The Two Noble Kinsmen Study Guide

Many regard William Shakespeare as the greatest writer in the English language and one of the most influential dramatists of all time. His bibliography consists of nearly 40 plays, 154 sonnets, and three long narrative poems. Shakespeare was baptized in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, on April 26, 1564. His father, John Shakespeare, was an alderman, and his mother, Mary Arden, was the daughter of a wealthy landowning family. Although Shakespeare likely attended the King’s New School in Stratford, he received no formal schooling beyond a grammar school education. He married Anne Hathaway in 1582, and the couple had three children together: a daughter named Susanna and twins Hamnet and Judith. Much of Shakespeare’s life between the birth of his twins and his entrance into the London theater scene in 1592 remains a mystery, and scholars refer to this period as Shakespeare’s “lost years.” Nevertheless, Shakespeare became an immensely successful actor, poet, and playwright upon moving to London. He was a part-owner of the King’s Men (formerly Lord Chamberlain’s Men), a playing company supported by the patronage of Elizabeth I, and later, by James I. Shakespeare likely ended his tenure with the King’s Men and returned to Stratford-upon-Avon around 1610. He produced only a few more plays before his death in 1616, one of which was The Two Noble Kinsmen, which he wrote in collaboration with John Fletcher, the playwright who replaced him as house playwright for the King’s Men. Shakespeare died in Stratford-upon-Avon on April 23, 1616, at 52. Although John Fletcher hasn’t achieved the same lasting renown as William Shakespeare, he was a prominent playwright in his day, and scholars credit him with popularizing the tragicomedy genre in England’s theater scene. Fletcher was born in December 1579 in Sussex. Much of Fletcher’s early life remains a mystery, but scholars believe he enrolled in Corpus Christi College in Cambridge in 1591 before entering the London theater scene in the early 1600s. Fletcher worked as a playwright for the Children of the Queen’s Revels beginning around 1606. Throughout his early career, Fletcher frequently collaborated with Francis Beaumont, a contemporary playwright. Fletcher began working more closely with the King’s Men playing company around 1613. He collaborated with Shakespeare on Henry VIII; The Two Noble Kinsmen; and Cardenio, a lost play thought to have been performed by the King’s Men in 1613. After Shakespeare’s death in 1616, Fletcher took over Shakespeare’s position as house playwright for the King’s Men. He continued to collaborate with other contemporary playwrights, as well—most notably Nathan Field and Philip Massinger, the latter of whom would succeed him as house playwright for the King’s Men. Fletcher died (reportedly of the Black Death) in London in August 1625.

One key difference between The Two Noble Kinsmen and its literary inspiration, Chaucer’s “The Knight’s Tale,” (from The Canterbury Tales) is The Two Noble Kinsmen’s heightened emphasis on friendship. This discrepancy reflects cultural ideas about friendship that emerged during the Renaissance. The Renaissance was a cultural movement that bridged the gap between the Middle Ages and modernity. It first developed in continental Europe starting in the late 1300s before taking hold in England around the mid-1500s, and it’s characterized by a revived a revived interest in the art, scholarship, and values of Classical Greece and Rome. One Classical ideal that saw new life during the Renaissance was the virtue of friendship. The French Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne wrote a collection of essays (translated into English in 1603) in which he praised the passionate, intimate bond of friendship that develops between two men. Montaigne held that this bond is so strong that friends become conjoined. Montaigne’s ideas derive from the writings of Classical Roman philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero, specifically ideas that Cicero voiced in Laelius de amicitia (“On Friendship”), a treatise on friendship that itself draws inspiration from Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics. The philosophy of friendship Cicero establishes in his work describes a friend as “another self,” or “one soul in two bodies.” Elizabethan and early Jacobian readers like Shakespeare and Fletcher would have been well-acquainted with these works and used them to form their own philosophies on friendship.

The Two Noble Kinsmen is inspired by “The Knight’s Tale,” the opening story of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. The Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories written in Middle English, mostly in verse, between 1387 and 1400. Chaucer presents the stories as the tales a group of pilgrims shares as they engage in a storytelling contest while traveling from London to Canterbury to see the shrine of Saint Thomas of Canterbury. In addition to The Two Noble Kinsmen, Shakespeare and Fletcher also collaborated on Henry VIII, a history play first published in the First Folio in 1623. Scholars associate The Two Noble Kinsmen with a group of Shakespeare’s later works called the “late romances,” which includes Pericles, Prince of Tyre; Cymbeline; The Winter’s Tale; and The Tempest. These works are generally characterized as tragicomedies, a genre that combines elements of tragedy and comedy and that became increasingly popular in early 17th-century England. Fletcher wrote his first solo play, a tragicomedy entitled The Faithful Shepherdess, around the time he collaborated with Shakespeare on The Two Noble Kinsmen. First performed in 1608, The Faithful Shepherdess wasn’t initially successful with audiences. However, the printed version of the play is significant because it includes Fletcher’s written definition of “tragicomedy,” which emphasizes the prevalence of death as a critical element of the genre. Other notable plays of Fletcher’s include Valentinian, a tragedy (c. 1610–1614 and first published 1647); Monsieur Thomas, a comedy (c. 1610–1616, first published 1639); and The Woman’s Prize, or The Tamer Tamed, a comedy (c. 1611, first published 1647). Finally, other notable Jacobian tragicomedies written by Fletcher’s contemporaries include Philip Massinger’s The Bondman (first published in 1624) and James Shirley’s The Young Admiral (first published in 1637).