SOURCE: Potter, Lois. “This Distracted Globe: Summer 2000.” Shakespeare Quarterly 52, no. 1 (spring 2001): 124-32.

In the following excerpted review of The Two Noble Kinsmen, directed by Tim Carroll for the Globe Theater, Potter comments on the director's excising of the text, noting that Carroll valued simplicity over spectacle.

The Globe season of 2000 paired two famous Shakespeare plays about madness, metatheatricality, and exotic travel (Hamlet and The Tempest) with two rarities: a Fletcher-Shakespeare collaboration (The Two Noble Kinsmen), whose most popular character has always been an Ophelia-like madwoman; and The Antipodes, a Brome comedy of the next generation about the cure of a hero who has gone mad from reading travel literature. Whether these interconnections were intended or merely the product of casting needs and directorial schedules, the result was a season of unusual coherence, though, at the same time, each play could be enjoyed on its own terms. Even if...