.
Before the battle, Arkith prays to Mars for victory; The Palamon prays to Venus to receive Emilia; Emilia prays to Diana , wanting to become the wife of the one who loves more. As a result, all three prayers are fulfilled: Arquit defeats the Palamon, but after the fight dies, crushed by a fallen horse, and Emilia is extradited as Palamona.
A side story is the story of the jailer’s daughter going crazy with a hopeless love for the Palamon. It is absent from Chaucer and is entirely developed by the authors of the play.
Text Attribution
Hallet Smith in the authoritative publication “ ”, based on a detailed study of the text, gives the following division of fragments of tragicomedy between two playwrights [6] :
Shakespeare: Act I, Scenes 1-3; Act II, scene 1; Act III, scene 1; Act V, Scene 1 (lines 34-173) and 3-4.
Fletcher: prologue; Act II, Scene 2-6; Act III, Scenes 2-6; Act IV, Scenes 1 and 3; Act V, Scene 1 (lines 1–33) and 2; epilogue.
Unclear authorship: Act I, scenes 4-5; Act IV, scene 2.
Other Shakespeare scholars, beginning in the mid-20th century, mainly came to similar, albeit different in detail conclusions. For example, Peter Ackroyd is expressed as follows: “Shakespeare ... defined the basic structure of the play by writing the entire first act and parts of the last three; he could also go over the completed text, paraphrasing and supplementing it at his discretion ” [7] .
Russian translations
The first translation of “Two Noble Relatives” into Russian was made by Nikolai Kholodkovsky for the complete works of Shakespeare in the “Library of Great Writers” edited by Semyon Vengerov ; It was published in 1903 [8] . This is a typical representative of Shakespeare’s comparatively high-quality pre-revolutionary translations, which, according to Alexander Anikst ’s description, “were clear, expressive, but sometimes somewhat verbose,” “did not reproduce Shakespeare’s complicated metaphors” and had “a tendency to smooth out“ rude “expressions” [9] .
In Soviet times, the translation of Kholodkovsky was not reprinted, and new translations of the play were also not carried out [10] .
The second Russian translation was made by Svetlana Likhacheva in 2015 for the proposed new complete works of Shakespeare. An excerpt from the translation (Act II, scene 2) was published in 2016 in the journal Foreign Literature [11] .
Notes
- ↑ For an example of argumentation, see the preface to the first Russian edition .
- ↑ Evidence for Authorship: Essays on Problems of Attribution. Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1966. - pp. 486-494, 433-435, 467-469.
- ↑ Igor Ratsky. The problem of tragicomedy and the last plays of Shakespeare / Theater, 1971, No. 2.
- ↑ Roger Holdsworth. Anti-Comedy in The Two Noble Kinsmen / Memoria di Shakespeare. A Journal of Shakespearean Studies. No. 5, 2018. - pp. 103-117.
- ↑ The names of the heroes are quoted by Nikolai Kholodkovsky. Translated by Svetlana Likhacheva Arcite - "Arsit"; in the Russian translation of Choser's “Knight's Tale” by Osip Rumer, the corresponding character is “Arsita”.
- ↑ The Riverside Shakespeare. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1974. - p. 1640.
- ↑ Peter Ackroyd. Shakespeare. Biography. - M .: Publishing house Kolibri, 2010. - Page 701.
- ↑ Shakespeare V. Two noble relatives. Translation by N. Kholodkovsky. With a preface by R. Boyle // Shakespeare V. Complete Works / Library of Great Writers, ed. S. A. Vengerova. St. Petersburg: Brockhaus — Efron, 1903.V. 5. - S. 227–288.
- ↑ Alexander Anikst. The first editions of Shakespeare. - M .: Book, 1974. - Page 156.
- ↑ "... this is our only publication in which the play" Two Noble Relatives "is written by Shakespeare in collaboration with John Fletcher ..." - Alexander Anikst, ibid.
- ↑ As an appendix to the note: Sergey Radlov. On the Complete Works of Shakespeare / Foreign Literature, 2016, No. 5. - Page 284-287.
Links
- "The Two Noble Kinsmen" - the original text of the play in the English Wikisource
- “Two noble relatives” translated by Nikolai Kholodkovsky
- Excerpt from the translation of Svetlana Likhacheva
- Trailer for the production of 2018 in the restored Globus Theater - shows the dance from Act III, scene 5 ( YouTube )