them to the height of bliss and that such friendship as theirs could not possibly be severed.
At that moment, though, Emilia and a maid come into the garden adjoining the prison. They gather flowers and Emilia comments on the myth of Narcissus (see page I-10).
Even while Palamon and Arcite are swearing total friendship, first Palamon, then Arcite, sees Emilia from a window and instantly (such is the convention of courtly love) falls entirely in love with her to the point where there is no room for any other emotion.
The two friends are suddenly competitors and Palamon claims sole right to the love since he saw Emilia first and called Arcite's attention to her. Arcite, however, points out that he too is subject to passions and says:
Why then would you deal so cunningly,
So strangely, so unlike a noble kinsman,
To love alone?
- Act II, scene i, lines 250-52
Here is the reference from which the title of the play is taken. Palamon and Arcite are "the two noble kinsmen."
... against the Maying
The quarrel between them is suspended when Arcite is called away. The news is quickly brought back to Palamon that Arcite, on Pirithous' request, has been released from prison, but banished forever from Athens.
Palamon fears that Arcite, free, may yet lead an army back to Athens to try to win Emilia. Arcite, on the other hand, as he takes the road back to Thebes, fears that Palamon, in Athens, though imprisoned, may have an opportunity to woo and win Emilia.
At this point, Arcite comes upon a group of country people intent on a holiday. One of them says, in fact:
Do we all hold, against the Maying?
- Act II, scene ii, line 36
Here, as in A Midsummer Night's Dream, that other play set against the Theseus-Hippolyta marriage, we have a group of members of the lower classes arranging a rustic performance. It is a May Day celebration, and A Midsummer Night's Dream seems to have taken place at May Day too (see page I-45).
Arcite decides to violate the exile order, join the countrymen, and in rustic guise participate in the athletic contests that accompany the May Day celebration.
As we might expect, he wins at wrestling before the eyes of Theseus and the court (who fail to recognize him-all disguises are effective in Shakespearean plays). Arcite even has the happiness of talking to Emilia and being accepted as her servant.
... the King of Pigmies
Arcite does not, however, have it all his own way. The Jailer's Daughter has fallen in love with Palamon and has let him out of his jail cell, though unable, at the moment, to arrange his liberation from the chains upon him.
Palamon finds Arcite and challenges him to a duel, but their old friendship is not entirely gone. Arcite helps him hide, then gets him food and wine, together with files with which to remove the shackles. They even try to reminisce fondly about earlier loves that did not come between them, but then Emilia's name comes up and they are ready for slaughter again.
Meanwhile, however, the poor Daughter, in a series of short scenes by herself, makes a gradual descent from love for Palamon, to a passionate search for him so that she might file off the shackles, to heartbreak at being unable to find him and fearing him dead, and, at last, to madness. She begins to talk nonsense built about her desire to know of the lost and absent Palamon:
Would I could find a fine frog; he would tell me
News from all parts o'th'world; then would I make
A carack of a cockleshell, and sail
By east and north-east to the King of Pigmies,
For he tells fortunes rarely.
- Act III, scene iv, lines 12-16
The Pygmies are first mentioned in Homer's Iliad, as a dwarfish people who perpetually war against cranes (and who, one would suppose, are therefore small enough to be eaten by cranes). The very word "pygmy" comes from a Greek word meaning the length of the arm from elbow to knuckles, which would imply that the little creatures were about a foot high. They were supposed to live somewhere in Ethiopia, the Greek name for the mysterious regions south of Egypt.
By modern times the Pygmies were dismissed as but another figment of the fertile Greek imagination, but then, oddly enough, a race of short human beings (not one foot high, to be sure, but averaging some four feet high) were discovered in central Africa in the nineteenth century.
It seems fairly reasonable to suppose that some of them were