ABSTRACT
Robert Armin’s Two Maids of More-clacke is the most canonical early modern play you have never heard of. Virtually unread today, and seemingly unloved even in its own day, its plot travesties what would become the most famous play of all time, William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. This is not a strained connection: from 1599 onward Armin was the clown of Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s/King’s Men. He would have acted in Hamlet himself (likely as the First Gravedigger), as well as in nearly every Shakespeare play produced over the next decade, not to mention any earlier ones the company revived. Two Maids alludes to a staggering number of those plays, including King Lear, Macbeth, Othello, Pericles, Julius Caesar, Love’s Labor’s Lost, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, and Romeo and Juliet, but its parallels with Hamlet are by far the most sustained. It is both a witness to early modern dramatic canon formation and a victim of it.
