Gender and Power Theme Analysis

The female characters in The Two Noble Kinsmen don’t enjoy the same freedoms and intellectual treatment as the male characters, largely because of the sexist cultural climate in which the play was written. Although women hold some power or agency, they often lack the means to exercise this power directly and must convey their thoughts and wishes through male characters. For example, Emilia convinces Theseus to spare Palamon and Arcite their lives in Act 3, Scene 6, but not by her power of persuasion alone. Instead, Emilia convinces Theseus by appealing to an earlier oath he made to give Emilia anything she wanted. In other words, Emilia persuades Theseus to spare the cousins’ lives not because she is particularly persuasive, but because Theseus is concerned about the negative ramifications breaking an oath would have on his reputation as a chivalrous nobleman. 

But the play’s women are hardly powerless. Often, female characters cast a more perceptive, attentive, and critical gaze at the issues male characters accept without question. For example, in Act 5, Scene 4, while Theseus happily accepts the odd twist of fate that leaves Arcite mortally wounded and Palamon the winner of Emilia’s hand in marriage, Emilia and Hippolyta are less convinced that the cousins’ fates were really so favorable. “Is this winning?” asks Emilia. Hippolyta, too, observes what a “pity” it is that Arcite and Palamon’s obsession with Emilia had to wreak such irreparable havoc on their formerly beautiful friendship. In turn, the female characters have something the male characters don’t: namely, the ability to think reasonably and critically about the things men foolishly take for granted. Of course, The Two Noble Kinsmen still isn’t particularly subversive in its treatment of gender roles: more often than not, the play relegates female characters to the sidelines, robs them of personal agency (nobody considers whether Emilia wants to marry Palamon or Arcite, for example), and upholds stereotypes about femininity. And yet, despite these shortcomings, the play gives its female characters the unique function of keenly observing and criticizing the action and intellectual debate from which their patriarchal society excludes them. Female characters, primarily Emilia and Hippolyta, cast a critical eye on the things male characters are quick to valorize, effectively offering a more nuanced and complicated exploration of the play’s values.