John Fletcher, a house playwright for the theater group the King’s Men, wrote a play with Williams Shakespeare entitled The Two Noble Kinsmen. The play is based on Geoffrey Chaucer’s fourteenth-century poem The Knight’s Tale, and is believed to have been written around 1613 or 1614. That would make it one of Shakespeare’s last works before he died in 1616, if not his last.
A 1634 printing of The Two Noble Kinsmen, still in its original leather binding, has recently been found in a Spanish university, the Royal Scots College. The Two Noble Kinsmen was included in a volume made up of several English plays printed from 1630 to 1635. In the 1600s and 1700s, collections of books in English were rare in Spain, because of censorship by the church. But the Scots college had special authorization to import whatever they wanted. And what they wanted, apparently, were plays!
