Summary
Palamon leaves Athens, but not before ensuring that neither the jailer nor the jailer's daughter is held responsible for his escape. He also provides the jailer's daughter with a large dowry to thank her for helping him escape.
When the wooer (the man who formerly planned to court the jailer's daughter) saves the jailer's daughter from drowning, he brings her back to her father. The jailer's daughter does not recognize her father, however, and continues singing mad songs.
The jailer decides to bring her to a doctor. The doctor encourages everyone to play along with the daughter's antics.
He also encourages the wooer to pretend that he is Palamon.
The plan works, and the daughter is soon recovered after believing that it was Palamon who courted her. She and the Wooer make plans to marry.
With the battle between Arcite and Palamon approaching, Emilia agonizes over her situation. She notes that both men are noble and worthy of her hand, but she cannot stomach choosing one and letting the other die.
Arcite, Palamon, and their knights return to Athens in preparation for battle. They each take turns praying in the temple before the action commences.
Analysis
Act Four of the play returns audiences to the subplot of the jailer's daughter, who is still mad from her unrequited love of Palamon.
It is important to note that madness on the early modern English stage rarely figured into comedies. It instead appeared most frequently in tragedies, typically befalling female characters who struggled to process extreme emotional duress. The most famous example of a woman descending into madness on the Renaissance stage is Ophelia from Hamlet, who, like the jailer's daughter, begins dancing and singing nonsensical songs after she learns of the death of her father, Polonius.
Unlike Ophelia, however, the jailer's daughter does not have a bleak ending but winds up marrying the man to whom she was betrothed before Palamon entered the picture. Given that The Two Noble Kinsmen is assumed to be one of the last plays Shakespeare wrote before his retirement to Stratford-upon-Avon, it is likely that the subplot of the jailer's daughter is a meta-theatrical and ironic take on the phenomenon of madness on the English stage; rather than fight or simply ignore the madness as male characters in tragedies tend to do, the characters in this play lean into the jailer's daughter's nonsensical ramblings and attempt to cure madness with more madness.
This act of the play also features a departure from the largely ironic tone that dominates the first three acts (and the subplot of the jailer's daughter). As the battle between Arcite and Palamon swiftly approaches, the satirical portrayal of chivalry dissipates and gives way to a much more serious, grave, and foreboding mood. Emilia is aggrieved knowing that whichever man loses the battle being fought over her will be executed, and her agony over the situation pushes the play toward the tragic register.
This is likely why most critics agree that The Two Noble Kinsmen can be classified as a tragicomedy, or a play that blends both tragic and comic elements in its structure. While this term was not widely recognized in the early modern period (plays were usually divided into only three categories: tragedies, comedies, and histories) it cannot be denied that the looming battle anticipated in Act Four foreshadows an at least partially tragic conclusion to the play.
