The Two Gentlemen of Verona - Reading Shakespeare Project

The Two Gentlemen of Verona

 

The Two Gentlemen of Verona is a comedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1589 and 1593. It is considered by some to be Shakespeare's first play, and is often seen as showing his first tentative steps in laying out some of the themes and motifs with which he would later deal in more detail; for example, it is the first of his plays in which a heroine dresses as a boy. The play deals with the themes of friendship and infidelity, the conflict between friendship and love, and the foolish behaviour of people in love. The highlight of the play is considered by some to be Launce, the clownish servant of Proteus, and his dog Crab, to whom "the most scene-stealing non-speaking role in the canon" has been attributed.

Two Gentlemen is often regarded as one of Shakespeare's weakest plays. It has the smallest named cast of any play by Shakespeare.

Characters

• Valentine – young man living in Verona
• Proteus – his closest friend
• Silvia – falls in love with Valentine in Milan
• Julia – in love with Proteus in Verona
• Duke of Milan – Silvia's father
• Lucetta – Julia's waiting woman
• Antonio – Proteus' father
• Thurio – foolish rival to Valentine for Silvia
• Eglamour – aids in Silvia's escape
• Speed – a clownish servant to Valentine
• Launce – Proteus's servant
• Panthino – Antonio's servant
• Host – of the inn where Julia lodges in Milan
• Outlaws
• Crab – Launce's dog
• Servants
• Musicians

 

Summary

As the play begins, Valentine is preparing to leave Verona for Milan so as to broaden his horizons. He begs his best friend, Proteus, to come with him, but Proteus is in love with Julia, and refuses to leave. Disappointed, Valentine bids Proteus farewell and goes on alone. Meanwhile, Julia is discussing Proteus with her maid, Lucetta, who tells Julia that she thinks Proteus is fond of her. Julia, however, acts coyly, embarrassed to admit that she likes him. Lucetta then produces a letter; she will not say who gave it to her, but teases Julia that it was Valentine's servant, Speed, who brought it from Proteus. Julia, still unwilling to reveal her love in front of Lucetta, angrily tears up the letter. She sends Lucetta away, but then, realising her own rashness, she picks up the fragments of the letter and kisses them, trying to piece them back together.

Meanwhile, Proteus' father has decided that Proteus should travel to Milan and join Valentine. He orders that Proteus must leave the next day, prompting a tearful farewell with Julia, to whom Proteus swears eternal love. The two exchange rings and vows and Proteus promises to return as soon as he can.

In Milan, Proteus finds Valentine in love with the Duke's daughter, Silvia. Despite being in love with Julia, Proteus falls instantly in love with Silvia and vows to win her. Unaware of Proteus' feelings, Valentine tells him the Duke wants Silvia to marry the foppish but wealthy Thurio, against her wishes. Because the Duke suspects that his daughter and Valentine are in love, he locks her nightly in a tower, to which he keeps the only key. However, Valentine tells Proteus that he plans to free her by means of a corded ladder, and together, they will elope. Proteus immediately informs the Duke, who subsequently captures and banishes Valentine. While wandering outside Milan, Valentine runs afoul of a band of outlaws, who claim they are also exiled gentlemen. Valentine lies, saying he was banished for killing a man in a fair fight, and the outlaws elect him their leader.

Meanwhile, in Verona, Julia decides to join her lover in Milan. She convinces Lucetta to dress her in boy's clothes and help her fix her hair so she will not be harmed on the journey. Once in Milan, Julia quickly discovers Proteus' love for Silvia, watching him attempt to serenade her. She contrives to become his page boy – Sebastian – until she can decide upon a course of action. Proteus sends Sebastian to Silvia with a gift of the ring that Julia gave to him before he left Verona, but Julia learns that Silvia scorns Proteus' affections and is disgusted he would forget his love back home, i.e. Julia herself. Silvia deeply mourns the loss of Valentine, who Proteus has told her is rumoured dead.

Not persuaded of Valentine's death, Silvia determines to flee the city with the help of Sir Eglamour. They escape into the forest but when they are confronted by the outlaws, Eglamour flees and Silvia is taken captive. The outlaws head to their leader (Valentine), but on the way, they encounter Proteus and Julia (still disguised as Sebastian). Proteus rescues Silvia, and then pursues her deeper into the forest. Secretly observed by Valentine, Proteus attempts to persuade Silvia that he loves her, but she rejects his advances.

Proteus insinuates that he will rape her ("I'll force thee yield to my desire"), but at this point, Valentine intervenes and denounces Proteus. Horrified at what has happened, Proteus vows that the hate Valentine feels for him is nothing compared to the hate he feels for himself. Convinced that Proteus' repentance is genuine, Valentine forgives him and seems to offer Silvia to him. At this point, overwhelmed, Julia faints, revealing her true identity. Upon seeing her, Proteus suddenly remembers his love for her and vows fidelity to her once again. The Duke and Thurio are brought as prisoners by the outlaws. Seeing Silvia, Thurio claims her as his, but Valentine warns Thurio that if he makes one move toward her, he will kill him. Terrified, Thurio renounces Silvia. The Duke, disgusted with Thurio's cowardice and impressed by Valentine's actions, approves his and Silvia's love, and consents to their marriage. The two couples are happily united, and the Duke pardons the outlaws, telling them they may return to Milan.

In writing The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Shakespeare drew on the Spanish prose romance Los Siete Libros de la Diana (The Seven Books of the Diana) by the Portuguese writer Jorge de Montemayor. In the second book of Diana, Don Felix, who is in love with Felismena, sends her a letter explaining his feelings. Like Julia, Felismena pretends to reject the letter, and be annoyed with her maid for delivering it. Like Proteus, Felix is sent away by his father, and is followed by Felismena, who, disguised as a boy, becomes his page, only to subsequently learn that Felix has fallen in love with Celia. Felismena is then employed by Felix to act as his messenger in all communications with Celia, who scorns his love. Instead, Celia falls in love with the page (i.e. Felismena in disguise). Eventually, after a combat in a wood, Felix and Felismena are reunited. Upon Felismena revealing herself however, Celia, having no counterpart to Valentine, dies of grief.

Diana was published in Spanish in 1559 and translated into French by Nicholas Collin in 1578. An English translation was made by Bartholomew Young and published in 1598, though Young claims in his preface to have finished the translation sixteen years earlier (c. 1582). Shakespeare could have read a manuscript of Young's English translation, or encountered the story in French, or learned of it from an anonymous English play, The History of Felix and Philiomena, which may have been based on Diana, and which was performed for the court at Greenwich Palace by the Queen's Men on 3 January 1585. The History of Felix and Philiomena is now lost.

Another major influence on Shakespeare was the story of the intimate friendship of Titus and Gisippus as told in Thomas Elyot's The Boke Named the Governour in 1531 (the same story is told in The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio, but verbal similarities between The Two Gentlemen and The Governor suggest it was Elyot's work Shakespeare used as his primary source, not Boccaccio's). In this story, Titus and Gisippus are inseparable until Gisippus falls in love with Sophronia. He introduces her to Titus, but Titus is overcome with jealousy, and vows to seduce her. Upon hearing of Titus' plan, Gisippus arranges for them to change places on the wedding night, thus placing their friendship above his love.

Also important to Shakespeare in the composition of the play was John Lyly's Euphues, The Anatomy of Wit, published in 1578. Like The Governor, Euphues presents two close friends who are inseparable until a woman comes between them, and, like both The Governor and Two Gentlemen, the story concludes with one friend sacrificing the woman so as to save the friendship. However, as Geoffrey Bullough argues "Shakespeare's debt to Lyly was probably one of technique more than matter." Lyly's Midas may also have influenced the scene where Launce and Speed run through the milkmaid's virtues and defects, as it contains a very similar scene between Lucio and Petulus.

Other minor sources include Arthur Brooke's narrative poem The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet. Obviously Shakespeare's source for Romeo and Juliet, it features a character called Friar Laurence, as does Two Gentlemen, and a scene where a young man attempts to outwit his lover's father by means of a corded ladder (as Valentine does in Two Gentlemen). Philip Sidney's The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia may also have influenced Shakespeare insofar as it contains a character who follows her betrothed, dressed as his page, and later on, one of the main characters becomes captain of a group of Helots.

Date and text

The exact date of composition of The Two Gentlemen of Verona is unknown, but it is generally believed to have been one of Shakespeare's earliest works.^[14] The first evidence of its existence is in a list of Shakespeare's plays in Francis Meres's Palladis Tamia, published in 1598, but it is thought to have been written in the early 1590s. Clifford Leech, for example, argues for 1592/1593; G. Blakemore Evans places the date at 1590–1593;^[17] Gary Taylor suggests 1590–1591; Kurt Schlueter posits the late 1580s; William C. Carroll suggests 1590–1592; Roger Warren tentatively suggests 1587, but acknowledges 1590/1591 as more likely.

It has been argued that Two Gentlemen may have been Shakespeare's first work for the stage. This theory was first suggested by Edmond Malone in 1821, in the Third Variorum edition of Shakespeare's plays, edited by James Boswell based on Malone's notes. Malone dated the play 1591, a modification of his earlier 1595 date from the third edition of The Plays of William Shakespeare. At this time, the dominant theory was that the Henry VI trilogy had been Shakespeare's first work. More recently, the play was placed first in The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works of 1986, and again in the 2nd edition of 2005, in The Norton Shakespeare of 1997, and again in the 2nd edition of 2008, and in The Complete Pelican Shakespeare of 2002.

A large part of the theory that this may be Shakespeare's first play is the quality of the work itself. Writing in 1968, Norman Sanders argued "all are agreed on the play's immaturity." The argument is that the play betrays a lack of practical theatrical experience on Shakespeare's part, and as such, it must have come extremely early in his career. Stanley Wells, for example, has written the "dramatic structure is comparatively unambitious, and while some of its scenes are expertly constructed, those involving more than, at the most, four characters betray an uncertainty of technique suggestive of inexperience." This uncertainty can be seen in how Shakespeare handles the distribution of dialogue in such scenes. Whenever there are more than three characters on stage, at least one of those characters tends to fall silent. For example, Speed is silent for almost all of Act 2, Scene 4, as are Thurio, Silvia and Julia for most of the last half of the final scene. It has also been suggested that the handling of the final scene in general, in which the faithful lover seemingly offers his beloved as a token of his forgiveness to the man who has just attempted to rape her, is a sign of Shakespeare's lack of maturity as a dramatist.

In his 2008 edition of the play for the Oxford Shakespeare, Roger Warren argues that the play is the oldest surviving piece of Shakespearean literature, suggesting a date of composition as somewhere between 1587 and 1591. He hypothesizes that the play was perhaps written before Shakespeare came to London, with an idea towards using the famous comic actor Richard Tarlton in the role of Launce (this theory stems from the fact that Tarlton had performed several extremely popular and well known scenes with dogs). However, Tarlton died in September 1588, and Warren notes several passages in Two Gentlemen which seem to borrow from John Lyly's Midas, which wasn't written until at least late-1589. As such, Warren acknowledges that 1590/1591 is most likely the correct date of composition.

Text

The play was not printed until 1623, when it appeared in the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays.

Criticism and analysis

Critical history

Perhaps the most critically discussed issue in the play is the sequence, bizarre by modern Western standards, in Act 5, Scene 4 in which Valentine seems to 'give' Silvia to Proteus as a sign of his friendship. For many years, the general critical consensus on this issue was that the incident revealed an inherent misogyny in the text. For example, Hilary Spurling wrote in 1970, "Valentine is so overcome [by Proteus' apology] that he promptly offers to hand over his beloved to the man who, not three minutes before, had meant to rape her." Modern scholarship, however, is much more divided about Valentine's actions at the end of the play, with some critics arguing that he does not offer to give Silvia to Proteus at all. The ambiguity lies in the line "All that was mine in Silvia I give thee" (5.4.83). Some critics (such as Stanley Wells, for example) interpret this to mean that Valentine is indeed handing Silvia over to her would-be rapist, but another school of thought suggests that Valentine simply means "I will love you [Proteus] with as much love as I love Silvia," thus reconciling the dichotomy of friendship and love as depicted elsewhere in the play. This is certainly how Jeffrey Masten, for example, sees it, arguing that the play as a whole "reveals not the opposition of male friendship and Petrarchan love but rather their interdependence." As such, the final scene "stages the play's ultimate collaboration of male friendship and its incorporation of the plot we would label "heterosexual"."

This is also how Roger Warren interprets the final scene. Warren cites a number of productions of the play as evidence for this argument, including Robin Phillips' Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) production in 1970, where Valentine kisses Silvia, makes his offer and then kisses Proteus. Another staging cited by Warren is Edward Hall's 1998 Swan Theatre production. In Hall's version of the scene, after Valentine says the controversial line, Silvia approaches him and takes him by the hand. They remain holding hands for the rest of the play, clearly suggesting that Valentine has not 'given' her away. Warren also mentions Leon Rubin's 1984 Stratford Shakespeare Festival production (where the controversial line was altered to "All my love to Silvia I also give to thee"), David Thacker's 1991 Swan Theatre production, and the 1983 BBC Television Shakespeare adaptation as supporting the theory that Valentine is not giving Silvia away, but is simply promising to love Proteus as much as he loves Silvia. Patty S. Derrick also interprets the BBC production in this manner, arguing that "Proteus clearly perceives the offer as a noble gesture of friendship, not an actual offer, because he does not even look towards Silvia but rather falls into an embrace with Valentine" (although Derrick does raise the question that if Valentine is not offering Silvia to Proteus, why does Julia swoon?).

There are other theories regarding this final scene, however. For example, in his 1990 edition of the play for the New Cambridge Shakespeare, Kurt Schlueter suggests that Valentine is indeed handing Silvia over to Proteus, but the audience is not supposed to take it literally; the incident is farcical, and should be interpreted as such. Schlueter argues that the play provides possible evidence it was written to be performed and viewed primarily by a young audience, and as such, to be staged at university theatres, as opposed to public playhouses. Such an audience would be more predisposed to accepting the farcical nature of the scene, and more likely to find humorous the absurdity of Valentine's gift. As such, in Schlueter's theory, the scene does represent what it appears to represent; Valentine does give Silvia to her would-be rapist, but it is done purely for comic effect.

Launce's substitute for Proteus' dog by Augustus Egg (1849).

Another theory is provided by William C. Carroll in his 2004 edition for the Arden Shakespeare, Third Series. Carroll argues, like Schlueter, that Valentine is indeed giving Silvia to Proteus, but unlike Schlueter, Carroll detects no sense of farce. Instead, he sees the action as a perfectly logical one in terms of the notions of friendship which were prevalent at the time:

the idealisation of male friendship as superior to male-female love (which was considered not romantic or compassionate but merely lustful, hence inferior) performs a project of cultural nostalgia, a stepping back from potentially more threatening social arrangements to a world of order, a world based on a 'gift' economy of personal relations among male social equals rather than one based on a newer, less stable economy of emotional and economic risk. The offer of the woman from one male friend to another would therefore be the highest expression of friendship from one point of view, a low point of psycho-sexual regression from another.

As in Schlueter, Carroll here interprets Valentine's actions as a gift to Proteus, but unlike Schlueter, and more in line with traditional criticism of the play, Carroll also argues that such a gift, as unacceptable as it is to modern eyes, is perfectly understandable when one considers the cultural and social milieu of the play itself.^[37]

Language

Language is of primary importance in the play insofar as Valentine and Proteus speak in blank verse, but Launce and Speed speak (for the most part) in prose. More specifically, the actual content of many of the speeches serve to illustrate the pompousness of Valentine and Proteus' exalted outlook, and the more realistic and practical outlook of the servants. This is most apparent in Act 3, Scene 1. Valentine has just given a lengthy speech lamenting his banishment and musing on how he cannot possibly survive without Silvia; "Except I be by Silvia in the night/There is no music in the nightingale./Unless I look on Silvia in the day/There is no day for me to look upon" (ll.178–181). However, when Launce enters only a few lines later, he announces that he too is in love, and proceeds to outline, along with Speed, all of his betrothed's positives ("She brews good ale"; "She can knit"; "She can wash and scour"), and negatives ("She hath a sweet mouth"; "She doth talk in her sleep"; "She is slow in words"). After weighing his options, Launce decides that the woman's most important quality is that "she hath more hair than wit, and more faults than hairs, and more wealth than faults" (ll.343–344). He announces that her wealth "makes the faults gracious" (l.356), and chooses for that reason to wed her. This purely materialistic reasoning, as revealed in the form of language, is in stark contrast to the more spiritual and idealised love espoused by Valentine earlier in the scene.

Themes

One of the dominant theories as regards the value of Two Gentlemen is that thematically, it represents a 'trial run' of sorts, in which Shakespeare deals briefly with themes which he would examine in more detail in later works. E.K. Chambers, for example, believed that the play represents something of a gestation of Shakespeare's great thematic concerns. Writing in 1905, Chambers stated that Two Gentlemen

was Shakespeare's first essay at originality, at fashioning for himself the outlines of that romantic or tragicomic formula in which so many of his most characteristic dramas were afterwards to be cast. Something which is neither quite tragedy nor quite comedy, something which touches the heights and depths of sentiment and reveals the dark places of the human heart without lingering long enough there to crystallise the painful impression, a love story broken for a moment into passionate chords by absence and inconstancy and intrigue, and then reunited to the music of wedding bells.

As such, the play's primary interest for critics has tended to lie in relation to what it reveals about Shakespeare's conception of certain themes before he became the accomplished playwright of later years. Writing in 1879, A.C. Swinburne, for example, states "here is the first dawn of that higher and more tender humour that was never given in such perfection to any man as ultimately to Shakespeare." Similarly, in 1906, Warwick R. Bond writes "Shakespeare first opens the vein he worked so richly afterwards – the vein of crossed love, of flight and exile under the escort of the generous sentiments; of disguised heroines, and sufferings endured and virtues exhibited under their disguise; and of the Providence, kinder than life, that annuls the errors and forgives the sin." More recently, Stanley Wells has referred to the play as a "dramatic laboratory in which Shakespeare first experimented with the conventions of romantic comedy which he would later treat with a more subtle complexity, but it has its own charm."

Other critics have been less kind however, arguing that if the later plays show a skilled and confident writer exploring serious issues of the human heart, Two Gentlemen represents the initial, primarily unsuccessful attempt to do likewise. In 1921, for example, J. Dover Wilson and Arthur Quiller-Couch, in their edition of the play for the Cambridge Shakespeare, famously stated that after hearing Valentine offer Silvia to Proteus "one's impulse, upon this declaration, is to remark that there are, by this time, no gentlemen in Verona." H.B. Charlton, writing in 1938, argues that "clearly, Shakespeare's first attempt to make romantic comedy had only succeeded so far as it had unexpectedly and inadvertently made romance comic." Another such argument is provided by Norman Sanders in 1968; "because the play reveals a relatively unsure dramatist and many effects managed with a tiro's lack of expertise, it offers us an opportunity to see more clearly than anywhere else in the canon what were to become characteristic techniques. It stands as an 'anatomie' or show-through version, as it were, of Shakespeare's comic art." Kurt Schlueter, on the other hand, argues that critics have been too harsh on the play precisely because the later plays are so much superior. He suggests that when looking at Shakespeare's earlier works, scholars put too much emphasis on how they fail to measure up to the later works, rather than looking at them for their own intrinsic merits; "we should not continue the practice of holding his later achievements against him when dealing with his early beginnings."

Love and friendship

Norman Sanders calls the play "almost a complete anthology of the practices of the doctrine of romantic love which inspired the poetic and prose Romances of the period." At the very centre of this is the contest between love and friendship; "an essential part of the comicality of The Two Gentlemen of Verona is created by the necessary conflict between highly stylised concepts of love and friendship." This is manifested in the question of whether the relationship between two male friends is more important than that between lovers, encapsulated by Proteus' rhetorical question at 5.4.54; "In love/Who respects friend?" This question "exposes the raw nerve at the heart of the central relationships, the dark reality lurking beneath the wit and lyricism with which the play has in general presented lovers' behaviour." In the program notes for John Barton's 1981 RSC production at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Anne Barton, his wife, wrote that the central theme of the play was "how to bring love and friendship into a constructive and mutually enhancing relationship." As William C. Carroll points out, this is a common theme in Renaissance literature, which often celebrates friendship as the more important relationship (because it is pure and unconcerned with sexual attraction), and contends that love and friendship cannot co-exist. As actor Alex Avery argues, "The love between two men is a greater love for some reason. There seems to be a sense that the function of a male/female relationship is purely for the family and to procreate, to have a family. But a love between two men is something that you choose. You have arranged marriages, [but] a friendship between two men is created by the desires and wills of those two men, whereas a relationship between a man and a girl is actually constructed completely peripheral to whatever the feelings of the said boy and girl are."

Carroll sees this societal belief as vital in interpreting the final scene of the play, arguing that Valentine does give Silvia to Proteus, and in so doing, he is merely acting in accordance with the practices of the day. However, if one accepts that Valentine does not give Silvia to Proteus, as critics such as Jeffrey Masten argue, but instead offers to love Proteus as much as he loves Silvia, then the conclusion of the play can be read as a final triumphant reconciliation between friendship and love; Valentine intends to love his friend as much as he does his betrothed. Love and friendship are shown to be co-existent, not exclusive.

Foolishness of lovers

Another major theme is the foolishness of lovers, what Roger Warren refers to as "mockery of the absurdity of conventional lovers' behaviour." Valentine for example, is introduced into the play mocking the excesses of love; "To be in love, where scorn is bought with groans/Coy looks with heart-sore sighs, one fading moment's mirth/With twenty watchful, weary, tedious nights" (1.1.29–31). Later, however, he becomes as much a prisoner of love as Proteus, exclaiming, "For in revenge of my contempt for love/Love hath chased sleep from my enthrall'd eyes/And made them watchers of my own heart's sorrow" (2.4.131–133).

The majority of the cynicism and mockery as regards conventional lovers, however, comes from Launce and Speed, who serve as foils for the two protagonists, and "supply a mundane view of the idealistic flights of fancy indulged in by Proteus and Valentine." Several times in the play, after either Valentine or Proteus has made an eloquent speech about love, Shakespeare introduces either Launce or Speed (or both), whose more mundane concerns serve to undercut what has just been said, thus exposing Proteus and Valentine to mockery. For example, in Act 2, Scene 1, as Valentine and Silvia engage in a game of flirtation, hinting at their love for one another, Speed provides constant asides which serve to directly mock the couple;

VALENTINE
Peace, here she comes.

Enter Silvia

SPEED (aside)
O excellent motion! O exceeding puppet! Now he will interpret her.

VALENTINE
Madame and mistress, a thousand good-morrows.

SPEED (aside)
O, give ye good e'en. Here's a million of manners.

SILVIA
Sir Valentine and servant, to you two thousand.

SPEED (aside)
He should give her interest, and she gives it him.
(2.1.85-94)

Inconstancy

A third major theme is inconstancy, particularly as manifested in Proteus, whose very name hints at his changeable mind (in Ovid's Metamorphoses, Proteus is a sea-god forever changing its shape). At the start of the play, Proteus has only eyes for Julia. However, upon meeting Silvia, he immediately falls in love with her (although he has no idea why). He then finds himself drawn to the page Sebastian (Julia in disguise) whilst still trying to woo Silvia, and at the end of the play, he announces that Silvia is no better than Julia and vows he now loves Julia again. Indeed, Proteus himself seems to be aware of this mutability, pointing out towards the end of the play; "O heaven, were man/But constant, he were perfect. That one error/Fills him with faults, makes him run through all th'sins;/Inconstancy falls off ere it begins" (5.4.109–112).