SOURCE: Carney, Jo Eldridge. “The Ambiguities of Love and War in The Two Noble Kinsmen.” In Sexuality and Politics in Renaissance Drama, edited by Carole Levin and Karen Robertson, pp. 95-111. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1991.

In the following essay, Carney comments on the tensions between love and war and between heterosexual desire and single-sex friendship in The Two Noble Kinsmen, suggesting that these antipathies are never resolved.

The Two Noble Kinsmen, usually attributed to Shakespeare and Fletcher, is a play seldom examined and seldom produced,¹ though perhaps it will receive more attention now that it has been included in the recently published Oxford edition of Shakespeare's Complete Works.² Most of Shakespeare's editors—from Heminges and Condell to their present-day counterparts—have chosen to omit this play from the canon; it is more frequently claimed as one of Fletcher's works.

Perhaps some of the reason for the...