The Two Noble Kinsmen

• 1. Introduction

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  William Shakespeare wrote The Two Noble Kinsmen in 1613 or 1614, his final play before he retired to Stratford-upon-Avon, where he died in 1616. He did not write it alone. Another dramatist's name sits beside his on every surviving copy, and for generations scholars argued over how real that shared credit truly was. This was not a new story: it was already centuries old by the time Shakespeare took it up. Two cousins, close friends, are pulled apart by a single woman neither of them has ever spoken to. The play then vanished from Shakespeare's own collected works, only to resurface far from where anyone expected it, generations later. Why did two playwrights share one script? Where did this rivalry between cousins actually begin? And how did a lost copy of the play end up so far from London?

• 2. Prison, Love, Rivalry

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  Three queens come before Theseus and Hippolyta, the rulers of Athens, pleading for vengeance against Creon, the tyrant of Thebes. He has killed their husbands and refused them proper burial. Theseus agrees to wage war against him.

  Palamon and Arcite, cousins and close friends bound by duty to Creon, fight courageously for Thebes despite despising his cruelty. Theseus defeats the Thebans, and the two men are taken prisoner. At first they resign themselves philosophically to captivity. That calm breaks the moment they see Princess Emilia, Hippolyta's sister, from their prison window, and both fall for her at once. Their friendship turns instantly into rivalry.

  Arcite wins release first, after a relative intercedes, and Theseus banishes him from Athens instead. He disguises himself, enters and wins a wrestling match, and is appointed Emilia's own bodyguard without her knowing his true identity. Meanwhile the jailer's daughter, who has fallen in love with Palamon, helps him escape his cell; he ignores her, still consumed by thoughts of Emilia. Half-starved in the forest, he encounters Arcite, and the two argue. Arcite then offers to bring him food, drink and weapons, so they can meet as equals in a fair fight over Emilia.

  The jailer's daughter, forsaken by Palamon, loses her mind and wanders the forest singing and babbling. She falls in with a troupe of countrymen rehearsing a Morris dance for Theseus and Hippolyta. Their schoolmaster, Gerald, invites her to join the performance. Theseus and Hippolyta, out hunting, stop to watch the rustic show, with the mad jailer's daughter dancing among the performers, and reward the whole troupe.

  Arcite returns to the forest with food and weapons, and the two men share a friendly dinner and reminisce before turning to combat. Theseus and his men arrive mid-fight, and he orders both cousins arrested and executed. Hippolyta and Emilia intervene, so Theseus instead decrees a public tournament for Emilia's hand. Each man will be backed by three companion knights, and the losing side is to be executed.

  On a doctor's advice, the jailer persuades his daughter's own former suitor to pose as Palamon, easing her slowly back toward sanity through his devotion. Before the tournament, Arcite prays to Mars for victory, and Palamon prays to Venus to marry Emilia. Emilia, in turn, prays to Diana that she be given to whichever man loves her best. Every prayer is granted at once. Arcite wins the fight, only to be thrown from his horse and killed, leaving Palamon to marry Emilia after all. The play never explains how three different gods could each fulfil a prayer that contradicted the other two. That puzzle is left entirely to the audience.

• 3. Borrowed From Chaucer

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  Geoffrey Chaucer told a version of this same rivalry roughly two centuries earlier, in The Knight's Tale from his The Canterbury Tales, written between 1387 and 1400. Chaucer's own tale was a shortened retelling of Giovanni Boccaccio's earlier epic poem, Teseida.

  Richard Edwardes had already staged the story once before, in 1566, under the title Palamon and Arcite. That production was commissioned for a single performance before Queen Elizabeth in Oxford, and it was never published. Because of that, it is unlikely to have shaped the version Shakespeare and Fletcher eventually wrote.

  A second, anonymous adaptation reached the stage in September 1594, performed by the Admiral's Men. That company had recently split off from Shakespeare's own troupe. Philip Henslowe commissioned that production, and it would certainly have been known to both Shakespeare and Fletcher. Some scholars think it may even have influenced Shakespeare's own A Midsummer Night's Dream, usually dated to around the same period.

  The comic subplot of the jailer's daughter has no traceable source of its own. It resembles scenes from Francis Beaumont's The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray's Inn, staged in 1613. That same masque is also where the countrymen's rustic performance seems to originate. The schoolmaster who organizes that performance recalls a character named Rombus from Philip Sidney's The Lady of May, written around 1579. In other ways, that same schoolmaster resembles Peter Quince, the amateur director of the play-within-a-play in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

• 4. Splitting The Pen

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  John Fletcher's name has stood beside Shakespeare's on this play since its very first printing, credited as a full co-author rather than a minor contributor. That joint credit was once disputed by scholars, but it is now generally accepted as fact.

  A scholar named Smith published a study in 1974 proposing ways to separate each writer's hand. He cited 'metrical characteristics, vocabulary and word-compounding, incidence of certain contractions, kinds and uses of imagery, and characteristic lines of certain types.' His resulting breakdown broadly matches conclusions reached by other researchers, even if the details differ.

  By that breakdown, Shakespeare is credited with Act One's scenes 1-3, Act Two's scene 1, and Act Three's scene 1. He is also credited with Act Five's scene 1, lines 34-173, plus its scenes 3 and 4. Fletcher is credited with the Prologue, Act Two's scenes 2-6, and Act Three's scenes 2-6. He also takes Act Four's scenes 1 and 3, Act Five's scene 1 up to line 33, its scene 2, and the Epilogue. Two scenes, Act One's 4 and 5, and Act Four's scene 2, resisted classification and remain unassigned to either playwright.

• 5. Printed And Excluded

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  Ben Jonson referenced Palamon, one of Kinsmen's two rival cousins, inside his own 1614 play, Bartholomew Fair. A passage in that play's fourth act, third scene, suggests Kinsmen was already familiar to Jonson's audience. That reference points scholars toward 1613-1614 as the likely date the play was written and first staged.

  Francis Beaumont staged The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray's Inn in 1613. Its second anti-masque featured a set of rustic figures: a pedant, a May Lord and Lady, and a servingman and chambermaid. It also included a tavern host and hostess, a shepherd and his sweetheart, and two costumed baboons. A slightly trimmed version of that same cast performs the Morris dance in Kinsmen's Act Two, scene five, lines 120-138. It drops only the sweetheart and one baboon from Beaumont's original lineup. One of the masque's stage effects, built for a single performance, appears to have been carried straight into Kinsmen. That borrowing suggests the play followed close behind the masque.

  The play was entered into the Stationers' Register on the 8th of April 1634. Its quarto reached print later that same year, published by the bookseller John Waterson and printed by Thomas Cotes. It never appeared in the First Folio of 1623, nor in any Folio that followed. Not until 1679, in the second folio collecting Beaumont and Fletcher's joint plays, did Kinsmen finally return to print inside a collected edition.

  In September 2020, researcher John Stone of the University of Barcelona reported a discovery in Salamanca, Spain. Inside the library of the Royal Scots College, he found early seventeenth century editions of several English plays, including a 1634 Two Noble Kinsmen. That single volume may be the oldest surviving copy of any Shakespeare work in the country. It is also the first of his plays known to have circulated in the Spanish-speaking world.

• 6. On Stage After Shakespeare

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  Evidence points to a performance of The Two Noble Kinsmen at Court in 1619. That came alongside whatever public shows had already taken place around 1613 and 1614.

  Sir William Davenant produced an adaptation of the play for the Duke's Company in 1664, after theatres reopened following Charles II's restoration. He retitled it The Rivals, and Thomas Betterton played Philander, Davenant's version of Palamon.

  Samuel Pepys watched Davenant's production and recorded his verdict in his diary on the 10th of September 1664. He called it, in his own words, 'no excellent play, but good acting in it.'

• 7. Still Being Staged

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  The Royal Shakespeare Company staged The Two Noble Kinsmen at the Swan Theatre in 1986, during that venue's very first season. The company returned to the same play at the same theatre again in 2016.

  Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London included the play in its 2018 summer season.

  In July 2007, the Hudson Shakespeare Company of New Jersey staged it as part of its annual Shakespeare in the Parks series. Director David Sewell set the production in ancient Greece, casting an ethnically diverse company reflective of that Mediterranean setting.

  A production opened on the 9th of June 2015 at the White Bear Theatre in Vauxhall, London. It was the city's first staging of the play since 2000.

  In 2019, the Porters of Hellsgate in Los Angeles performed it in repertory with Double Falsehood, directed by Will Block. He turned the Morris dance into a hallucination featuring major figures from the jailer's daughter's own life. He also cut Palamon and Arcite's prayers entirely, centering the scene on Emilia's dilemma instead.

  From the 25th of January to the 4th of February 2024, the Toronto based Shakespeare Bash'd Theatre Company staged the play at the Theatre Centre Incubator, at 1115 Queen Street West in Toronto.