The Two Gentlemen of Verona

Introduction

Origins

Debates

Lovers

About the Text

Key Facts

The Two Gentlemen of Verona

Textual Notes

Scene-by-Scene Analysis

The Two Gentlemen of Verona
in Performance:
The RSC and Beyond

Four Centuries of
The Two Gentlemen:
An Overview

At the RSC

The Director’s Cut: Interviews with David Thacker and Edward Hall

Shakespeare’s Career in the Theater

Beginnings

Playhouses

The Ensemble at Work

The King’s Man

Shakespeare’s Works: A Chronology

Further Reading and Viewing

References

Acknowledgments and Picture Credits

The Two Gentlemen of Verona
is one of Shakespeare’s early plays, perhaps even his first. We do not know exactly when it was written or first performed, but its stylistic and dramatic features mark it out as early work: a small cast, a preponderance of end-stopped verse lines, a degree of simplicity in both language and characterization. Though the play has the relative superficiality of youth, it also has the virtues of that time of life: freshness, energy, pace, wholeheartedness, a desire to get to the point and to speak its mind. It is about the things that matter most urgently to young people: themselves, their friendships and their love affairs. It makes its drama out of the conflicts between these things: how can you be simultaneously true to yourself, to your best friend, and to the object of your sexual desire? Especially if the person you’ve fallen in love with happens to be your best friend’s girlfriend.

Shakespeare and his contemporaries inherited their idea of stage comedy from the ancient Roman masters Terence and Plautus. According to the classical model, whereas tragedy concerned itself with heroes and kings, with wars and affairs of state, comedy was about ordinary people—people like us. Elizabethan audiences expected to be stirred to amazement by the matter of tragedy, but to see images of themselves in a comedy.

Classical comedy wove a set of variations on a common theme. Boy meets girl. Girl’s father is not amused: he has another suitor in mind, a richer, older, or better-connected man. But, often thanks to the assistance of an ingenious servant, the young lovers overcome all obstacles and are united. Confusion, disguises, and mistaken identity abound along the way. Stories of this kind recur throughout European Renaissance culture, in both prose romance and stage comedy. Thus in
The Two Gentlemen
the Duke intends to marry his daughter Silvia to the foolish Turio, so Valentine arrives with a letter, a rope ladder, and the intention to elope with her by night. The Shakespearean twist in the tale is that the person who has tipped off the Duke about Valentine’s intentions is the latter’s best friend Proteus, who has also fallen in love with Silvia.

One of the plays in the repertoire of the Queen’s Men, the leading acting company of the 1580s, was recorded under the title
The History of Felix and Feliomena
(probably a transcription error for
Felismena
). It was a dramatization of a story in the Portuguese writer Jorge de Montemayor’s
Diana
, a multiply plotted prose romance of the 1540s that was read and imitated across Europe. A French translation was published in the 1570s and an English one undertaken in the 1580s, though not published until 1598. The Queen’s Men play is lost, but it presumably followed the basic outline of Montemayor’s plot. On seeing the beautiful Celia, Don Felix deserts his lover Felismena. The latter disguises herself as a page boy and follows him. Celia then falls in love with the page. She is rejected and dies. Felismena’s identity is revealed and she is reunited with Don Felix.

Shakespeare clearly knew this story. He is unlikely to have had enough Spanish or even French to have read it in published form, so his knowledge was probably based on a script or a viewing of the Queen’s Men play, or even on having acted in it himself. It is just possible that he saw the manuscript of the English version of Montemayor—perhaps whoever wrote the play for the Queen’s Men possessed a copy of the Don Felix section.

The mark of Shakespeare’s originality was his gift of combining disparate sources. He created
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
by turning Felix, Felismena, and Celia into Proteus, Julia, and Silvia while simultaneously mapping this love triangle onto another one, namely the plot of two friends falling out with each other by falling in love with the same girl.

One of the most influential prose romances—one might say protonovels—in Elizabethan England was John Lyly’s
Euphues
, published in 1578. It told the story of two close male friends who fall in love with the same girl. The narrative serves as the field for a debate about the conflicting demands of friendship and erotic desire. At the same time, Lyly established a dichotomy between two kinds of education, the intellectual (symbolized by Athens, ancient Greece being the seat of wisdom) and the sentimental (symbolized by Naples, Italy being the playground of lovers). One character stays home in Athens, while the other travels to Naples.

The story line of
Euphues
had innumerable precedents, going back through the Middle Ages to ancient times. Some were tragic, some comic. A famous example was the tale of bosom friends and fellow warriors Palamon and Arcite. Chaucer’s
Knight’s Tale
tells of how they both fall for a lady named Emilia, with tragic consequences. At the very end of his career, Shakespeare would dramatize their story in a play cowritten with John Fletcher:
The Two Noble Kinsmen
. As the similarity in title suggests, this is a revisiting of
The Two Gentlemen
in a different key, testimony to the endurance of Shakespeare’s interest in the motif of male bonding versus heterosexual desire—which he also explored in works as diverse as
Othello, The Winter’s Tale
, and the
Sonnets
.

In all sorts of ways,
The Two Gentlemen
is a prototype for later Shakespearean developments. The cross-dressed heroine recurs in the more renowned comedies of the late 1590s and early 1600s. The outlaw scenes introduce a movement out from “civil” society into a “wilderness” or green world, where surprising developments take place, anticipating the enchanted wood of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
and the Forest of Arden in
As You Like It
. The soliloquies of Proteus, meanwhile, offer an early example of a Shakespearean character undergoing a crisis of personal identity, of consciousness—already we are moving into the territory that will be taken in very different (and of course much more complex) directions in the self-communion of Richard III, Richard II, and eventually Hamlet.

The play begins by establishing the friendship between the two gentlemen. Valentine’s name suggests the patron saint of lovers in the Christian tradition, while that of Proteus evokes the shape-changing god of the classical tradition. The names are enough to suggest that Valentine will be the constant lover, Proteus the fickle one. Initially, though, Valentine is associated with the pursuit of “honour” rather than sexual desire. He intends to seek his fortune in the city of Milan instead of “living dully sluggardized at home.” His plan would immediately have pricked the interest of many members of the play’s original London audience, who would themselves have made the journey from the provinces to the capital—as indeed Shakespeare had done himself not long before writing the play.

Proteus, meanwhile, has undergone a psychological rather than a physical journey: he has left himself, his friends, and all, for love. His desire for Julia has “metamorphosed” him and made him neglect his studies, waste his time, and go to “War with good counsel.” The didactic literature of the age was full of admonitions against such self-abuse. Young gentlemen were supposed to study the arts of good behavior and good citizenship, not to be distracted by affairs of the heart and effeminizing influences. Stage plays came into the latter category, which partially accounts for the anti-theatrical diatribes of Elizabethan “puritans.”

The notion of drama as debate, developed in large measure from the plays of Lyly, led Shakespeare to write his opening scenes as a series of two-handers. First we have Valentine and Proteus, debating the relative merits of erotic desire and civic honor. Then Julia and her knowing maid Lucetta debate how a girl should respond to a proposition of love. And then the representatives of the older generation, Proteus’ father, Antonio, and the servant Pantino, discuss the need for a young man to be tested in the world before he can achieve maturity.