SOURCE: Stewart, Alan. “‘Near Akin’: The Trials of Friendship in The Two Noble Kinsmen.” In Shakespeare's Late Plays: New Readings, edited by Jennifer Richards and James Knowles, pp. 57-71. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999.

In the following essay, Stewart examines the idealized friendship of Palamon and Arcite in The Two Noble Kinsmen and notes that their friendship, which is defined by medieval codes of chivalric honor and kinship, exists uncomfortably among the social realities of Jacobean England.

Critics have never been happy with The Two Noble Kinsmen.¹ It has traditionally been regarded as an unsatisfactory play, compromised, in Ann Thompson's words, by ‘many tensions and inconsistencies’;² to at least one critic, it remains ‘that most distressing of plays’.³ Despite its use of an archetypal story of two male friends brought into conflict over a woman, already tried and tested by Boccaccio (in the Teseida) and Chaucer (Knight's Tale), its...