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This is the first Arden edition of The Two Noble Kinsmen. Largely ignored for centuries because of doubts about its authorship and its subject matter, once considered distasteful, it is surprisingly relevant to many current interests. Lois Potter's valuable edition gives a full exposition of contemporary claims as to authorship and genre, discussing all the elements of collaborative writing ' not only the two authors themselves but their historical, theatrical and literary contexts. She argues that, complex as the collaboration process was, the end product can be discussed as a coherent work because of and not despite the circumstances of its production. Potter supplies new information on sources and, drawing on her extensive experience as a theatre critic, discusses the play's afterlife and compares a number of recent stagings of the play.'Potter's The Two Noble Kinsmen...shows how, even in the case of a play with a comparatively limited performance history, understanding of performance can inform every aspect of an edition...as usual with the Arden series, it is the amplitude and intelligence of the commentary that is so striking.'Peter Holland, Times Literary Supplement
Report
'Scholars and general readers will welcome Potter's edition...for its balanced discusssion of the nature of the collaboration; for its provocative, sometimes quirky introduction and notes; and for its democratic openess to all forms of contemporary interpretation...Like all Arden edtions, Potter's is concerned both with early stagings and with the plays "afterlife" in later productions..In her section on the text Potter follows other recent Arden editors in leading an inexperience reader through the basic methods editors use to determine the status and history of a printed play...Potter now takes a distinguished place [among] the long line of previous editors.' Shakespeare Quarterly
