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Introduction
The word 'race' appears once in Shakespeare and Fletcher's The Two Noble Kinsmen. Lamenting the impending death of Arcite from his unfortunate accident, Theseus states, 'Surely the gods/Would have him die a bachelor lest his race/Should show i'th' world too godlike' (5.3.116-118).1 The word 'race' in the medieval and early modern periods enfolds numerous meanings: it can denote geographical origin, ethnicity, religion, lineage, class and gender (Loomba, 2002a; Loomba and Burton, 2007; Cohen, 2013). Here, the word 'race' most explicitly denotes lineage. When Theseus suggests that the lineage of Arcite and Emilia would be truly exceptional, and, by implication, that the lineage of Palamon and Emilia would be less so, he recapitulates a hierarchizing of lineages and ontological categories that occurs throughout the play: Athenian over Amazonian, man over woman, light over dark and aristocrat over peasant. Yet, it is curious that Arcite's race should be exalted over Palamon's; nowhere does the play's primary source text, Chaucer's Knight's Tale , suggest that the two cousins are racially different from each other.
Although this suggestion of racial difference marks one of the ways The Two Noble Kinsmen departs from the Knight's Tale , Chaucer's tale is no less concerned with race than is Shakespeare and Fletcher's play. Whereas The Two Noble Kinsmen is concerned with how various characters perceive racial differences between the knights, the Knight's Tale is concerned with the racial alterity of Amazonian women. Ypolita's and Emelye's Amazonian alterity, however, is obscured by their white skin and aristocratic social status, both of which make them desirable marriage and sexual partners. The two Amazons are thus similar to the white Saracen princesses that Christian knights find so desirable in crusade romances; like white Saracen princesses in crusade romances, Ypolita and Emelye are transformed from enemies into wives. Moreover, when we remember that the Knight participated in significant battles between the Christian West and the Islamic East and South, the similarities between the two Amazons and the white Saracen princesses of crusade romances become more than coincidental. In crusade romances, eroticized whiteness becomes a sign of not-yet-realized racial sameness, a sameness that only comes into being after religious conversion and marriage to Christian knights. The Knight's Tale replicates both crusade romance's eroticization of...