SOURCE: "The Two Noble Kinsmen," in Literature and Degree in Renaissance England: Nashe, Bourgeois Tragedy, Shakespeare, University of Delaware Press, 1994, pp. 124-33.

In the excerpt that follows, Holbrook examines the relationship between the conception of art in the play and social values, maintaining that the social sphere of the kinsmen reflects the stylized, artificial nature of aristocratic life, while in the Jailer's Daughter subplot, the pastoral and the natural are contrasted with the artificiality of the aristocracy.

Let me turn now to some other Shakespeare plays that seem, by a significant manipulation of social interplay, to explore the social meaning of literary modes or art. I am not concerned here with plays that explicitly reflect upon the social-symbolic function of cultural modes. Nevertheless, I shall attempt to show that notions of art in The Two Noble Kinsmen (1613; pub. 1634), assumed to be a collaboration by Shakespeare and Fletcher, have...