SOURCE: "Shakespeare's Romantic Innocents and the Misappropriation of the Romance Past: The Case of The Two Noble Kinsmen" in Shakespeare Survey: An Annual Survey of Shakespeare Studies and Production, Vol. 43, 1991, pp. 69-79.

In this essay, Hillman explores the relation between The Knight's Tale and The Two Noble Kinsmen, and finds that "[The Two Noble Kinsmen displays a strong stylistic aspiration to forms of decorum reminiscent of [The Knight's] Tale."]

In what is probably the most influential discussion to date of the relation between The Knight's Tale and The Two Noble Kinsmen, Philip Edwards leans heavily on 'a Chaucerian view of the frailty of our determinations'¹ in making his case for a fundamental continuity of vision. Shakespeare and Fletcher, apparently, are far from misappropriating the romance, even if they skew its rueful irony regarding human subjection to chance, coincidence, and above all Venus, to match the intensely personal bitterness...