Links between The Two Noble Kinsmen and contemporaneous works point to 1613–1614 as its date of composition and first performance. A reference to Palamon, one of the protagonists of Kinsmen, is contained in Ben Jonson's play Bartholomew Fair (1614). In Jonson's work, a passage in Act IV, scene iii, appears to indicate that Kinsmen was known and familiar to audiences at that time.
In Francis Beaumont's The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray's Inn (1613), the second anti-masque features this cast of rural characters: pedant, May Lord and Lady, servingman and chambermaid, tavern host and hostess, shepherd and his wench, and two "bavians" (male and female baboon). The same cast slightly simplified (minus wench and one "bavian") enacts the Morris dance in Kinsmen, II, v, 120–138. A successful "special effect" in Beaumont's masque, designed for a single performance, appears to have been adopted and adapted into Kinsmen, indicating that the play followed soon after the masque.[4]: 53–54, 306
The play was entered into the Stationers' Register on 8 April 1634; the quarto was published later that year by the bookseller John Waterson, printed by Thomas Cotes. The play was not included in the First Folio (1623) or any of the subsequent Folios of Shakespeare's works, though it was included in the second Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1679.[4]: 507
In September 2020, media reported that early seventeenth-century editions of several English plays, including a 1634 Two Noble Kinsmen had been discovered by John Stone of the University of Barcelona at the Royal Scots College's library in Salamanca, Spain.[5] The inclusion of The Two Noble Kinsmen in one of these two volumes makes it perhaps the oldest copy of any of Shakespeare's works in the country and the first to circulate in the Spanish-speaking world.[6]
