The Two Noble Kinsmen

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William Shakespeare
and John Fletcher

THE TWO NOBLE KINSMEN

Edited with a Commentary by
N. W. Bawcutt
with an Introduction by
Peter Swaab
and with The Play in Performance by
Stanley Wells and Paul Edmondson

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Contents

General Introduction

The Chronology of Shakespeare’s Works

Introduction

The Play in Performance

Further Reading

THE TWO NOBLE KINSMEN

Prologue

Epilogue

An Account of the Text

Commentary

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FOUNDING EDITOR: T. J. B. SPENCER
GENERAL EDITOR: STANLEY WELLS
SUPERVISORY EDITORS: PAUL EDMONDSON, STANLEY WELLS
THE TWO NOBLE KINSMEN

T. J. B. SPENCER, sometime Director of the Shakespeare Institute of the University of Birmingham, was the founding editor of the New Penguin Shakespeare, for which he edited both Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet.

STANLEY WELLS is Honorary President of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Emeritus Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Birmingham, and General Editor of the Oxford Shakespeare. His many books include Shakespeare: For All Time, Shakespeare & Co., Shakespeare, Sex, and Love and Great Shakespeare Actors.

N. W. BAWCUTT, who taught at the University of Liverpool, is an expert on the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre and has edited plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

PETER SWAAB is a Professor of English Literature at University College London. He is the editor of the first editions of poetry and prose by Sara Coleridge and of the Selected Nonsense and Travel Writings of Edward Lear. His other publications include a BFI Film Classic book on Bringing Up Baby and a co-edited book about the British film director Thorold Dickinson.

PAUL EDMONDSON is Head of Research at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and an Honorary Fellow of the Shakespeare Institute. His publications include Shakespeare’s Sonnets; A Year of Shakespeare: Re-living the World Shakespeare Festival; Shakespeare Beyond Doubt: Evidence, Argument, Controversy; The Shakespeare Circle: An Alternative Biography; and Shakespeare: Ideas in Profile.

General Introduction

Every play by Shakespeare is unique. This is part of his greatness. A restless and indefatigable experimenter, he moved with a rare amalgamation of artistic integrity and dedicated professionalism from one kind of drama to another. Never shackled by convention, he offered his actors the alternation between serious and comic modes from play to play, and often also within the plays themselves, that the repertory system within which he worked demanded, and which provided an invaluable stimulus to his imagination. Introductions to individual works in this series attempt to define their individuality. But there are common factors that underpin Shakespeare’s career.

Nothing in his heredity offers clues to the origins of his genius. His upbringing in Stratford-upon-Avon, where he was born in 1564, was unexceptional. His mother, born Mary Arden, came from a prosperous farming family. Her father chose her as his executor over her eight sisters and his four stepchildren when she was only in her late teens, which suggests that she was of more than average practical ability. Her husband John, a glover, apparently unable to write, was nevertheless a capable businessman and loyal townsfellow, who seems to have fallen on relatively hard times in later life. He would have been brought up as a Catholic, and may have retained Catholic sympathies, but his son subscribed publicly to Anglicanism throughout his life.

The most important formative influence on Shakespeare was his school. As the son of an alderman who became bailiff (or mayor) in 1568, he had the right to attend the town’s grammar school. Here he would have received an education grounded in classical rhetoric and oratory, studying authors such as Ovid, Cicero and Quintilian, and would have been required to read, speak, write and even think in Latin from his early years. This classical education permeates Shakespeare’s work from the beginning to the end of his career. It is apparent in the self-conscious classicism of plays of the early 1590s such as the tragedy of Titus Andronicus, The Comedy of Errors, and the narrative poems Venus and Adonis (1592–3) and The Rape of Lucrece (1593–4), and is still evident in his latest plays, informing the dream visions of Pericles and Cymbeline and the masque in The Tempest, written between 1607 and 1611. It inflects his literary style throughout his career. In his earliest writings the verse, based on the ten-syllabled, five-beat iambic pentameter, is highly patterned. Rhetorical devices deriving from classical literature, such as alliteration and antithesis, extended similes and elaborate wordplay, abound.