ABSTRACT
The Two Noble Kinsmen is a play with an almost embarrassingly long literary past, balanced by a theatrical afterlife which is short even by comparison with William Shakespeare’s Fletcherian collaboration, Henry VIII. The politics of both theatre and criticism are bound up with history of The Two Noble Kinsmen. Several features of The Two Noble Kinsmen might have offered its first audiences visual reminders of elaborate celebrations for the royal wedding. Richard Proudfoot and others suggest that The Two Noble Kinsmen may have been put together hastily, after the Globe fire of June 1613, either for Blackfriars season that autumn or for the opening of the new Globe in 1614. By comparison both with Geoffrey Chaucer and with John Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes, which is a sort of Knight’s Tale, Part One, authors of The Two Noble Kinsmen seem positively in favour of purifying effect of Mars, who, as Arcite puts it, rids the world of the pleurisy of people.
