SOURCE: '"Is this Winning?': Prince Henry's Death and the Problem of Chivalry in The Two Noble Kinsmen," in The South Atlantic Review, Vol. 62, No. 1, Winter, 1997, pp. 1-31.

Below, Herman argues that Shakespeare and Fletcher's adaptation of Chaucer's The Knight's Tale was "significantly influenced" by the recent premature death of the young Prince Henry of Wales in 1613 and by the public disillusionment brought about by this event.

"Men are mad things."

Although criticism is replete with investigations into how shifts in later contexts alter the interpretation of early modern texts, examples of how this paradigm obtains within the Renaissance itself are much less common.¹ In this article I want to suggest that william Shakespeare and John Fletcher's The Two Noble Kinsmen provides such an instance. This play was first staged in 1613, a few months after the premature death of Henry, Prince of Wales unleashed a flood of...