ceremony has been performed, and it is his triumphant return to the city of
Athens that is interrupted by the widows' appeal for justice; and in the
play the action passes in the three or four days before the marriage.
Secondly, the wedding-day is the first of May, and there are two references
to that "observance of May"[16] which is given by Chaucer as the reason
both for Emilia's walking in the garden and for Arcite's seeking of the
grove where Palamon lay hid.[17] Thirdly, it can hardly be doubted that
Shakespeare took the name of Philostrate from Chaucer; Egeus he would find
also in North's Plutarch as the name of the father of Theseus; and it is
possible that Chaucer's names for the champions, Ligurge and Emetreus, may
have suggested Lysander and Demetrius. Finally, there are two or three
minor indications; Lysander and Demetrius fight, or attempt to fight, for
Helena, in the "wood near Athens," just as Palamon and Arcite fight for
Emilia in the grove[18]; Theseus is a keen huntsman both in the poem and in
the play[19]; and he refers[20] to his conquest of Thebes, which, as we
have seen, is described in _The Knightes Tale_.

Apart from these details, I do not think Shakespeare is indebted to
Chaucer. It is conceivable that the story of Palamon and Arcite affected,
but did not supply, the plot of the four lovers in _A Midsummer-Night's
Dream_; but Shakespeare has added a second woman. This completion of the
antithesis is characteristic of his early work; with a happy ending in
view, the characters must fall into pairs, whereas with Palamon, Arcite,
and Emilia, one of the men must be removed. There is nothing to prevent the
supposition that Shakespeare was acquainted from boyhood with Chaucer's
story--either in Chaucerian form or possibly in the shape of a
chap-book--and that he constructed a first draft of _The Two Noble Kinsmen_
quite early in his career as a playwright, subsequently laying it aside as
unsatisfactory, and, in his declining years, collaborating with another or
others to produce the play on that theme.