SOURCE: "Shakespeare and Fletcher on Love and Friendship," in Shakespeare Studies: An Annual Gathering of Research, Criticism, and Review, Vol. XVIII, 1986, pp. 235-49.

In the essay that follows, Waith explores the conflict between friendship and love in The Two Noble Kinsmen, and examines the differences between Shakespeare and Fletcher in their treatment of this theme.

The loue of men to women is a thing common and of course: the friendshippe of man to man infinite and immortali.

These words of Eumenides in Lyly's Endimion¹ give euphuistic form to one side of the conflict between love and friendship, which constitutes one plot in that play and underlies the main action of The Two Noble Kinsmen. By 1613, when Shakespeare and Fletcher's play was first performed, similar conflicts had been the subject of many stories in western literature, the earliest of them found in the twelfth-century collection of tales called the...