Counting to One: ‘One Flesh’ Marriage in Shakespeare and Fletcher’s The Two Noble Kinsmen

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay builds on scholarship surrounding the foreclosure of same-sex love and friendship in Shakespeare and Fletcher’s The Two Noble Kinsmen to argue that the play also struggles to realise marriage as a union of man and wife into ‘one flesh’. At turns mocking and subscribing to the trope of Palamon and Arcite as one person, the play’s marriage plot stumbles over the problem of how to create a monogamous heterosexual couple. By reading The Two Noble Kinsmen in relation to The Winter’s Tale and its handling of similar questions surrounding the identity of friends and spouses, this essay argues that Shakespeare and Fletcher's play highlights the impossibility of counting two as one in a fallen world. The tragicomedy reaches its ‘happy’ marital ending at the expense of its repeated suggestions that husband and wife, unlike Adam and Eve, are one with others before they marry. The plot summarily compels the creation of the married couple even as the play repeatedly reminds its audience that the couple is a fiction predicated on the denial of one’s oneness with others.