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The Two Noble Kinsmen is a play whose history lies in the shadow of the issue of authorship. For many centuries the interest of critics and scholars in this work sprang almost entirely from Shakespeare’s involvement in its creation and ended precisely at those moments in the text where the Bard’s contribution shifted into what was seen as John Fletcher’s mediocre postscript to Shakespeare’s magnificent verse. Even nowadays the shadow of the question of authorship still looms on the horizon. Eugene M. Waith’s recently reissued edition of the play, published originally in 1989 in the Oxford World’s Classics series, still devotes the bulk of the introduction to the matter even if it aspires to move beyond this belaboured problem – more than to any other issue it raises and thus, significantly, more than to the actual interpretation of the play (cf. Waith 4-23, 62-66). In this article I want to challenge this traditional preoccupation by pointing towards a powerful intrinsic coherence of the text, a force to be reckoned with in any interpretation of the play regardless of the nature or technicalities of Shakespeare’s and Fletcher’s actual collaboration. It is high time that one once and for all abandoned the schizophrenic nineteenth-century approach to The Two Noble Kinsmen which posited it as a kind of a textual patchwork, with some passages evincing Shakespeare’s genius in their “higher element of eloquence” (Richard Whateley qtd. in Waith 9) and others, stitched to them, betraying Fletcher’s unmistakeably “slow and languid” touch in their sense of disunity (Charles Lamb qtd. in Waith 11). This may in fact be harder than it seems, for, as Waith (1) rightly notices, the play has so rarely been staged precisely due to its troubled provenance and its appreciation, both in terms of theatrical audiences and readership, must be measured against it; Amazon still markets one of the editions of the play as a work with one author only, with John Fletcher featuring merely as a “contributor,” which obviously goes against the spirit of the original 1634 quarto edition, where Fletcher’s name comes first. 1 Additionally, as I hope to show,

Chaucer and His Bastard Child: Social Disjunction and Metaliterariness in "The Two Noble Kinsmen"