The Two Noble Kinsmen
When Theseus, Duke of Athens, learns that the ruler of Thebes has killed three noble kings he swears to take revenge. But after Athens triumphs over the rival city, Theseus is struck by the bravery of two Theban cousins and orders his surgeons to attend to them. Soon, the cousins' lifelong friendship is threatened, as both become overwhelmed with love for the duke's beautiful sister.
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What Hacker News says
- > Like many collections, they omit The Two Noble Kinsmen due to unclear authorship, and for this reason I’m omitting it from my list as well.
> Also, around 20% of plays credited to Shakespeare were collaborations of some degree, though the collaboration details have been long lost.
Isn't it accepted that The Two Noble Kinsmen was a collaboration?
EDIT:
> [On Hamlet] You’d be hard-pressed to find something that beats the faithful, star-studded 1996 major film adaption.
Personally, I liked the (less faithful) 1948 film.
EDIT2: I also found it amusing that the play he liked the best is the only Shakespeare play I've actually acted in (before his favorite adaptation came out).
- Good to know that's there. The MIT collection of Shakespeare finally went offline. It had been my go-to for starting material for decades. (I perform Shakespeare plays, which I edit according to my goals, and need a source of plain text to start from.)
This edition, conveniently, has been lightly edited to regularize the spelling. When I did Two Noble Kinsmen, I had to start from an edition that was directly from the original printed text, and the first step was to make it legible.
Despite bearing the title page of the First Folio, this isn't drawn from there. It's got plays (including 2NK) that weren't in the Folio until the third edition.
- I've been working on adapting Two Noble Kinsmen for performance, and boy, it's not a good piece. I haven't been counting it in my quest to perform every Shakespeare play, since it's not included in the First Folio. I've been treating it as a Fletcher play with some Shakespeare touching-up.
Not that every word Shakespeare wrote was gold. He wrote some real stinkers, especially when it comes to the comedies, which this one kinda-sorta is. (Spoiler alert: it ends with both a death and a marriage.) It's clunky and confused, and none of the poetry is the least memorable. I do find the very tail end of the jailer's daughter's story very sweetly written, but the rest of her plot is so horrifying that I'm tempted to simply drop it entirely. It has no bearing on the main plot.
Still, it's nifty to know that somebody in Spain wanted this play so early on.
- The majority of the plays were written by William Shakespeare solo, and this includes the most well known like "Hamlet", "Romeo and Juliet", "Othello", "King Lear" and so on.
But a number of plays were written in collaboration with other playwrights - for example the play "Two Noble Kinsmen" mentioned in the article, which was written in collaboration with John Fletcher. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shakespeare%27s_collab... for other collaborations.
Quantitative textual analysis have indeed been used to try to discern which scenes were written by who. The method is still pretty controversial though, and subject to the pitfalls of machine learning - selection of training sets, overfitting and so on. For example new edition from Oxford press attributes Henry VI parts 1-3 to Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, but this is highly controversial. The attribution are based on similarities to Marlowe's style, but critics have pointed out it could just be Shakespeare emulating Marlowe.
However the theories that all of Shakespeare's plays were written by a committee or by someone not called Shakespeare, are just fringe theories without any serious support.
- I get that it's fun to conjecture about things, but no serious scholars debate his authorship. You have to do some serious mental gymnastics to get past all the evidence that he wrote his own plays.
> he owned no books
No, we don't know that he didn't own any books. How would you even prove that? We just don't have a list of which books that owned. We also don't have lists of books owned by the vast majority of people who lived in Elizabethan England. I find this a particularly weird argument for someone who lived over 400 years ago.
> he was not contemporaneously referred to as a playwright or poet
There are literally 18 published plays during his lifetime, numerous editions of which list Shakespeare as author right on the title page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Shakespeare_plays_in_q...
Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Shakespeare_plays_in_q...
In 1592, "Greenes, groats-worth of witte" refers to him famously as an "Upstart Crow" and makes fun of the fact that a mere actor thinks he can write. What better evidence is there than that?
In 1598, Frances Meres wrote a book about English poets called "Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury" that talks about both Shakespeare's poetry and plays. It says "Shakespeare among ye English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage" and then goes on to literally list his comedic and dramatic plays by name. I'm not sure how anyone can claim he was not referred to as a playwright or poet in his lifetime: https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/life/early%2...
Numerous other contemporary mentions of him in documents are collected and available online: https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/resource/playwright...
What is definitely true is that plays during this time period were often collaborations between multiple writers. Different authors might add in lines or scenes. Two authors might co-write a play (The Two Noble Kinsmen) or numerous author might 'punch up' a work. Shakespeare primarily wrote his plays, but other people definitely contributed bits here and there, just like he contributed bits to other plays that don't have his name as author (like "The Booke of Thomas More").
- Writing plays is the counter-example that comes to mind first. Say "Beaumont" to an English major and he will respond "Fletcher", whether or not he has read their plays. Shakespeare collaborated on at least one play. (Two Noble Kinsmen?)
The Goncourt brothers wrote novels together until the one's decline and death--the linked piece mentions duos as more common.
Why would writing with someone else necessarily leave the need unsatisfied?
