“I am not against your faith yet I continue mine”: Virginal Vocation in The Two Noble Kinsmen

In the first act of William Shakespeare and John Fletcher’s The Two Noble Kinsmen (c. 1614), the Amazon princess Emilia offers a striking defense of virginity and female community over and against Hippolyta’s praise of marriage. As she contemplates the virtuous friendship of Theseus and Pirithous, Emilia reminisces about her relationship with a childhood friend, Flavina. This moment is a conspicuous addition to Shakespeare and Fletcher’s primary source for the play, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, which instead begins with an elision of Hippolyta’s subjugation in favor of Theseus’s triumphal procession back to Athens. In The Two Noble Kinsmen, Emilia offers this image of idealized virginal homosociality as an alternative mode of affiliation in opposition to the patriarchal society into which she and Hippolyta have been transported.¹ While Emilia reassures her sister that Theseus will subordinate his affection for Pirithous to his new love for Hippolyta, she nonetheless believes that she herself will never abandon her commitment to homosocial community in order to marry. Although Hippolyta insists that Emilia will eventually long for a husband, their debate ends in a stalemate when Emilia tells her “I am not / Against your faith, yet I continue mine” (1.3.96–97).

Emilia’s allegiance to homosocial community, coded as faith, shapes Shakespeare and Fletcher’s repurposing of Chaucer’s Amazons in their stage romance. Notably, the figure of the Amazon would have held polemical currency for both Shakespeare and Fletcher. Kathryn Schwarz argues that in the early modern period, “stories about Amazons are testing grounds for social conventions, playing out the relationships between homosocial and heterosocial systems of connection that produce the domestic.” In many such Amazon narratives, “formulations of social normativity are structured through, rather than against or in spite of, representations of a socially deviant sexual identity,” and certain “stories about Amazons theorize marriage rather than oppose it.”² Following Schwarz’s work, Karma Lochrie has demonstrated that the figure of the Amazon was just as multivalent for Chaucer and his contemporaries as it would be for Shakespeare and Fletcher two centuries later. In the late medieval period, Amazons could embody “a fantasy not only of something lost but of something that remains to be encountered, of a time both past and enduring, and of an exotic terra incognita at the edge of the known world and, at the same time, a dangerously proximate space with respect to Western culture.”³

By provoking anxieties about female agency and chastity, the stereotype of the Amazon has much in common with the stereotype of the nun in late medieval and post-Reformation English literature. The potential similitude between the matriarchal society of the Amazons and the convent was recurrently exploited throughout these periods. Lochrie notes that “the sexuality of the Amazon, with its uncanny nod to the theologically derived ideal of female chastity and procreation as the telos for all sexual acts, threatens to dismantle that very ideal through hypertrophy and mimicry. Like the female saint, the Amazon assumes a queer virginity that grants her certain exemptions from femininity rather than reinforcing the cultural gender ideal.”⁴ These competing forms of virginity were so often compared in medieval polemic and hagiography that Elizabeth J. Bryan has traced several medieval English versions of the life of St. Ursula that trade on the juxtaposition of Amazons and militant virgins to “expose the potential for Ursulines to play at Amazons.”⁵ The Amazonian devotees of Diana in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale and Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Two Noble Kinsmen suggest that these legendary women could also be coded as nuns and encapsulate contemporary anxieties about the autonomy afforded by female celibacy.

This article posits that Emilia and Hippolyta’s conflicting views on marriage in The Two Noble Kinsmen mirror the orientation of two different “faiths”: on the one hand, the vestiges of a medieval, Catholic perspective inherited from The Knight’s Tale, in which vowed virginity was a permissible and even laudable vocation; and on the other hand, the emergent...