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Adapting same-sex friendship: Fletcher

and Shakespeare's The Two Noble
Kinsmen, and Davenant's The Rivals
a
Huw Grif f it hs
a
Universit y of Sydney, English Depart ment , John Woolley Building
(A 20), Sydney, NSW 2006, Aust ralia
Published online: 23 Feb 2015.

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To cite this article: Huw Grif f it hs (2015): Adapt ing same-sex f riendship: Flet cher and
Shakespeare's The Two Noble Kinsmen, and Davenant 's The Rivals , Shakespeare, DOI:
10. 1080/ 17450918. 2015. 1012551

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 Shakespeare, 2015
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17450918.2015.1012551

Adapting same-sex friendship: Fletcher and Shakespeare’s The Two

Noble Kinsmen, and Davenant’s The Rivals
Huw Griffiths*

University of Sydney, English Department, John Woolley Building (A 20), Sydney,

NSW 2006, Australia

In adapting The Two Noble Kinsmen as The Rivals, William Davenant minimizes the
affective power of same-sex love and friendship that is present in the original, at the
same time as eliminating most of Shakespeare’s contribution to the original script.
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Tracing this process of adaptation allows us not only to see what happens to Renaissance
idealizations of philia in the later period, but also to reexamine the relationship between
Fletcher and Shakespeare. Their collaboration emerges as, itself, potentially rivalrous, as
they promote quite different understandings of the values attached to same-sex
friendship.
Keywords: collaboration; adaptation; homoeroticism

Written and performed in 1664 and printed in 1668, Davenant’s The Rivals is an early
Restoration adaptation of Fletcher and Shakespeare’s play, The Two Noble Kinsmen, itself
an adaptation of Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale, whose source lies in Boccaccio’s Teseida.
Beyond this immediate genealogy for Davenant’s play, the recycled story that it tells
(male friendship disrupted by rivalrous affections for the same woman) extends the play’s
intertexts almost endlessly: from Boccaccio’s “Titus and Gisippus,” and its retelling in
The Book Named the Governor (itself adapted in Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of
Verona), to the embedded “Cardenio” and “Curious Impertinent” narratives in Don
Quixote (whose source is Herodotus). The usefulness of the story, as it passes from male
author to male author, is as a consideration of amicitia, an idealized male friendship
grounded in Aristotelian and Ciceronian thought, in relation to the effects of desire and to
the institution of heterosexual marriage. Moreover, just as these stories focus on the
relationships between two men, the texts are themselves the product of men’s relation-
ships with each other; it is what Stephen Guy-Bray calls “a literary tradition characterised
by what we would call diachronic literary collaborations by men” (75).
This article investigates one such “diachronic collaboration”: that between Davenant
and the two writers of The Two Noble Kinsmen. The Restoration stage inherited plays
from the late sixteenth and earlier seventeenth centuries as a ready-built repertoire, but the
new companies’ contracts insisted that they adapt rather than merely restage the texts as
they were (Clark 1–2). With The Rivals, Davenant makes radical changes to the source.
As the new title suggests, the focus of the play shifts from a primary concern with same-
sex friendship to the rivalrous competition over the woman. In Davenant’s version of the
story, the relationship between the men and the object of their affection is of more

*Email: huw.griffiths@sydney.edu.au
© 2015 Huw Griffiths
 2 H. Griffiths

significance than their friendship. In directing attention towards the telos of marriage and
away from the distractions of friendship, Davenant turns a tragicomedy into a comedy.
Theocles, Davenant’s equivalent for Arcite, does not die. Rather, he is married off to
Celania, a high-class version of the Jailer’s Daughter. A particularly dark and problematic
Jacobean tragicomedy that draws unwavering attention to the losses attendant on same-
sex friendship becomes, in the 1660s, a comedy that ends in a double heterosexual
marriage.
However, this story of adaptation is not so simple. The original play itself contains in-
built differences of attitude towards the values of amicitia, and I want to situate this
adaptation in relation to the original co-authorship of Fletcher and Shakespeare which I will
construe as a process of rivalrous adaptation as much as it is a harmonious collaboration. In
Fletcher and Shakespeare’s play, the central relationship between Palamon and Arcite is, at
different points in the play, either a source of deep pathos or of ironic scepticism. The play, I
will argue, is not the surprising unity identified by Eugene Waith who argues that “there
are some differences between the collaborators in their treatments of love and friendship”
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but that, on the whole, “the play is better unified than is often granted” (237). In adapting
the play, Davenant mostly drops what were Shakespeare’s contributions to the text of The
Two Noble Kinsmen, and I will argue that this reorients the play towards a typically
Fletcherian scepticism around the idealizing discourses of male friendship.1
In his study of the homoerotics of collaborative writing for the early modern stage,
Jeffrey Masten argues that The Two Noble Kinsmen tests “the limits of that conflation”
which sees other texts, such as The Two Gentlemen of Verona, cheerfully accommodate
same-sex friendship to marriage in their comic endings (49). The first printing of the play
in 1634, with its famous bracketing of the two names, Fletcher and Shakespeare, as
conjoined “gentlemen” frames The Two Noble Kinsmen as the product of an ideal
friendship, but Masten argues that the text of the play “provides a possible critique of the
collaborative practice that frames its own presentation”. I do not disagree with Masten’s
analysis, which sees a disjunction between the way that the printed text presents itself to
the world – as the product of gentlemanly friendship – and the dramatic text itself which
puts pressure on the sustainability of same-sex friendships within the marriage-based
economies of comedy. However, parsing the nature of the collaboration more precisely
might also be a productive way into the text’s engagement with friendship discourse.
Working within the paradigm set up by Masten, Guy-Bray disclaims any interest in
determining the exact scope of Shakespeare and Fletcher’s respective contributions to the
text, stating that “the collaboration between Fletcher and Shakespeare is merely one of
several same-sex collaborations in the play” (75). While I can see the value in Guy-Bray’s
project, which is to trace “the continued association of same-sex couples with creativity”
(78), it might also be worthwhile to approach the workings of this collaboration from a
slightly different angle. Elsewhere in their work, Shakespeare and Fletcher evince
markedly different attitudes to same-sex friendship. In Shakespeare’s plays, same-sex
friendship is associated with strong feelings of loss and, at times, provides the strong
emotional centre of gravity for the plays’ action: Antonio and Bassanio; Henry V and
Scroop; Helena and Hermia. Work associated with Fletcher, on the other hand, frequently
displays a mocking scepticism towards the idealizing discourses of male friendship in
particular. In The Coxcomb, The Scornful Lady, The Chances and (as I will argue) The
Two Noble Kinsmen, languages of male friendship are revealed as foolishly hyperbolic.
Even Fletcher and Beaumont’s The Maid’s Tragedy, in which the central friendship of
Amintor and Melantius is both celebrated and strongly determinative of the play’s
 Shakespeare 3

narrative, exhibits some anxiety about friendship discourse, especially in Fletcher’s

scenes from the central part of the play (Hoy III 94). In The Two Noble Kinsmen and
potentially also Cardenio, another story of rivalrous male friends, these two attitudes play
off against each other throughout the plays.2 If Davenant produces a more Fletcher-like
play than he does a Shakespeare-like play, then this may speak to some interesting
differences that are already present in the Jacobean tragicomedy. In renaming the
gentlemen of the title as “rivals,” Davenant allows us to look back at the earlier text and
reconsider the relationships between collaborative practice and fictive friendships.
I am, therefore, going to proceed backwards. I will start with what Davenant does to
produce The Rivals out of The Two Noble Kinsmen. Davenant’s text directs its audiences
towards a specific reinterpretation of same-sex friendship, not only through making
notable changes to the plot but also through a type of meta-commentary on his inherited
dialogue. I will then trace this process of adaptation back into the original text itself. The
purpose of this dual approach – reading for synchronic collaboration as well as diachronic
forms of adaptation – is a hope that this will contribute to a nuanced understanding of
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same-sex friendship across the long early modern period, one that traces rivalrous
disagreement as much as gentlemanly collaboration.

Davenant’s The Rivals as adaptation and meta-commentary

The most obvious thing to say about the changes that Davenant makes to The Two Noble
Kinsmen is that he changes the title, the location, and all of the characters’ names. The
title change makes explicit the different way in which this adaptation presents the central
conflict of the play: not between two gentleman friends, but between two rivals. The
change in names compounds this shift in emphasis by no longer advertising the origins of
the play in the matter of Athens and stories surrounding Theseus. Theseus, both in the
original play and more generally in early modern culture, was thought of as a man who
privileged friendship over marriage. Removing Theseus and his beloved friend, Pirithous,
from the picture in favour of one Arcon and his chief minister, Polynices, is an important
aspect of a general erasure of many of the aspects of The Two Noble Kinsmen that
emphasized the enduring attractions of same-sex friendship over marriage. This also
includes the removal of Shakespeare’s first act in which the character of Emilia is firmly
established as somebody who is utterly resistant to the idea of heterosexual marriage.3 In
place of the Emilia who claims that, “the true love ’tween maid and maid may be / More
than in sex dividual” (1.4.81–82), Davenant gives us Heraclia, whose main contribution
to the plot is to torment Celania, testing her love for Philander by claiming that he is
dead. As Lori Leigh puts it, there is “no place for Emilia’s ‘female world’” in Davenant’s
play (51).4 In The Two Noble Kinsmen, Emilia’s first words are in response to one of the
Spartan Queens who have come as supplicants to the Athenian court, begging for
assistance in burying their dead. Emilia replies, expressing a universal community of
female sympathy:

No knees to me.
What woman I may stead that is distressed
Does bind me to her. (1.1.35–37)

In The Rivals, by contrast, Heraclia’s first lines are spoken from down on her own knees,
thankful for the return of Arcon, Prince of Arcadia, from the wars:
 4 H. Griffiths

What welcom shall give vent

To my Excess of Joy for your return. (sig. B2v)

Emilia’s transformation into Heraclia removes her from a sphere of all-female

community, where she is sister to the Amazonian Queen Hippolyta and, instead, places
her in the more subservient role of niece to the Prince. The scenes that she shares with
Celania are all focused on swapping news about the two prisoners, and this prepares us
for the two female leads’ happy acceptance of their proposed marriages to the two
prisoners at the end of the play. Heraclia’s final words rejoice in her and Celania’s double
marriage: “Dear Celania! Nought greater can ensue / My double bliss in Theocles and
you” (sig. H4v).
This is a far cry from Emilia, whose final words epitomize the overwhelming sorrow
that accompanies the final events of The Two Noble Kinsmen, including her proposed
marriage to Palamon: “Thou [Arcite] were a good man, and while I live / This day I give
to tears” (5.6.97–98). From “tears” over the death of a friend to “double bliss” in a pair of
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proposed marriages, this rewriting of Emilia as Celania is emblematic not only of this
Restoration adaptation but of Restoration adaptation tout court. Paul Hammond writes
that “In adaptations of Shakespeare during the late seventeenth century we can see a shift
in the way that passionate male relationships are conceptualized” (115). That is
undoubtedly true of The Rivals, as I will show with the rewriting of Palamon and Arcite
as Philander and Theocles, but the validation of same-sex friendship in The Two Noble
Kinsmen begins with Emilia’s passionate commitment to other women and it is here that
Davenant lays out some of the terms of his adaptation: from a bleak story of loss in which
former attachments are broken in the movement towards marriage to a comic plot in
which fulfilment can only be achieved through an orderly marriage.
The critical association of The Two Noble Kinsmen with the discourses of amicitia
lies chiefly, however, in the description that the kinsmen give of their enduring and
unassailable friendship as they enter the Athenian prison. Set against the backdrop of
the Athenian context, with Theseus and Pirithous as ideal patterns of male friendship,
Palamon’s assertion that “I do not think it possible our friendship / Should ever leave
us” (2.2.114–15) sounds initially like an instruction to the audience that they should
view these friends in the same light: mythically virtuous, impervious to what Arcite
calls, “the corruption of worse men” (2.2.72). Much of this dialogue represents the
homosocial in potentially erotic ways. Palamon is made “almost wanton” (2.2.96) with
his imprisonment when Arcite describes the mutual paradise they will construct in each
other’s company. This capacity for amicitia to extend its arms to include the homoerotic
is not quite so available to Davenant in the Restoration. While we are not yet in the
period during which Kristina Straub has identified an incipient homophobia often
directed at the eighteenth-century male actor, it is still the case, as Hammond puts
it, that Restoration alterations to Shakespeare’s texts are often “motivated partly
by a concern to protect male friendship from the suspicion of homosexual desire”
(116). The way that Arcite and Palamon are rewritten appears like a textbook result of
this motivation.
Much of the idealizing dialogue that the two gentlemen use to describe their mutual
affection for each other is retained in Davenant’s text. And, in some senses, this mutuality
is heightened by distributing the dialogue more evenly between the two men. Where
Fletcher gives Arcite the lengthiest speeches, in Davenant they take turns summing up the
potential for their mutually constitutive happiness in prison:
 Shakespeare 5

Theocles.
Wealth we need none, we are each other’s mine,
Each other’s Wife, begetting every hour
New births of Love; we’re Father, Friends, Acquaintance,
We are in one another Family’s [sic.]
I am your heir and you are mine, this place
Is our inheritance; and no oppressor
Dare take this from us. Here with Patience
We may live long. No surfets seek us here.
Philander.
Here no man falls by the rude hand of War,
And by his groanes halk kills the next with fear.
Nor shall the Sea’s [sic.] here swallow up our Youth. (sig. B8v)

Shared between Philander and Theocles, this is all Arcite in the original play. And it
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seems like a fairly faithful replication of the sentiment of the original scene. However,
there is a crucial difference. In The Two Noble Kinsmen, the kinsmen are alone on stage.
In The Rivals, they have an audience who comment on their dialogue and who seem to
direct the audience to respond to it in a particular way. Celania is on stage with her maid,
Leucippe, “as at a Window.” As observers of the scene being played out between the
condemned men, they offer a specific perspective on their friendship. Leucippe sets the
situation up very clearly at the start of the scene:
This Window, Madam, looks into the Tarras
Where they are walking, you may over-hear
All their discourse (the Curtain being clos’d)
Without discovery. (sig. D8r)
Seeing unseen, and hearing unheard, they are licensed to comment on the behavior and
conversation of the two young men. Celania’s first comment evinces pleasant surprise
that they “forget their Misery’s [sic.]” and “brook / Affliction with so smooth a brow”
(sig. D8v). This framing of the dialogue between the two men becomes comic in the next
part of the scene where, again, Theocles and Philander share Arcite’s words from The
Two Noble Kinsmen:
Theocles.
Were we at liberty and unconfin’d,
A Wife might disunite us lawfully,
Bas’ness divide us.
Philander.
Or I might sicken, Cosin,
Where you should never know it, and so perish
Without your Noble hand to close my eyes. (sig. D8v)
Celania’s subsequent commentary on this is a wonderful piece of comic irony, especially
followed by Philander’s next speech:

Celania.
What charming language his affection speakes?
What kindness wou’d he to a Woman show
 6 H. Griffiths

That is enamour’d on his kinsman so?

How happy were a Maid which shou’d receive
So sweet assurances of Love?
Philander.
I’m almost wanton with my Captivity,
What Misery is to live abroad,
And everywhere? Me-thinks ’tis like a Beast:
I here enjoy a Court. (sig. D8v)

Celania’s comment – that the love that these men share reveals them as ideal husbands –
is a barely credible misapprehension of what she is seeing and hearing. However, for The
Rivals, it is entirely appropriate. It works as meta-commentary on the process of
adaptation itself as Davenant wrestles his early modern material – with all its homoerotic
potential – into a properly comic Restoration performance.
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The framing of the male friends as a spectacle for the heterosexual gaze of the
enamored Celania prepares us for quite a different reading of the scene in which the
two friends see and both fall for Heraclia at first sight. In Fletcher’s scene, Palamon’s
silence, as he sees Emilia, interrupts Arcite’s effusive celebration of their friendship in
a way that is typically Fletcherian in its use of abrupt reversals. In Davenant, the
way has already been paved towards heterosexual desire by Celania’s ironic reframing
of the discourse of amicitia. Alex Davis argues that, in putting The Knight’s Tale
onto the stage in The Two Noble Kinsmen, Fletcher and Shakespeare produce a
circumstance in which the aristocratic male body becomes an object of admiring
gazes. He writes:

Both the prison and, by implication, the physical structure of the Blackfriars playhouse, onto
which the architecture of the jail is imaginatively projected, figure here as vast machines for
viewing, framing for a vulgar audience the spectacle of a refined and (literally) elevated
nobility. (178)

In this scheme, the Jailer’s Daughter becomes victim to the dangers of over-investing in
her (and our) enjoyment as we look in admiration at these beautiful exemplars of male
friendship. However, in promoting the Jailer’s Daughter to Celania, the Provost’s
daughter, she is licensed to look. Unlike in The Two Noble Kinsmen, she does not need
to be educated out of her desire for young aristocrats. Her desire for the prisoners is
sanctioned and her ironic misapprehension about the significance of the discourse of male
friendship is, in the end, endorsed by the play.
So far, I have outlined the ways in which a potentially troubling Jacobean
tragicomedy is adapted and put to use on the Restoration stage. A play from a period
in which same-sex friendship, especially male amicitia, was granted substantial
emotional weight, is altered for a period in which this was not so much the case.
However, there is a sense in which Davenant is, himself, just as ironically mistaken as
Celania in his reading of what is going on between Fletcher’s two gentlemen friends. In
this scene from the Jacobean play, the discourse of amicitia is already being given very
short shrift. Fletcher’s scene works hard to redirect the emotional centre of Shakespeare’s
first act.
 Shakespeare 7

Fletcher and Shakespeare: gentlemen rivals

In feeling the need to frame friendship discourse as ironic and, through this, to redirect
our attention towards the story of heterosexual marriage (“Move along! Nothing to see
here!”), Davenant misses the irony that is already there in Fletcher’s scene. Robert Stretter
reads the scene, and the whole play, as parodying Ciceronian discourses of amicitia. As
he puts it, “As soon as the imprisoned Palamon and Arcite finish swearing eternal loyalty
to one another in the conventional, superlative terms of male friendship, Emilia appears
and fatally rearranges their priorities” (350). Here, then, a Fletcherian sudden reversal
underscores the implausibility of sustaining ideal friendship in the real world. Jennifer
Forsyth has also seen, in the set-up of their relationship, an indication of its
unsustainability. She argues that “While the pair seems to believe that they exemplify
true friendship, their language shows that they fall short of the ideal even before Emilia
serves as the apparent mediate cause of their friendship’s collapse” (75). The language
that Forsyth points towards is Palamon’s mistake in saying that they have “two souls / Put
in two noble bodies” whereas, if he had been reading his Montaigne and Cicero properly,
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he would be putting just one (unified) soul into two (separate) bodies. However, there are
additional ways in which the language of this scene undermines any of its ostensible
claims. In particular, its hyperbolic reconstructions of friendship discourse are reminiscent
of some of Fletcher’s other work.
In The Chances, a sole-authored Fletcher play from 1617, there is a piece of dialogue
that concentrates the hyperbole of his scene form The Two Noble Kinsmen. Don Frederick
introduces his friend, Don John, to Constantia who is to become the object of their
rivalrous affections. The two men have already fallen out and, although the restitution of
their friendship is part of the play’s comic ending, at this point, Don Frederick’s
introduction is suffused with irony:

Fredrick [to Constantia, on his friend, Don John]

Nay start not, though he be a stranger to ye,
Hee’s of a Noble straine, my kinsman, Lady,
My Countrey-man, and fellow Traveller,
One bed containes us ever, one purse feeds us,
And one faith free beween us; do not fear him,
Hee’s truely honest.
John [aside]. That’s a lye. (2.2.37–42)5

Frederick’s “ever” tips his speech nicely over into the realms of hyperbole. This is, then,
confirmed by John’s mischievous aside. As I’ve argued elsewhere, this effect can also be
seen in Fletcher’s contributions to The Coxcomb and The Elder Brother, both of which
contain stories of hopelessly misdirected male friendship where mistaken claims are made
to the aristocratic discourse of amicitia, only for those claims to be revealed as specious
(Griffiths “John Fletcher’s Men” 97–98). In The Two Noble Kinsmen, Palamon and
Arcite’s conversation has the air of over-compensation and the situation of their
imprisonment itself undermines the claims they make to a friendship that is selfless.
Palamon, after detailing the joys of their mutual imprisonment and the horrors that would
wait on their lives if they had the misfortune to be released, asks his friend, “Shall I say
more?” “I would hear you still,” Arcite replies. “Ye shall”, says Palamon and off he goes:
“Is there any record of any two that loved / Better than we, Arcite?” (2.2.111–13).
 8 H. Griffiths

The two kinsmen’s loquaciousness in captivity mimics the endless repetitions of

friendship discourse itself but, in so doing, frames it as always open to ironic reversal.
Shakespeare does not see it quite like this and the work of his final act is to reinvest
their situation with pathos and, as Waith argues, “[Arcite’s death] becomes the occasion
for a moving reassertion of the bond of friendship so nearly destroyed by love” (248).
The ending of this play is comparable to the moment at the end of The Maid’s Tragedy,
where Diphilus cannot quite believe that his brother, Melantius, grieves more over the
death of his friend than that of their sister, Evadne:

Diphilus O brother,
Here lies your sister slain! You lose yourself
In sorrow there.
Melantius Why, Diphilus, it is
A thing to laugh at in respect of this:
Here was my sister, father, brother, son,
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All that I had. (5.3.261–66)

Melantius echoes Arcite’s claim that, “We are one another’s wife, ever begetting / New
births of love; we are father, friends, acquaintance; / We are in one another, families – ”
(2.2.80–82). In Beaumont and Fletcher’s tragedy, the same topos is not accompanied by
verbose embellishment as it is in the tragicomedy but, rather, has a darker tone. That tone
gains much of its darkness from a tacit acknowledgment of the appalling hurt that is, in
part, caused by Melantius’ devotion to Amintor. That his friendship enables him to laugh
at his sister’s suicide ensures that their friendship is not rescued for the re-inscription of
virtuous behavior that might properly attend tragic conclusions. Melantius ends the
tragedy vowing that he will do anything in his power to kill himself, and a Fletcherian
scepticism about the values of idealized friendship lasts right through to the close of The
Maid’s Tragedy. This is in marked contrast to the close of The Two Noble Kinsmen, which
registers only loss. Palamon’s last words are not for himself but for his friend:

O cousin,
That we should things desire which do cost us
The loss of our desire! That naught could buy
Dear love, but loss of dear love! (5.6.110–12)

Conclusion
In adapting The Two Noble Kinsmen into The Rivals, Davenant adapts its discursive
frameworks – including those of aristocratic amicitia – for his Restoration audience. In
doing so, he reads the earlier play as troublingly homoerotic and renders the discourse
ironically in order to redirect our attention and the plot of the play towards the double
marriage that he supplies as its conclusion. Fletcher, I argue, was already there, putting
that discourse under severe pressure, both here and elsewhere in his work. Shakespeare,
on the other hand, treats this discourse with pathos right until the end. Tracing both
adaptation and rivalrous collaboration, then, allows for a variegated understanding of
what Guy-Bray calls this “literary tradition characterized by what we would call
diachronic literary collaborations by men” (75). I have tried to trace three authorial
hands – Davenant, Fletcher, Shakespeare – working both with each other and, to an
 Shakespeare 9

extent, at cross purposes. The recognitions and misunderstandings that are involved in
these dramatic adaptations and collaborations – between periods and across texts – offer a
nuanced perspective on the development of same-sex friendship across the early modern
period.

Acknowledgement
I would like to thank the Folger Shakespeare library. Some of the work for this article was
undertaken while enjoying a short-term fellowship at the library.

Notes
1. Waith argues elsewhere that Davenant, in trying to make his play conform more to the “general
rejoicings” that are a feature of tragicomedy, “made it more like the tragicomedies in the
Beaumont-and-Fletcher corpus than like the late Shakesepearean romances” (Introduction 33).
2. I have examined the potential relationships between Cervantes, Fletcher, Shakespeare and
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Theobald elsewhere, in two chapters which consider both the idea of loss that might attend
Theobald’s treatment of male friendship in Double Falsehood and, also, the value of considering
Fletcher’s contribution to a possible text of Cardenio, as distinct from that of Shakespeare, and
especially with regard to their differing treatments of male friendship. See Griffiths, “The Friend
in Cardenio” and “John Fletcher’s Men.”
3. There is very little contention over who wrote which part of The Two Noble Kinsmen.
Throughout the article, I use the demarcations suggested by Cyrus Hoy and confirmed by
Jonathan Hope (Hoy VII; Hope).
4. Leigh’s book came out too late for me, in this article, to give it the consideration it deserves. Her
reading of The Rivals as an adaptation of Two Noble Kinsmen is part of a project to consider the
dramaturgical possibilities for Shakespeare’s late female characters through the way that they are
adapted for the Restoration stage. Although the focus is obviously different (genealogies of
female agency rather than of idealized male friendship), there are also many continuities between
the two readings of the adaptation.
5. Fletcher’s work is quoted from Fredson Bowers’ Cambridge edition.

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