Such is Chaucer's tale of Palamon and Arcite. It was dramatised before Shakespeare's day by Richard Edwardes in a play now lost. Possibly the play of "Palamon and Arcite" four times recorded--in for different spellings--by Henslowe in his _Diary_[14] is Edwardes' play, but as the latter was performed at Oxford before Queen Elizabeth as early as 1566, it is at least equally possible that Henslowe's play is another version. The complete Chaucerian form of the story of Palamon and Arcite is dramatised in _The Two Noble Kinsmen_, a play to which Shakespeare undoubtedly[15] contributed. The changes made by the authors--Fletcher and Massinger or Shakespeare, or all three--are little more than such limitations as are demanded by dramatic form; for instance, the Kinsmen, when discovered fighting, are dismissed for a month to find three knights, instead of being given a year to find one hundred. Chaucer's hint, that Palamon was assisted to escape from prison by a friend, is developed by the dramatists to make the sub-plot of the gaoler's daughter. The character-drawing is far more subtle than the poet's; Chaucer leaves the reader's sympathies equally divided, despite the fact that he says plainly that Arcite was in the wrong, because he violated the compact of the two kinsmen to assist each other in love. We must now consider what justification there is for believing that the main plot of _A Midsummer-Night's Dream_ was suggested by _The Knightes Tale_. Firstly, as has already been pointed out, the nuptials of Theseus form the beginning of both play and poem; though in the poem the actual 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_.