The Two Noble Kinsmen
Two Noble Kinsmen, TheThis bitter-sweet tragicomedy of love and death, co-written with John Fletcher, includes what was almost certainly Shakespeare's last writing for the stage. Excluded from the Folio, presumably because of its collaborative authorship, the play was not published until 1634: both the Stationers' Register entry and the quarto's title page attribute it to ‘William Shakespeare and John Fletcher’. The play borrows its morris dance (3.5) from Francis Beaumont's Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray's Inn (February 1613), while its prologue's reference to ‘our losses’ almost certainly alludes to the burning down of the Globe (June 1613). Probably composed during 1613–14, The Two Noble Kinsmen may well have been the first play to appear at the rebuilt Globe on its opening in 1614: certainly two sarcastic allusions to ‘Palamon’ in Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair (premièred in October 1614) suggest that Jonson expected...
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