SOURCE: "The Two Noble Kinsmen, the Friendship Tradition, and the Flight from Eros," in Shakespeare, Fletcher and The Two Noble Kinsmen, edited by Charles H. Frey, University of Missouri Press, 1989, pp. 93-108.

In the following essay, Weiler explores the effects of love and sexual desire on friendship as it is depicted in The Two Noble Kinsmen, and examines the play's Chaucerian and Boccaccian roots.

Like most Elizabethan depictions of symmetrical friendship, whether broken or preserved, The Two Noble Kinsmen owes something not only to its Chaucerian source but also to the Boccaccian tale of Tito and Gesippo from the tenth day of the Decameron (a tale that has, in turn, its own more ancient sources).¹ The question this tale confronts, as in a philosophical parable, is: if friendship is grounded on a similarity of character and tastes, strong enough to allow each friend to regard the other as...