The Two Gentlemen of Verona Read online

  The RSC Shakespeare

  Edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen

  Chief Associate Editors: Jan Sewell and Will Sharpe

  Associate Editors: Trey Jansen, Eleanor Lowe, Lucy Munro,

  Dee Anna Phares, Heloise Senechal

  The Two Gentlemen of Verona

  Textual editing: Eric Rasmussen

  Introduction and Shakespeare's Career in the Theater: Jonathan Bate

  Commentary: Heloise Senechal

  Scene-by-Scene Analysis: Jan Sewell

  In Performance: Jan Sewell (RSC stagings) and Peter Kirwan (overview)

  The Director's Cut (interviews by Jan Sewell and Kevin Wright):

  David Thacker and Edward Hall

  Editorial Advisory Board

  Gregory Doran, Chief Associate Director, Royal Shakespeare Company

  Jim Davis, Professor of Theatre Studies, University of Warwick, UK

  Charles Edelman, Senior Lecturer, Edith Cowan University,

  Western Australia

  Lukas Erne, Professor of Modern English Literature,

  Universite de Geneve, Switzerland

  Jacqui O'Hanlon, Director of Education, Royal Shakespeare Company

  Akiko Kusunoki, Tokyo Woman's Christian University, Japan

  Ron Rosenbaum, author and journalist, New York, USA

  James Shapiro, Professor of English and Comparative Literature,

  Columbia University, USA

  Tiffany Stern, Professor and Tutor in English, University of Oxford, UK

  2011 Modern Library Paperback Edition Copyright (c) 2007, 2011 by The Royal Shakespeare Company All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of

  The Random House Publishing Group, a division of

  Random House, Inc., New York.

  MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks

  of Random House, Inc.

  "Royal Shakespeare Company," "RSC," and the RSC logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of The Royal Shakespeare Company.

  The version of The Two Gentlemen of Verona and the corresponding footnotes that appear in this volume were originally published in William Shakespeare: Complete Works, edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, published in 2007 by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

  eISBN: 978-1-58836885-0

  www.modernlibrary.com

  Cover design: Gabrielle Bordwin

  Cover photograph: (c) Roberto Mettifogo/Getty Images

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Origins

  Debates

  Lovers

  About the Text

  Key Facts

  The Two Gentlemen of Verona

  Act 1

  Scene 1

  Scene 2

  Scene 3

  Act 2

  Scene 1

  Scene 2

  Scene 3

  Scene 4

  Scene 5

  Scene 6

  Scene 7

  Act 3

  Scene 1

  Scene 2

  Act 4

  Scene 1

  Scene 2

  Scene 3

  Scene 4

  Act 5

  Scene 1

  Scene 2

  Scene 3

  Scene 4

  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

  INTRODUCTION

  ORIGINS

  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.
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  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.

  DEBATES

  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.

  As well as establishing oppositions between generations and genders, Shakespeare also sets up a dialogue across the barrier of class by means of witty banter between master and servant. Valentine goes to Milan in pursuit of honor, but once he gets there he finds himself in the same situation as Proteus back in Verona: "metamorphosed with a mistress." His mockery of lovers' affectation in the first scene comes back to haunt him. Meanwhile his servant Speed is there to anatomize the characteristics of the mooning courtly lover: he observes his master folding his arms like a melancholy malcontent, relishing love songs, walking alone, sighing like a schoolboy who knows he's going to be in trouble for losing his spelling book, weeping, speaking in a whining voice, and rejecting food like someone on a diet. Much as the play celebrates the transforming energies of young love--and indeed engages with its destructive potential--it also mocks the courtly idiom of love language, not least through the contrast between the artificial poeticisms of the genteel characters and the robust prose voice of their servants.

  The name "Speed" suggests the quickness of wit that is confirmed by this servant's linguistic facility and awareness of the gentlemen's foibles. He always seems to be one step ahead of Valentine, anticipating what his master's going to do next in an aside shared with the audience. Proteus' servant Lance also has a name that suggests mental sharpness: Shakespeare himself was often praised by his contemporaries for having a wit that was as sharp as the spear in his name. Ironically, though, Lance's way of proceeding is anything but pointed: his role is that of the clown for whom everything goes wrong and who confuses his words ("the prodigious son" for "the prodigal son," "a notable lover" misheard as "A notable lubber"). When he tries to use his shoe, his staff, his hat, and his dog to act out the scene of his farewell from his family, he gets into a terrible tangle. The joke is that this should be as a result of the unpredictability of the live dog onstage, but actually it is due to Lance's own incompetence. At the end of the fourth act, Lance has a second two-hander with his dog, Crab, a riff on the theme of a servant's obedience to his master. As Lance makes a mess of the demands of Proteus, so Crab fails to do the will of Lance: "did not I bid thee still mark me and do as I do? When didst thou see me heave up my leg and make water against a gentlewoman's farthingale?"

  While Speed mocks Valentine's transformation into a lover, Lance succumbs to desire in the manner of his master. He falls in love with a milkmaid, the unseen prototype of the hoyden character type that will be incarnated in the fat kitchen maid of The Comedy of Errors and As You Like It's goatherd Audrey. Lance's catalogue of the milkmaid's down-to-earth virtues and vices parodies the courtly lover's enumeration of the beauties of his mistress.

  LOVERS

  In the world of Shakespearean comedy, young women are usually seen in one of three settings. With their parents, where they are expected to be obedient, which ultimately means marrying the man of the parents' choice. With a female confidante, such as a servant or kinswoman, in whose company they can talk of love. And in a position of vulnerability, away from home, where their courage is tested and they have to live by their wits (for example, by taking on male disguise), but where they have unprecedented freedom to explore and express their true selves, their hopes, fears, and desires. Silvia enters in the first role, under the eye of her father, the Duke of Milan, as he measures up her potential suitors. The beautiful lady of courtly romance, she is the object of men's devoted gaze and fantastic desire, a woman on a pedestal who reveals little of her inner life. Julia, by contrast, wears her heart upon her sleeve as she moves from the second to the third of the female situations when she sets off in pursuit of Proteus. Her decision to do so reveals the sexual double standard that was pervasive in Shakespeare's time: whereas a young man is condemned for "sluggardizing" at home, a young woman risks being made the object of scandal by setting out from home.

  One of Shakespeare's favorite techniques was the dramatically ironic counterpointing of scenes: we see Julia proving her love for Proteus by setting off on her dangerous journey immediately after we have seen Proteus renouncing his love for Julia because he has been smitten by the sight of Silvia. The scene when Valentine introduces
his best friend to the girl he has fallen in love with is brief but very subtly written. It turns on the correspondence between the language of courtesy and that of courtship. Valentine asks Silvia to welcome Proteus "with some special favour" and to "entertain him" in her service. What he means is "please treat my friend with respect," but since in the courtly idiom the language of service is synonymous with that of love, Proteus is given an opening to project himself into the role of a rival lover--when Silvia modestly refers to herself as a "worthless mistress" he responds by saying that he would fight to the death anyone else who described her thus. In a sense, the crux of the play lies in the double meaning of the word "mistress."

  Proteus explores his own transformation in two soliloquies that come in rapid succession. In the first, he introduces the image of his love for Julia as akin to a wax image melted to oblivion by the heat of his new desire for Silvia. At the same time, he recognizes that what he has fallen in love with is merely a "picture," the outer image of her beauty. The play begins to probe more deeply into the nature of love when in later scenes a series of questions are asked about the relationship between the "shadow" of surface beauty and the "substance" or "essence" of personality within. In parallel with this motif, the action develops the concerns of Proteus' second major soliloquy: making and breaking vows, finding and losing selves, and the conflict between "sweet-suggesting Love" and "the law of friendship." "In love," Proteus asks at the play's crisis point, "Who respects friend?"

  Prior to the last few years of Shakespeare's career, his plays were performed without an interval. Despite this, there is often a perceptible change in the action at the beginning of the fourth act. The plot has been wound to the full, so now the unwinding begins. Here the turning point is marked by the movement away from court and city to a wood peopled by some rather genteel Outlaws. One of them swears "By the bare scalp of Robin Hood's fat friar," and it is the jolly camaraderie of the merry men, stripped of the old story's violence and political edge, that is evoked by these Outlaws.

  Desire feeds itself on rejection. The more Silvia spurns Proteus, the more he desires her. By the same account, the more he spurns Julia, the more she dotes on him. In the play's richest sequence, music is introduced to establish a nocturnal setting in which Proteus displaces Turio and woos Silvia at her window, not knowing that he is overheard by Julia in her page-boy disguise: This is her dark night of the soul. But then in a bold and very Shakespearean twist, when Proteus confronts the disguised Julia face-to-face he takes rather a fancy to her boy self: "Sebastian is thy name? I like thee well and will employ thee in some service presently." The words "employ" and "service" maintain the punning on the shared language of domestic obligation and sexual engagement. Anticipating Viola in Twelfth Night, Julia finds herself in the painful position of being "servant" to the man whose "mistress" she really wants to be. Hitherto Proteus has regarded Julia as nothing more than a decorative blonde. Now that he thinks she is Sebastian, he unwittingly begins to intuit her inner qualities.