The Two Noble Kinsmen
1634
Two noble cousins. One woman. An impossible choice. Palamon and Arcite have fought side by side through countless battles, their bond as strong as blood. But when they are captured and imprisoned in Thebes, both catch sight of the beautiful Emilia in a garden below their cell - and everything unravels. What begins as shared admiration becomes a torment: each man must decide whether his love for the woman is worth destroying his love for his brother. Shakespeare, collaborating here with John Fletcher in his final play, builds to a devastating climax where friendship and rivalry become indistinguishable. The play asks whether passion is a gift or a curse, and whether any honor survives when desire takes hold. It is dark, philosophical, and ruthlessly honest about the violence that love can do to the bonds we cherish most. For readers who ache at the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, this is the tragedy of two friends who never wanted to be enemies.
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“Who knows himself a braggart, let him fear this, for it will come to pass that every braggart shall be found an ass.””
— William Shakespeare
“Sir, I am a true laborer; I earn that I eat, get that I wear; owe no man hate, envy no man’s happiness; glad of other men’s good, content with my harm; and the greatest of my pride is to see my ewes graze and my lambs suck.” (As You Like It, Act 3, Sc. 2.)””
— William Shakespeare
“better a little chiding than a great deal of heart-break.””
— William Shakespeare
“Light, seeking light, doth light of light beguile; So ere you find where light in darkness lies, Your light grows dark by losing of your eyes.””
— William Shakespeare
“The fine purple cloaks, the holiday garments, elsewhere signs of gayety of mind, are stained with blood and bordered with black. Throughout a stern discipline, the axe ready for every suspicion of treason; “great men, bishops, a chancellor, princes, the king’s relations, queens, a protector kneeling in the straw, sprinkled the Tower with their blood; one after the other they marched past, stretched out their necks; the Duke of Buckingham, Queen Anne Boleyn, Queen Catherine Howard, the Earl of Surrey, Admiral Seymour, the Duke of Somerset, Lady Jane Grey and her husband, the Duke of Northumberland, the Earl of Essex, all on the throne, or on the steps of the throne, in the highest ranks of honor, beauty, youth, genius; of the bright procession nothing is left but senseless trunks, marred by the tender mercies of the executioner.””
— William Shakespeare
“Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them.””
— William Shakespeare
“Humanity is as much lacking as decency. Blood, suffering, does not move them. The court frequents bull and bear baitings; Elizabeth beats her maids, spits upon a courtier’s fringed coat, boxes Essex’s ears; great ladies beat their children and their servants. “The sixteenth century,” he says, “is like a den of lions. Amid passions so strong as these there is not one lacking. Nature appears here in all its violence, but also in all its fullness. If nothing has been softened, nothing has been mutilated. It is the entire man who is displayed, heart, mind, body, senses, with his noblest and finest aspirations, as with his most bestial and savage appetites, without the preponderance of any dominant passion to cast him altogether in one direction, to exalt or degrade him. He has not become rigid as he will under Puritanism.””
— William Shakespeare
“Could ever hear by tale or history, The course of true love never did run smooth;””
— William Shakespeare
“Would the fountain of your mind were clear again,that I might water an ass at it!””
— William Shakespeare
