ABSTRACT
From a certain point of view, the Jailer’s Daughter in William Shakespeare and John Fletcher’s Two Noble Kinsmen comes across as a strikingly modern figure. A teenage girl just approaching marriageable age, she lives in a single-parent household and, notwithstanding her father’s counsel, falls madly in love with a man both unsuitable and unattainable. Finally grasping the impossibility of her desires, she loses her reason and her behavior becomes unruly and uncontrollable. She runs away from home and becomes a ‘street’ person, calling attention to herself through wild and unconventional dress, overly friendly overtures to strangers, and public exhibitionism. A particular mark of her indecorum is her refusal to eat. As her anxious father describes her, ‘She is continually in a harmless distemper, sleeps little, altogether without appetite, save often drinking, dreaming of another world and a better; and what broken piece of matter soe’er she’s about, the name of Palamon lards it, that she farces ev’ry business withal, fits it to every question’ (IV. iii. 3-8).1 If the plot of generational conflict, with the stock figures of the fretful father and the hormonally-driven teenage girl, seems predictable and familiar up to this point, the next turn of this plot categorically demonstrates to us that we have entered a culture far different from our own, with curious notions regarding the scope of parental authority, the nature and makeup of female sexuality, and the relationship between private and public arenas. We discover that, on the advice of a learned doctor consulted by the father, one of the suitors of the daughter ‘cures’ her by pretending he is the man she loves. He sleeps with her, and the last we hear of the Jailer’s Daughter in the play is that she is soon to be wed, presumably to the suitor.
