SOURCE: Stewart, Alan. “‘Near Akin’: The Trials of Friendship in The Two Noble Kinsmen.” In Shakespeare's Late Plays: New Readings, edited by Jennifer Richards and James Knowles, pp. 57-71. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999.

In the following essay, Stewart investigates the nature of the failure of Palamon and Arcite's idealized male friendship depicted in The Two Noble Kinsmen, suggesting that the relationship was doomed because of the conflict between humanist and chivalric notions of male friendship, and the realities of male relations and kinship bonds in Jacobean England.

Critics have never been happy with The Two Noble Kinsmen.¹ It has traditionally been regarded as an unsatisfactory play, compromised, in Ann Thompson's words, by ‘many tensions and inconsistencies’;² to at least one critic, it remains ‘that most distressing of plays’.³ Despite its use of an archetypal story of two male friends brought into conflict over a woman, already tried and...