Read "The Two Noble Kinsmen" by William Shakespeare online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
Flourish.
New plays and maidenheads are near akin; / Much follow'd both, for both much money gi'en, / If they stand sound and well: and a good play, / Whose modest scenes blush on his marriage-day, / And shake to lose his honour, is like her / That after holy tie and first night's stir, / Yet still is modesty, and still retains / More of the maid to sight than husband's pains. / We pray our play may be so; for I'm sure / It has a noble breeder and a pure, / A learned, and a poet never went / More famous yet 'twixt Po and silver Trent: / Chaucer, of all admir'd, the story gives; / There constant to eternity it lives. / If we let fall the nobleness of this, / And the first sound this child hear be a hiss, / How will it shake the bones of that good man, / And make him cry from under ground, "O, fan / From me the witless chaff of such a writer / That blasts my bays, and my fam'd works makes lighter / Than Robin Hood! "