The king of Thebes is a tyrant but his young relatives, Palamon and
Arcite, defend him anyway. The two noble kinsmen find their loyalty
rewarded with imprisonment when they end up on the losing side of a
battle with the great hero, Theseus of Athens. From the window of their
jail they observe Emilia, the sister-in-law of their conqueror, whose
stunning beauty shatters their vow of eternal brotherhood. Now the
former friends must find a way to evade their captors and pursue the
alluring princess, an undertaking that will conclude with a fight to the
death.
First published in 1634, this Jacobean tragicomedy features a plot
derived from The Knight's Tale in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. The play
was originally attributed to both John Fletcher and William Shakespeare;
its association with the latter is a longstanding source of controversy
that is now generally accepted by scholarly consensus.