Chaucer, Shakespeare, and the Lost Friendship Plays of the Admiral’s Men

When Beatrice derisively asserts in Much Ado About Nothing that Benedick “hath every month a new sworn brother” (1.1.53), what points of reference for sworn brotherhood would have been available to Shakespeare and his audience?¹ An obvious place to start, for Shakespeare at least, would be Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, which tells the story of the tragic brotherhood of Palamon and Arcite. Chaucer’s tale inspired at least three early modern dramatizations: Richard Edwards’s lost play “Palamon and Arcite,” performed over two nights during Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Oxford in 1566; an anonymous “Palamon and Arcite,” also lost, staged by the Admiral’s Men at the Rose in 1594; and, of course, Shakespeare and Fletcher’s The Two Noble Kinsmen (c. 1613–14).² The best known, The Knight’s Tale is by no means the only medieval inspiration for Renaissance playwrights interested in the long tradition of brotherhood as idealized male friendship. In this essay, I argue that from about 1594 to 1600, the Admiral’s Men, the principal rival to Shakespeare’s acting company, had a kind of specialty in male friendship plays, many of them based on medieval texts and most of them now unfortunately lost. In some of these plays, we find a peculiar melding of the medieval tradition of sworn brotherhood with the humanist ideal of classical friendship. I focus in particular on the possible influence on Shakespeare of “Alexander and Lodowick,” a lost play with origins in the legend of Amis and Amiloun, a widely-known medieval tale of friendship that itself almost certainly influenced Chaucer. We know from Henslowe’s diary that the Admiral’s Men performed the play over a dozen times in 1597.³ While “Alexander and Lodowick” has not survived and its author is unknown, we can form an educated guess about its plot from the two extant Renaissance versions of the story: one, the final tale in The Seven Wise Masters of Rome cycle; and the other, a popular ballad called “The Two Faithfull Friends.” Alexander and Lodowick’s story closely follows the plot of the medieval legend of Amis and Amiloun, culminating in an infanticide that surprisingly produces a happy ending.

As devoted friends, Alexander and Lodowick invite comparison to Palamon and Arcite, and the fact that the Admiral’s Men performed plays about both sets of men within three years of each other at the Rose suggests a connection between the plays as medieval friendship stories, a connection recognizable for writers and audiences alike. Scholars agree that Shakespeare was well aware of the work of his company’s rivals. As Todd Borlik writes, “Shakespeare must have gone to performances at the Rose. His active role in Elizabethan show business—as the triple threat of sharer, player, and playwright—would have demanded it.”⁴ It is likely, then, that Shakespeare’s own friendship drama was influenced by and responded to thematically similar plays staged by the Admiral’s Men. So far, we can infer two things: first, that Shakespeare would have been thinking about Chaucer in the mid-1590s in contexts beyond his borrowings from The Knight’s Tale in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and well before his direct adaptation of Chaucerian source material in Troilus and Cressida (c. 1603) and The Two Noble Kinsmen; second, that the transmission of medieval romance source material to early modern England is less direct than is often recognized. If “Alexander and Lodowick,” “Palamon and Arcite,” and several other similarly themed plays performed by the Admiral’s Men reflect a vogue for friendship plays in the 1590s, then Shakespeare’s treatment of male friendship in his own drama of this period should be understood in this context. In plays such as The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596) and Much Ado About Nothing (c. 1598–99), I suggest, Shakespeare offers a critique of the kind of triumphalist male friendship that appears in the legends of friends such as Alexander and Lodowick, stories in which the needs of the male friends take priority over wives, children, and sometimes...