SOURCE: Potter, Lois. “Topicality or Politics?: The Two Noble Kinsmen, 1613-34.” In The Politics of Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and After, edited by Gordon McMullan and Jonathan Hope, pp. 77-91. London: Routledge, 1992.

In the following essay, Potter explores the topical allusions in The Two Noble Kinsmen.

The Two Noble Kinsmen is a play with an almost embarrassingly long literary past, balanced by a theatrical afterlife which is short even by comparison with Shakespeare's other Fletcherian collaboration, Henry VIII. We think of it as a dramatization of Chaucer's Knight's Tale, and the prologue invites us to admire it for his sake, but in fact everyone who tells the tale attributes it to someone else. It can be traced, in some form or other, as far back as the earliest Greek legends of Thebes. Antiquity seems to be one of its claims to attention in the first edition of 1634. Not only does...