The Two Noble Kinsmen

In my quest to read all of Shakespeare's officially credited plays, I ran into a problem.

One of those plays, The Two Noble Kinsmen, was not readily available as a stand-alone play, and it was not in the "complete" Shakespeare volume I've had since college days. 

Part of the problem is that he apparently wrote it with John Fletcher, and there was a dispute among scholars whether is should properly be called a play by Shakespeare. It is now accepted as a "Shakespeare" play with dual authorship, and is included in later collections.

So much for going to college in the 1970s!

I managed to find a collection that had the play in it. As I read, I kept thinking some of it sounded familiar, so I checked the notes. Aha! Based on Chaucer's "The Knight's Tale." Shakespeare regularly based his plays on sources, so no surprise.

As a play/story, it was okay. The main characters acted in keeping with traditional patterns for such characters. There were some interesting patches of dialogue. Some of the long speeches - giving the main actors their moment on stage? - did seem a bit much after a while. The side story of the Jailer' s Daughter and her madness bugged me, though. The treatment advised by the doctor was to have a man who wanted to woo her anyway pretend to be the man she loved (and because of whom she went crazy) and to do anything she wanted, including have sex. Apparently the cure works, but by modern standards, sex with a delusional, mentally unstable person in this way would be rape. Ugh.

I now have two more plays to read to complete my goal - Measure for Measure and Coriolanus.

There are a couple of other plays that scholar now think had some input from Shakespeare - The Book of Sir Thomas More and Cardenio. The former was a collaborative play with a number of writers (including Shakespeare) contributing lines/scenes/revisions to the original text of the play. The latter was apparently a collaboration of Shakespeare and Fletcher, though the versions we have were from later writers based on that original. I'll probably read both at some point - particularly the More one due to my admiration of Saint Thomas More - but they are not part of the official list.

Pax et bonum