SOURCE: “Love, War, and the Cost of Winning: The Knight's Tale and The Two Noble Kinsmen,” in The Swan at the Well: Shakespeare Reading Chaucer, Yale University Press, 1985, pp. 50-73.

In the following essay, Donaldson studies the differences between the portrayals of Palamon and Arcite in The Two Noble Kinsmen and in Chaucer's The Knight's Tale, observing that Shakespeare and Fletcher eliminated distinctions between the two kinsmen that appear in Chaucer's poem.

It is the chief misfortune of one who is considering the relation of Chaucer to Shakespeare that there is no way to avoid that most distressing of plays, The Two Noble Kinsmen. Though the play was written in collaboration with Fletcher, it still represents Shakespeare's most direct and unquestionable use of a Chaucerian source—as the Prologue to the play proclaims it to be—and it would be dereliction of duty for me to ignore it...