Shakespeare’s Romantic Innocents and the Misappropriation of the Romance Past: The Case of The Two Noble Kinsmen

Summary

In what is probably the most influential discussion to date of the relation between The Knight’s Tale and The Two Noble Kinsmen, Philip Edwards leans heavily on ‘a Chaucerian view of the frailty of our determinations’ in making his case for a fundamental continuity of vision. Shakespeare and Fletcher, apparently, are far from misappropriating the romance, even if they skew its rueful irony regarding human subjection to chance, coincidence, and above all Venus, to match the intensely personal bitterness of a Shakespeare ‘looking dim-eyed at innocence and seeing salvation disappear with puberty’ (p. 104). It is as if the world-weary bard, having just recently bid farewell to the imperfect magic of his art in The Tempest, returns for a curtain call in the role of Theseus, presiding sagely over the fading of another insubstantial pageant:

O you heavenly charmers,

What things you make of us! For what we lack

We laugh, for what we have are sorry; still

Are children in some kind. Let us be thankful

For that which is, and with you leave dispute

That are above our question. Let’s go off

And bear us like the time.

(5.4.131–7)

Indeed, Theseus' magisterial resignation might appear to take us beyond the threat of 'despair' that troubles Prospero's 'ending' (The Tempest Epi.15) to something like the pallid stoicism of King Lear's concluding lines (either Edgar's or Albany's, depending on the text preferred): The weight of this sad time we must obey, / Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say' (Learf 5.3.299-300).