Where friendship is a major and foregrounded theme in English Renaissance narrative and drama it tends to be put in competition with love. This is because the Humanist ideal of friendship bears some similarity to romantic love; the Humanist ideal in fact seems to want to displace love as a priority in men's lives. This tends towards an insistence that love and friendship are in some sense incompatible, and puts a great deal of pressure on friendship. The conflict between friendship and love is expressed in the narrative and dramatic form of the jealousy plot – in which two friends love the same woman – a plot that is sufficiently common in this period for us to call it a genre. Through the test of jealousy, this genre allows an exploration of the nature of ideal friendship, which is ultimately shown to be a hollow rhetorical construct. When such friendship is taken seriously, however, it can cause an excessive sense of obligation which is often stifling, sometimes absurd. It also causes anxiety about the loss of identity, due to the similarity assumed between the friends. In characters' attempts to escape the stifling determinism of this genre, we can see the start of the kind of self-assertion we see in more differentiated friendly relationships.

Burton observes that sexual jealousy ‘will make the nearest and dearest friends fall out; they will endure all other things to be common, goods, lands, moneys, participate of each [other's] pleasures, and take in good part any disgraces, injuries in another kind; but as Propertius well describes it in an elegy of his, in this they will suffer nothing, have no corrivals’.