The Two Noble Kinsmen based on The Knight's Tale
The Two Noble Kinsmen is a Jacobean tragicomedy, first published in 1634 and attributed jointly to John Fletcher and William Shakespeare. Its plot derives from "The Knight's Tale" in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, which had already been dramatised at least twice before. This play is believed to have been William Shakespeare's final play before he retired to Stratford-upon-Avon and died three years later.
Formerly a point of controversy, the dual attribution is now generally accepted by scholarly consensus.Sources
Before the composition of The Two Noble Kinsmen, Chaucer's "Knight's Tale"—itself based on Giovanni Boccaccio's Teseida—had been adapted for the stage twice before, although both versions are now lost. The first was by Richard Edwardes in Palamon and Arcite (1566). This play was commissioned for a one-off performance before Queen Elizabeth in Oxford. It was never published, and it is unlikely to have served as a basis for The Two Noble Kinsmen.
Another play on the topic, the authorship of which is not known, would certainly have been known to Shakespeare and Fletcher. It was performed by the Admiral's Men in September 1594, which had then recently been formed after a split in Shakespeare's own company. Philip Henslowe commissioned the play, which may have influenced Shakespeare's own A Midsummer Night's Dream, which is usually considered to have been written around this time.The comic sub-plot involving the jailer's daughter has no direct source, but is similar to scenes in The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray's Inn (1613), by Francis Beaumont, from which the performance by the yokels is derived. The Schoolmaster who organises it recalls Rombus in Sir Philip Sidney's one-act play The Lady of May (1579?). In other respects, he resembles Peter Quince in A Midsummer Night's Dream.
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