SOURCE: "Linguistic Subversion and the Artifice of Rhetoric in The Two Noble Kinsmen" in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 38, No. 4, Winter, 1987, pp. 405-25.

In this essay, Lief and Radei contend that the parts of The Two Noble Kinsmen which are attributed to Fletcher undercut Shakespeare's language of invocation and reflect "a cynical and problematic world view emerging in Shakespeare's late plays and in non-Shakespearean drama of the early seventeenth century. "

In one of the first detailed studies of Shakespeare and Fletcher's The Two Noble Kinsmen, Theodore Spencer did his best to suggest that Shakespeare's scenes had been produced by an exhausted mind, one that believed in "an order melted at the edges into a larger unity of acceptance and wonder." Claiming that the verse of the play's opening scene is "processional" and "static" and that its tone is one of "invocation" and "apostrophe," Spencer argued that Shakespeare distances the audience...