One of my goals for 2019 is to read every Shakespeare play I have never read or seen. Much to my joy, I looked at the canon and counted only twelve plays I'd never read or seen performed, and among them, only one was a comedy. The Two Noble Kinsmen. (When I say "much to my joy", I mean that I have already read so many-- I need every scrap of accomplishment I can get-- and not that I have so few to read, as once I am done reading all the excluded ones, I want to re-read all the ones I know)
The Two Noble Kinsmen is rarely performed or taught, usually the original text of "A Knight's Tale" from Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales" is used to explore this story. This differs from so many stories that were rehashed by Shakespeare and we only know as Shakespeare's. Julius Caesar the politician cannot be separated from Shakespeare's character, and few people know that King Lear and Macbeth were actual Medieval rulers. The texts that inspired Romeo and Juliet and The Taming of the Shrew are all but lost. Because of Shakespeare Cleopatra will sadly always be remembered as a manipulative decadent despite being a shrewd and competent ruler, while Richard III will forever be known as a humpbacked child killer (although we finally do have evidence that both those things were true).
I loved Chaucer's Knight's Tale, not as much as the Miller's Tale-- I'd be so happy if scholars find a Shakespeare adaptation of that one-- but The Knight's Tale was my first introduction to chivalry and noble love. I'd known such things only as the foreplay in grocery store bodice-rippers and Harlequin romance novels, which I learned to read on. This is the story of frustrating, mental, unsatisfied admiration-- not that that gets me excited, but sometimes what we obsess over is more interesting to explore than what we corporeally enjoy.
Excluded from the First Folio, and credited first to William Fletcher and then Shakespeare, this play often is viewed as being less Shakespeare's and more of his collaborator's, and thus it gets ignored. Well, I am not going to ignore this one any longer, and give it (the sad but hey-it's-something) honor of being the first read on my list.
