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II. Improvisations On the Friendship Form

Much critical consideration of The Two Noble Kinsmen has concerned itself with allocating authorship between Shakespeare and Fletcher.²⁹ Treatments undertaking more thematic interpretation have often utilized an idea of the "naturalness" of marriage to interpret this drama, which, as I will show, could hardly go further than it does to argue that marriage is a (brutally) political institution. As one editor of The Two Noble Kinsmen suggests, "perhaps the chief difficulty is that the play seems to compel us to attribute to Shakespeare at the end of his career an apparently partial and distorted attitude to love."³⁰ Other critics read the play as a representation of the inevitability of such a "distorted" attitude's ultimate defeat. Mary Beth Rose argues that "the best studies of the play have relied on the psychoanalytic conception of individual development to argue . . . that The Two...

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1. Introduction
2. I. Chastity and the Space Of Female Friendship
3. II. Improvisations On the Friendship Form
4. III. Theseus's Power
5. IV. Emilia's Choice
6. V. Conclusion
7. Copyright