SOURCE: “Same-Sex Erotic Friendship in The Two Noble Kinsmen,” in Renaissance Drama, Vol. XXVI, 1995, pp. 29-52.

In the following essay, Mallette investigates the play's exploration of love, friendship, desire, and marriage, asserting that the dramatists stress the ruin of same-sex desire rather than the ascendancy of marriage.

At the end of The Two Noble Kinsmen, having vanquished his cousin and friend Arcite in chivalric contest for the hand of Emilia, Palamon belatedly grasps the irony of his triumph:

                                                                                O cousin, That we should things desire which do cost us The loss of our desire! that nought could buy Dear love but loss of dear love! 

(5.4.109-12)

Palamon's bitter sense of the price of victory goes to the heart of the play's dilemma. The Two Noble Kinsmen makes strenuous efforts to balance competing sets of desires—in the cousins' case, between friendship and romantic love. But, as Palamon notes...