Home > Shakespearean Criticism > The Two Noble Kinsmen (Vol. 58) - Richard Mallette (essay date 1995)

The Two Noble Kinsmen (Vol. 58) - Richard Mallette (essay date 1995)

Richard Mallette (essay date 1995)

SOURCE: “Same-Sex Erotic Friendship in The Two Noble Kinsmen,” in Renaissance Drama, Vol. XXVI, 1995, pp. 29-52.

[In the following essay, Mallette investigates the play's exploration of love, friendship, desire, and marriage, asserting that the dramatists stress the ruin of same-sex desire rather than the ascendancy of marriage.]

At the end of The Two Noble Kinsmen, having vanquished his cousin and friend Arcite in chivalric contest for the hand of Emilia, Palamon belatedly grasps the irony of his triumph:

                                                                                O cousin,
That we should things desire which do cost us
The loss of our desire! that nought could buy
Dear love but loss of dear love!

(5.4.109-12)

Palamon's bitter sense of the price of victory goes...

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