The Two Gentlemen of Verona Read online

  The most significant of the "weeds" was Valentine's "gift" of Silvia to Proteus in the play's final scene, an act too unconscionable for the sentimental eighteenth-century stage. The cutting of this moment in order to soften the play's darker edges was still practiced well into the twentieth century. In Victor's version, Valentine admonishes Proteus and claims Silvia unreservedly for himself:

  Kind heav'n has heard my fervent prayer!

  And brought my faithful Silvia to my arms!

  There is no rhetoric can express my joy!3

  The renewal of the two men's friendship follows the reunion of Proteus and Julia, prioritizing marriage over male homosocial bonds. There is also a good deal of added business for Lance and Crab, including a prisoner trick that recalls the deception of Parolles in All's Well That Ends Well.

  A text closer to Shakespeare's was produced at Covent Garden in 1784, but was not revived after its first performance. It was perhaps most notable for John Quick, as Lance, delivering an address following the main performance "riding on an elephant."4 John Philip Kemble's staging at Drury Lane in 1790 managed three performances, and was noted for a serenade in the fourth act performed by Charles Dignum. Kemble himself went on to play one of the oldest Valentines in the play's performance history at Covent Garden in 1808, at the age of fifty.

  In 1821, Frederick Reynolds initiated an influential tradition of turning the play into an opera in a successful production at Covent Garden. The European Magazine reported:

  In the fourth [act], the Carnival was displayed in more than its customary glories. The opening of the scene displayed the Ducal Palace and great square of Milan illuminated, golden gondolas on the river, and all the usual appendages of foreign gala, masquers, dancing girls, and mountebanks.5

  The opera was praised for its grand spectacle and pageantry, including processions of the seasons and elements, and the appearance of Cleopatra's galley; and the performances, including Jones' spirited Valentine, were applauded. It was criticized, however, for being lengthy and overcrowded with songs. It set a precedent for later musical adaptations of the play, including Augustin Daly's 1895 "vaudeville" version,6 Mel Shapiro's 1971 rock musical, and the BBC film's use of period madrigals.

  William Charles Macready used a more straightforward text for his 1841 production at Drury Lane, including the restoration of Valentine's offer of Silvia, played in a whirl of emotional excess at the play's conclusion. Interestingly, although Lance received his share of the notices, Miss Fortescue's Julia commanded the most applause:

  In the single character of Julia, Shakespeare may be said at once to have reached perfection, for throughout his works we shall not find a personage more beautifully conceived or more delicately organized ... The maidenlike unwillingness to discover her passion even in the presence of an attendant, who is almost a confidant; the rapture with which she owns her love to herself when free from a witness; the feminine vanity which allows her to contrast herself favourably with Sylvia ... all these traits are so many threads to draw down a character from the regions of abstractions.7

  In Julia, the Victorian stage found its ideal heroine. Macready's promptbook formed the basis of Charles Kean's mounting, which toured America and returned to London's Haymarket in 1848. The review in The Times summed up the preexisting bias against the play that would continue to dominate critical responses:

  The meagreness of the story, the absence of effective situations, and the crudity of construction, will always prevent this play from being a permanent favourite with the public, in spite of the poetical beauties and genuine comic humour with which it abounds.8

  It was again Julia who most caught the attention of reviewers, this time played by Ellen Tree: "Her by-play in the scene when Proteus serenades Sylvia, and when she scrutinizes every face till she has discovered that of her faithless lover, and then bursts into a mute agony of grief, is one of the best things she has done."9 The other significant production of this era was that of Samuel Phelps at Sadler's Wells in 1857, about which unfortunately little is known.

  Augustin Daly's production played in New York and London in early 1895, and was savaged by Bernard Shaw who objected to Daly's cutting of the more poetical passages in preference for functional exposition, and complained:

  All through the drama the most horribly common music repeatedly breaks out on the slightest pretext or on no pretext at all ... Mr. Worthing [Valentine] charged himself with feeling without any particular reference to his lines; and Mr. Craig [Proteus] struck a balance by attending to the meaning of his speeches without taking them at all to heart.10

  Shaw did, however, reserve a qualified note of praise for Lance and Crab, whose scenes "brought out the latent silliness and childishness of the audience as Shakespear's [sic] clowning scenes always do: I laugh at them like a yokel myself," and for Ada Rehan's Julia who "stirred some feeling into the part" as well as providing "a strong argument for rational dress by looking much better in her page's costume than in that of her own sex."11 In New York, Julia was once more a star role, "but not even Miss Rehan's pleasing exhibition of herself in page-boy costume, nor the moonlit lake Daly invented for the environs of Milan, nor a thunderstorm in the final act could make up for the tenuousness of the narrative."12

  Preconceptions about the quality of the play, often excused as juvenilia and a forerunner to worthier comedies, continued to influence twentieth-century reviewers; The Times noted of Ben Iden Payne's 1938 Stratford Memorial Theatre production, "All the chief romantic characters are continually vexed by the ghosts of their descendants,"13 though there were exceptions. William Poel staged the play at His Majesty's Theatre in London for Herbert Beerbohm Tree in 1910, following earlier productions in the 1890s. Beerbohm Tree, famous for his Victorian spectaculars, was diametrically opposed to Poel's Elizabethan-influenced, bare-stage approach, but allowed Poel to build out an apron stage over the orchestra pit to his own specifications. As a result, "the literary quality of the play, the verve of its dialogue, the lyric beauty of many of its passages came out with unusual freshness and clear-cut relief."14

  As it did not afford an obvious starring role for the great actor-managers, the play was rarely performed or reviewed during their heyday. In 1904, Harley Granville-Barker took the role of Speed at the Royal Court, while Frank Benson played the First Outlaw in his mounting at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in 1910. At this stage, the play was primarily treated as a curio that needed to be "resolved"--J. C. Trewin noted that Granville-Barker's production "was smoothed along gracefully,"15 while Benson's succeeded "in spite of its maddening ending," which continued to cause problems for reviewers wanting neat sentiments.16 In 1925, meanwhile, one reviewer generously called William Bridges-Adams' mounting

  1. Augustin Daly's 1896-97 New York production with Ada Rehan as Julia who "stirred some feeling into the part" as well as providing "a strong argument for rational dress by looking much better in her page's costume than in that of her own sex."

  A fresh and successful experiment. Although it is light in structure and has no great acting part, it is surprising that it should so seldom be performed for it is a melodious play, full of witty contrivance and written in a verse that sings.17

  The Stratford performance history of the play is unremarkable, although Ben Greet's 1916 production did feature Sybil Thorndike as Julia, and Paddy Rainbow made an impression as Crab. The Crab/Lance scenes remained the chief draw, as in Payne's production:

  So far as individual performances go it is Mr. Jay Laurier's evening. This comedian finds in Launce a character almost perfectly suited to his humour, and whenever he is on the stage we are in contact with something that is more than a mere foreshadowing of greater things to come.18

  Denis Carey's exuberant production by a young cast for the Bristol Old Vic in 1952 was broadcast on BBC1, ironing over the more problematic areas of the play with a zestful approach. Muriel St. Clare Byrne contrasted it with Michael Langham's important 1956 production at London's Old Vic. Set i
n a Regency era of Byronic heroes and decor reminiscent of Jane Austen:

  The sentiments and the clothes go perfectly together. There is an essential frivolity about Regency costume which persuades us to abandon our disapproval of Proteus and our concern for the ladies' feelings as irrelevant. If the producer can make us agree to accept it as artificial comedy, set in an age where we take romantic absurdity for granted, he can restore to the play a gaiety with which I believe its author tried to endow it.19

  2. Ben Iden Payne's 1938 production for the Stratford Memorial Theatre: Lance and Pantino. While "all the chief romantic characters are continually vexed by the ghosts of their descendants," Jay Laurier (left) "finds in Launce a character almost perfectly suited to his humour, and whenever he is on the stage we are in contact with something that is more than a mere foreshadowing of greater things to come."

  In this world of emotional excesses, the ending came as a perfect climax of sensibility and swooning, in which a repentant Proteus threatened to kill himself with a pistol, prompting Valentine's offer of Silvia. Langham's production reintroduced Two Gentlemen to the repertory as a play of some merit.

  The play has rarely been filmed, but Don Taylor's gentle studio production for the BBC/Time Life series in 1983 drew on Botticelli for a poetic, faithful presentation that used a formal garden setting and towers to exaggerate the play's lyricism. There have been several foreign language screen adaptations, including Yi jian mei (A Spray of Plum Blossoms), a silent Chinese film from 1931, and the 1964 German TV version Die zwei herren aus Verona. More effective in reaching a large audience was Mel Shapiro's Tony Award-winning rock musical of 1971, playing to appreciative crowds on Broadway and in the West End. Featuring numbers such as "Night Letter" and the climactic "Love Has Driven Me Sane," the multiracial cast and provocative score captured a zeitgeist alongside shows such as Hair and Grease, introducing the story to a new generation of theatergoers.

  Two noteworthy productions were staged at Stratford, Ontario. Robin Phillips directed a faithful 1975 version set on the Italian Riviera. Most notable was a reversal of the usual Valentine/Proteus dynamic:

  Stephen Russell ... presented a dangerously volatile, restlessly physical Valentine who worked out with boxing gloves, threw a beach ball about, and displayed all the attributes of his type: frankness, generosity, impulsiveness, and a shortage of acumen. Nicholas Pennell played the softer Proteus as a young man not devious by nature but grasping at duplicity as the only weapon that might serve him against such as Valentine in his pursuit of Silvia. He came to contrition at the end in the same way that Valentine abandoned his anger, almost with relief.20

  Jackie Burrough's forthright Silvia was also praised: "You felt she was enjoying herself, and that the touch of chagrin in her silence following Valentine's intervention was as much the result of being prevented from dealing with Proteus in her own way as of finding herself, for once, not the center of attention."21 In 1984, Leon Rubin directed the Young Company at the Third Stage in a New Wave-inflected production where an uproarious Crab upstaged a weak Lance, but in which the complexities of Proteus were finely drawn:

  [David Clark] plays Proteus as an ebullient undergraduate whose apparently harmless self-absorption turns vicious and proves ultimately as painful to him as it has to others ... He becomes so plausible an opportunist that he makes easy game of Valentine ... and so ardent a spokesman of the poetry of courtship that he justly holds Milan and Thurio spellbound at his recital.22

  In the UK, Jeremy James Taylor set his Young Vic production in a formal French garden that "manages, in fact, to reconcile two different approaches: hand-on-heart and tongue-in-cheek."23 The women were stately in public but prone to giggles and irreverence when private and, unusually, Peter O'Farrell's Turio was singled out for praise, "whirring around the Junoesque Sylvia (Joanna McCallum) with incredible speed and holding balletic postures like a vainglorious white mouse."24

  Charles Newell's 1990 American touring production with the Acting Company marked a growing interest in self-conscious theatricality, opening to the sound of an orchestra tuning up and two projected silhouettes of Valentine and Proteus struggling over a baton. To a score of freeform jazz, the play spiraled toward its chaotic climax:

  The attempted rape of Silvia is horrifyingly realistic. She and Proteus overturn a couch in a struggle that lasts several minutes, and, when she resists, he slaps her viciously. This rapist means business. Valentine's intervention is equally brutal--he only just resists bringing a log down on his betrayer's skull with killing force. The image visually echoes their opening wrestling bout.25

  The notion that the play's value was to be found in its darker edges would gain increasing currency in the twenty-first century.

  In 1996, the reconstructed Globe in London opened with Jack Shepherd's production of Two Gentlemen, with Mark Rylance as Proteus and Anastasia Hille as Silvia. Most reviewers were more concerned with the new space, which had a significant impact on the performance: for example, audience members hissed at Proteus' plans. Rylance, "although peddling a sharp comic line in repressed, buttoned-up gaucheness, is a sentimental study of the villain as little boy lost."26 Three years later, Julia Anne Robinson directed the play in the Cottesloe at London's National Theatre, a production received well by its intended school audiences.

  As with The Merchant of Venice and The Two Noble Kinsmen, the central male friendship of Two Gentlemen can be usefully appropriated for a more explicitly homosexual reading. Stuart Draper's 2004 production transferred from New York to London, and announced its intentions in a prologue where,

  To the dying strains of an orchestral regurgitation of the Bee Gees' hit "Tragedy," the two Veronese gentlemen begin canoodling under a tree. As Valentine finishes reciting Christopher Marlowe's amorous lyric "Come live with me and be my love" to his boyfriend Proteus, the latter's father steams in and begins shouting abuse while Valentine is taken to one side and duffed up by his henchmen.27

  Performed in a spirit of "raucous caricature and high camp,"28 this energetic version found a new narrative for the comedy with serious, unsettling undertones concerning prejudice and familial expectations.

  While a return by theater companies to the ironic use of farce has been enlightening in the case of some of Shakespeare's early comedies (particularly The Comedy of Errors and The Taming of the Shrew), in the case of Two Gentlemen the play itself risks being lost under its parodic adaptations (such as a Dawson's Creek TV episode entitled "Two Gentlemen of Capeside" [2000]; Adam Bertocci's hysterical amalgamation of Shakespeare and the Coen Brothers in Two Gentlemen of Lebowski, 2009).29 However, the use of physical comedy and playful theatricality has, in different cultural contexts, recently offered fresh perspectives on the play, as in Helena Pimenta's production for the Basque ur Teatro, which used a hedonistic 1920s music hall style to critique the evasion of moral responsibility. In 2006, the Brazilian company Nos do Morro ("Us From the Hillside," a group from Vidigal, a shantytown outside Rio de Janeiro) visited the RSC Complete Works Festival in partnership with the Birmingham youth project Gallery 37 (a talented group of underprivileged young people from Birmingham), in a production that adapted the play to the concerns of council estates and favela (Brazilian shantytown) life. The English children wrote their own rap music, which they performed as a group Chorus, mediating the plot and using their bodies to create scenery on a bare stage. The Brazilian actors, meanwhile, used a Portuguese text to turn the play into a series of lyrical combats, with one memorable sequence involving Valentine and Turio performing a "sing-off" in a makeshift boxing ring. The play belonged to Diogo de Brito Sales, however, as a human Crab who bounded among the audience, pretending to lick faces.

  Similarly left field was Two Gents' Productions' Vakomana Vaviri Ve Zimbabwe. This international two-man touring production, performed in the style of Zimbabwean township theater, was lively and informal, filled with audience participation. Simple items of clothing (a glove for Silvia; braces for Valentine) signifie
d characters, with Tonderai Munyevu and Denton Chikura acting as storytellers--a character could literally be passed between the two. Julia visited a witch doctor in order to see a vision of Proteus wooing Silvia; and Crab was once more played by a human, though his bitter disdain of Lance had an edge to it. The frenetic comedy, however, gave way to a powerful closing image. Proteus and Valentine had reunited, while Julia and Silvia "lay" on the floor as discarded garments. While the men's reunion was joyous, the women were visibly forgotten. As the lights faded to black and the two actors once more became the women. Julia moved to the sobbing Silvia, taking her head in her lap. In these stripped-back productions, The Two Gentlemen of Verona transcended its trivial reputation, and its translation into fresh cultural contexts continues to unlock fresh potential in this neglected play.

  AT THE RSC

  The Two Gentlemen of Verona is an early Shakespeare play--perhaps the earliest. It is often argued that its main interest lies in a first glimpse of characters, conventions, and tropes which Shakespeare develops and deploys more successfully in later work:

  In innumerable ways Two Gentlemen of Verona looks forward to Shakespeare's later comedies. The character of Julia and her masculine disguise, the central position of the women in the play, the serious use of the clowns as commentators, and of music, themes of travel, and the transformation of people through love, the greenwood as the place where pretences are dropped and characters appear for what they really are, the carefully calculated mixture of prose and verse, all of these motifs and devices were to be extended and developed in succeeding plays. Yet the Two Gentlemen has a freshness and lyrical charm all its own, an uncertain glory that is no more to be despised than that of the April day described by Proteus, wavering between brilliance and cloud.30