SOURCE: "The Two Noble Kinsmen or A Midsummer Night's Dream, Part II?," in The Elizabethan Theatre VII, edited by G. R. Hibbard, P. D. Meany Company Inc., 1980, pp. 167-96.

In the following essay, originally presented at the Seventh Waterloo Conference in 1977, Wickham briefly surveys the critical history of The Two Noble Kinsmen and examines the similarities between it and A Midsummer Night's Dream, claiming that the former continues themes introduced in the latter.

It will not be my purpose to devote time to further discussion of Shakespeare's and Fletcher's respective contributions to this play. To dispose of that question at the outset, therefore, let me simply say that I accept (with only modest reservations) Littledale's assumption of the Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean scenes, supplemented by Alfred Hart's vocabulary tests, and thus base this paper on their findings. Rather do I wish to pursue a line of thought about The...