William C. Carroll, Introduction to The Two Gentlemen of Verona
William Shakespeare, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Ed. William C. Carroll, Arden Shakespeare, London, 2004
…many readers and audiences have judged The Gentlemen, as one of Shakespeare’s earliest plays, to be aesthetically inferior to most of his others: ‘early’ comes to connote ‘immature’, hence relatively incompetent, … (Introduction, 2)
I aim to break this critical cycle, not by mounting a new (and doomed) argument about the play’s aesthetic perfections, but by enlisting and, if possible, augmenting some stimulating recent critical and theoretical work on the early modern period and also related texts to cast light on Shakespeare’s dramatic strategies in Two Gentlemen. Thus, the Introduction that follows begins by placing the play in relations to sixteenth-century discourses of [2] friendship, which have been seen to contextualize (although not satisfactorily for modern tastes) Valentine’s behaviour at the end of the play. I hope that this edition, in exploring the early modern discourse of male friendship, will show how Shakespeare’s use of the tradition is more complicated and indeed more searching than what has sometimes been seen as a rather immature, incompetent appropriation of it. (3)
The Introduction them moves on to a consideration of other topics of significance: the bearing on the play of the story of the Prodigal Son, the problematics of the cross-dressed boy actor (the first in a Shakespearean comedy), metamorphosis as a central motif revealing the play’s indebtedness to Ovid and Lyly, the use of letters, the identity of Crab’s breed, the play’s confused geography and its dramaturgy. (3)
The dominant cultural content of The Two Gentlemen of Verona appears to be registered in the discourse of male friendship, derived from an amalgam… (3)
The dissemination of the precepts of friendship was extraordinary widespread, yet two figures stand out as essential in every account: Aristotle and Cicero. Aristotle’s comments on friendship were widely known and quoted, though they were not concentrated into a single essay. Cicero’s essay De Amicitia, on the other hand, was at the heart of the entire textual field. Generations of schoolboys read and translated this essay and took up its moral lessons, even more than its style, … (5)
Among the most important of friendship texts was one evidently known to Shakespeare, Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Boke Named the Governour, published in 1531, … (5)
Cicero’s essay establishes, if it does not historically originate, the basic tenets of friendship theory. The first of these, as in John Harington’s translation (reprinted by Ruth Hughey), is the moral necessity that ‘friendshippe can bee but in good men’ (Hughey, 147, 1. 361) (5)
So close do true friends [5] become that, in the most famous phrase of the entire tradition, ‘of two he wold make one’ (Hughey, 172, 1. 1233). [The phrase seems already common by the time of Aristotle: ‘all the proverbs agree in this;...] (5-6)
…the other most frequently quoted tenet of friendship is that, in Harington’s translation of Cicero, ‘he surely is a [6] freend, that is an other I’ (Hughey, 172, 11. 1223-4). … ‘another the same’, … an ‘alter ego’, another I or self. (6-7)
Among the other key elements of the Ciceronian tradition are the frequently repeated insights that … no one needs a true friend to speak the blunt truth more than princes and kings, yet no one is less able to accept such friendship, in part because ‘it is a chiefe poinct in freendeship, … to equal theim selves with their inferiours’ Hughey, 168-9, 11. 1095-6, 1120-1) (7)
For almost all (male) writers, friendship is a possibility among men only, not among women; ‘the ordinary sufficiency of women’, Montaigne asserts, / cannot answer this conference and communication, the nurse of this sacred bond: nor seeme their mindes strong enough to endure the pulling of a knot so hard, so fast, and durable…this sex could never yet by any example attaine unto it, and is by ancient schooles rejected thence. (Montaigne, 1.199) (8)
Women’s friendships, of which there are numerous examples and accounts, are ‘commonly portrayed in the Renaissance, but normally as coexistent with marriage’, rather than in opposition to it (Shannon, 55, n. 1). Shakespeare, however, does depict some women as strong friends, as in Helena’s reminiscence in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, [8] … As with male friends, romantic love here injects discord into the now past-tense ideal friendship; ‘two seeming bodies but one heart’ have now split apart, and at the end of the play the two couples will leave behind same-sex friendship for marriage. (9)
Yet despite the use of similar language to describe both male and female same-sex friendship (and A Midsummer Night’s Dream even explores conflict between friends over love), none of these plays really derives from the Ciceronian friendship tradition of idealization, which took men as its exemplars: … If female-female relations could not really be true friendship, neither could male-female relations. The question, again, was one of stability, as Montaigne argues: … (10)
In John Lyly’s Endymion, 3.4.114-16, Eumenides, torn between his desire for Semele and his friendship with Endymion, comes to realize that ‘The love of men to women is a thing common and of course: the friendshippe of man to man infinite and immortall’ … (11)
…all of Cicero’s examples, as with later writers, are men, and in the early modern period a clear misogynist line emerges. True friendship, in virtually all cases, could only exist between men. (11)
The idealization of the power and transcendent virtue of male-male friendship lies at the heart of the male friendship tradition as Shakespeare explores it in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. In most pre-Shakespearean works engaged with the [11] tradition, the bonds of friendship between two male friends—what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick terms homosocial bonds—prove stronger than male-female desire. Usually, one of the young men falls in love with a woman, but the prior friendship with a male friend produces enormous anxiety and conflict; or one male friend falls in love with his friend’s beloved, leading to conflict and anxiety on both sides. The nature of such male-male friendship is both platonic and to some extent erotic, and its power is sufficient to cause a man to renounce his own life to save his friend (as in the stories of Damon and Pythias and Titus and Gisippus), to renounce wife or fiancée in preference to the bond with another man, or even, in perhaps its most extreme form, to offer his female beloved to his friend. / This idealization of male-male friendship reflected a Neoplatonic exaltation of both selfless devotion to and ideal union with another, as well as mastery over sexual desire. (12)
Early modern texts stressing the powerful emotional bonds of male-male friendship frequently figured this closeness as a clearly physical intimacy. (12)
Bruce Smith also traces the themes of male friendship through a wide range of early modern literature (particularly in relation to the ways in which it is distinguished from but also allied to master-servant sexual relations), noting the ‘improbable, magical circumstances that allow friendship to be reconciled with marriage’ in the early plays of Shakespeare (Smith, Desire, 69). (13)
Some critics describe the idealization of male friendship as a kind of fantasy of denial, an embodiment, in psychoanalytic terms, of the paralysis of normative development from same-sex to other-sex erotic relations— [See Garber, 31-2, and Adelman, 75. Haslem, 129, notes that the ‘female communicative bond’ established between Julia and Lucetta in the first half of the play ‘is in effect discarded, erased, en route to achieving the male-female love relationship.’] (15)
One might also note here changing conceptions of marriage in the early modern period, in which romantic companionate [Among works on companionate marriage in the early modern period, see Fletcher, ‘Marriage’, Jardine, ‘Companionate’, and Macfarlane.] relations are elevated as equal or superior to purely arranged marriages based on economic considerations. The idealization of male friendship as superior to male-female love (which was considered not romantic or companionate but merely lustful, hence inferior in some accounts (see p. 10)) therefore performs a project of cultural nostalgia, … (15)
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, or, from still another viewpoint, a fantastic instance of a patriarchal culture’s ‘traffic in women’ (Gayle Rubin’s term). (16)
Rene Girard would describe the resulting triangle as a consequence of mimetic desire—Titus desures Sophronia just because Gisippus does [Girard makes a similar arugement about Two Gentlemen: ‘Valentine and Proteus can be friends only by desiring alike and, if they do, they are enemies’ because ‘The mimesis of desire is both the best of friendship and the worst of hatred’ (Girard, 233 and 242). Ostergaard offers a refutation of Girard’s argument. (Rene Girard, ‘Love Delights in Praises: A Reading of The Two Gentlemen of Verona’, Philosophy and Literature, 13 (1989), 231-47)] –but Titus himself puts a slightly different interpretation on it: / Why wolde ye have me see that, whiche you youre selfe coulde nat beholde without ravisshinge of minde and carnall appetite? Alas, why forgate ye that our mindes and appetites were ever one? And that also what so ye liked was ever to me in like degree pleasant? (Elyot, 139), (20)
It is a critical moment in the play, to which I will return; I want to emphasize here that the offer of the beloved is not accepted in Shakespeare. (21)
Shakespeare seems not to have been the dramatist who would pass up the chance to use a bed trick. In All’s Well That Ends Well, he takes up a bed trick that is in his source material (William Painter’s The Palace of Pleasure, 1566), while in Measure for Measure, he invents a bed trick that does not exist in any of the source materials (see Doran, 385-9). In the Renaissance versions of the Titus and Gisippus story following either Elyot or Boccaccio, the offer of the woman is not only accepted, but it is accomplished through a bed trick. The bed tricks in Measure for Measure and All’s Well work against the male—in the dark, he cannot distinguish his wife from the woman whose place has been taken; in both cases, he rightly believes he is deflowering a virgin (the aptly named Diana in All’s Well) or even a nun (Isabella in Measure for Measure), though wrong about that virgin’s identity. The blindness of the [22] man in these stories figures male desire as primally aggressive and narcissistic; the woman is reduced to a maidenhead, undistinguishable from any other maidenhead. Thus the usual bed trick enacts a male rape fantasy, one which is magically resolved: the virgin/nun taken in the dark turns out to be the man’s wife after all, a woman both sexual and virginal. Eventually, the exposure and guilty knowledge of their actions leads the men to some kind of penitence or apparent reformation. (22-23)
Where does the attempted rape come from? No attempted or completed rape exist in any of the available analogues of Two Gentlemen: in Elyot’s version of Titus and Gisippus, Sophronia goes willingly with Titus under a misapprehension, and in Julio und Hyppolita, the female is simply deceived into accepting a new lover. …In traditional source studies of the play, Ovid is referenced almost exclusively in relation to Proteus’s name… Ovidian influence, however, clearly informs the play at the end as well as in these other moments, for love in the Metamorphoses itself is all too frequently enacted as rape; … Perhaps one way in which to reconceive Ovid’s influence on Shakespeare in Two Gentlemen is to consider Valentine as no less Ovidian than Proteus, and to see the two gentlemen as in essence one man split into two parallel but distinct figures. [Simmons, 862, calls them subject (Valentine) and anti-subject (Proteus).] (24)
In Two Gentlemen, Shakespeare can therefore be seen to be bringing together two figurations of male desire from the narratives of the two gentlemen of England and Italy, Elyot and Ovid. (27)
Often in Shakespeare the ‘ring’ has a sexual connotation—it was a slang term for the female genitalia (Rubinstein, 220-1; cf. AW 4.2.59-62). (29)
By substituting an attempted rape for the rape fantasy (the bed trick) as the action which mirrors the offer, Shakespeare drastically raises the emotional temperature of the play. (30)
…the attempted rape and the attempted offer are thus equivalent, or at least parallel, enactments of an ideology of male possession. Yet in Two Gentlemen, where neither action is completed, both ultimately lead to the same thing: marriage. Shakespeare understood better than most, how powerful, transforming and at time destructive a force male desire could be, and he learned this, in [30] large part, from his reading of Ovid. (30-31)
…writers from Cicero onward had considered whether true friendship could exist between male and female, and whether romantic love could develop into the idealized form of friendship; the answers were invariably negative. (31)
…Two Noble Kinsmen deploys, at some point, a comparable ambivalence about the friendship tradition, and suggests, as Two Gentlemen does, that romantic desire is a vastly stronger power than male-male friendship. (34)
The parable of the Prodigal Son was widely known in early modern England [Young, 20, notes that ‘following the issue of The New Church Calendar in 1561, it was established that the parable of the Prodigal Son should be read three times every year in church, on 4 March, 3 July, and 29 October, provided that those dates did not coincide with a Sunday or a Holy Day’.] and is, according to Richmond Noble, 277, ‘the most frequently mentioned Parable of the Gospels in [Shakespeare’s] plays’. The parable serves as a deep narrative for many plot lines in several of Shakespeare’s plays, perhaps the most obvious being the development of Prince Hal from I Henry [36] IV to Henry V. (36-37)
In many of Shakespeare’s plays there are few references to mothers, … Fathers in comedy, and in New Comedy particularly, of course, rarely applaud their children’s loves, at least at the beginning of the plays (cf. Egeus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.) (38)
…Proteus has a father much in evidence onstage, Antonio, who is ‘resolved’, ‘peremptory’ and determined to ‘suddenly proceed’ (1.3.66,71,64)—in short, the typical father-figure of comedy who, wittingly or not, thwarts the romantic desires of his child. (39)
The prodigal daughters of Two Gentlemen, Julia and Silvia, undertake journeys for love, to Verona and to the forest, while the journeys undertaken by the two prodigal sons, Proteus and Valentine, are, initially, explorations of their own identities—… (40)
The prodigal son motif substantially overlaps with the male friendship tradition: both concern the process of the individuation of male identity—or, more generally, of masculinity itself [See Adelman, Garber and Kahn]. As Shakespeare plays out the parable in Two Gentlemen, the sons leave their families in search of a place in society, but the ‘hunt’ for ‘honour’ (1.1.63) is soon short-circuited by love. Loss of self is associated with being in thrall to sexual desire, as in Proteus’s [40] soliloquy, but also with immaturity. Sexual and psychological maturity evolve as the child leaves behind the limitations of the ‘fraternal or sororal bond…which must yield priority to a marital and sexual bond’ (Garber, 38). [Marjorie Garber, Coming of Age in Shakespeare (1981)]. (40-41)
Shakespeare achieves, unsatisfactorily in some views, a resolution of his own narrative by using a second woman in order to break the triangle of desire and allow for the marriage of both men. (42)
In Silvia, Shakespeare created a formidable woman character, more intelligent than any of the men who desire her. Silvia’s strong characterization in most of the play explains in part the continuing efforts of directors and editors to invent positive stage actions for her during her long silence in 5.4 (see pp. 104-8). The romance heroine Julia, by contrast, does write a letter directly to Proteus (1.3.45-7) and, like her model Felismena in Diana, rather than finding a male escort for her journey to her beloved. She actively, and far less cautiously, expresses and seeks to fulfill her desire. In this aspect Julia anticipates, as many critics have noted, such later Shakespearean heroines as Portia, Rosalind and Viola. / When Julia agrees to take on the disguise of a man, she follows in the steps of innumerable heroines of romance narratives. … earlier saints’ lives, [44] chivalric romances, romantic epics, ballads and novellas. (44-45)
Such cross-dressings, so common in literary romance, were considerable rarer on the public stage until the 1590s. … Despite these earlier examples, [45] especially Gallathea, the fact remains that Shakespeare is among the first playwrights to introduce this romance motif into the theatre, and he is certainly the first to develop the idea to the sophisticated levels we see in Two Gentlemen. (45-46)
…breeches cause these two women the greatest difficulty. Lucetta insists that, to appear as a man, Julia ‘must needs have them with a codpiece’ (53), and when Julia protests that the codpiece ‘will be ill-favoured’ (54), Lucetta insists that ‘A round hose, madam, now’s not worth a pin/ Unless you have a codpiece to stick pins on’ (55-6; see 2.7.56n.). Julia, like almost all such heroines in similar situations, fears that ‘undertaking so unstaid a journey…will make me scandalized’ (60-1) but proceeds nevertheless (see Figs 4 and 5). (46)
The multiple levels of comments on the power of acting here reflect the wit and self-consciousness of a young playwright making discoveries about the stage’s possibilities. (51)
Although similarly sophisticated moments of self-consciousness about dramatic art, in relation to the heroine’s gender disguise, may be found in the vast array of romance poems and narratives that stand behind the play, what particularly distinguishes Shakespeare’s treatment of the subject is his self-consciousness about the physical reality of the boy actor beneath the female role. (51)
Much recent scholarly work has engaged with the material conditions, metadramtic thematics and erotic suggestiveness of the boy actor on the early modern stage (see, for example, Shapiro, Gender, Levine and Orgel). Two Gentlemen does not seem to go as far as As You Like It…or Antony and Cleopatra…in acknowledging its own practice, … That said, the language of Two Gentlemen does at times reveal the boy actor: … (51)
…a ‘passioning’ performance, with ‘tears’ (4.4.165-7), a stereotypical ‘female’ signifier, like the codpiece for the male. (52)
This exchange highlights the androgynous aspects of the boy actor and further destabilizes any supposedly clear demarcations of gender. In his discussion of the ‘body beneath’ the woman’s clothing on the early modern stage, particularly in regard to scenes of women characters in bed or undressing to reveal themselves, Peter Stallybrass effectively demonstrates the impossibility of fixing gender, nothing that/ all attempts to fix gender are necessarily prosthetic: that is, they suggest the attempt to supply an imagined deficiency by the exchange of male clothes for female clothes or of female clothes for male clothes; by displacement from male to female space or from female to male space; by the replacement of male with female tasks or of female with male tasks. But all elaborations of the prosthesis which will supply the ‘deficiency’ can secure no essence. On the contrary, they suggest that gender itself is a fetish, the production of an identity through the fixation upon specific ‘parts’. (Stallybrass, 77) [Peter Stallybrass, ‘Transvestism and the “body beneath” : Speculating on the boy actor’, in Susan Zimmerman (ed.), Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage (1992), 64-83] / Any consideration of the boy actor in Two Gentlemen, and the potential erotic charge of the phenomenon in general (see Orgel) [Stephen Orgel, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge, 1996)], must take account of the fact that Shakespeare’s introduction of [52] the female-disguised-as-male-page was relatively daring in the early 1590s (as indeed later). Antitheatrical writers like John Rainoldes were constantly inveighing against the moral dangers of the boy actor let alone the multiplied effects of the further transformation of the female character into the boy page. [Among the vast literature on antitheatrical discourse, see Barish.] [Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley, Calif., 1981) (52-53)
Any moral dubiety arising from the boy actor playing a female is also partly subverted by having the female character disguised as a page, and at the end of the play the boy playing Julia remains in a more suitable male [53] costume: Julia’s revelation of her identity does not involve removing, or threatening to remove, her clothing. (53-54)
In Two Gentlemen Shakespeare has begun to explore, with some considerable sophistication, the dramatic possibilities raised by the material reality of the boy actor: the boundaries of gender identity, a metadramatic self-consciousness about his own craft and the erotic frisson of transvestite wooing. (54)
Ovid’s texts (the Heroides and the Metamorphoses especially) resonate not only in particular allusions… but more generally in the relentless instability experienced by [54] many of the figures in the play—the transformations of character, the shifting of allegiances, the erosion of resolve, the instability of language. (54-55)
As in most of Shakespeare’s comedies, love constitutes the great agent of transformation in Two Gentlemen. (55)
Yet there are centres of constancy in the two women, Julia and Silvia; their love for Proteus and Valentine remains immovable,… (56)
Proteus’s changeability is both his vice and the means of his regeneration, for he can recover quickly as he fell. His sudden repentence—‘My shame and guilt confounds me./ Forgive me, Valentine’ (5.4.73-4)—may seem psychologically absurd, but it works thematically, … (57)
The recurring interest in metamorphosis and transformation in Two Gentlemen may rightly be traced to Shakespeare’s extensive indebtedness to Ovid, but it may equally be indebted to the Ovidianism of John Lyle’s drama: … (58)
These letters, variously delivered and read, or intercepted and torn up, become metonymies for sexual desire. Their errant and self-referential paths effectively reflect the confusions and failures [59] of the main love plots. [As Kiernander, 36, observes, ‘The characters cannot relate to one another directly but only through various highlighted mediating devices—messengers, letters, portraits and a gift. The signals these media are intended to transmit are subject to a great deal of interference.’ …] (59-60)
The vagrancy and instability of language in Two Gentlemen indicate a far more complex and ambiguous world than the naïve lovers imagine at the beginning of the play. Julia, for example, before she knows of Proteus’s betrayal, equates constancy in language with constancy in love: … (64)
…there seems little doubt that actual dogs did appear onstage, as is made clear by entry stage direction in Every Man Out of His Humour, 3.2.0.1: ‘one leading a dog’ (Jonson, 1.338), … (67)
The lower down the human social scale, the less refined the breed of dog, and the greater the number of complaints about their uncleanliness and impurity. … Crab’s excretal energies (see 4.4.36n.) also mark him as low… (68)
…a lady’s lap-dog, ‘usually a toy spaniel in the early sixteenth century and a pug in the seventeenth’… (73)
Verona is named in Two Gentlemen solely, however, as the place of origin and the point of departure for five of the main characters. Milan is where most of the action takes place, the location of the Duke’s (or Emperor’s) court—clearly, in the play’s terms, a larger, more sophisticated world where the full flowering of the Italian Renaissance might be found. (78)
…Romeo and Juliet is set in Verona… (79)
The plays that are set in or refer substantially to northern Italy—Taming of the Shrew, Two Gentlemen, Romeo and Juliet—are ‘romantic’ in nature, … Shakespeare’s Italy in these plays, then, is the Elizabethans’ romantic Italy, not that other Italy which was home to Machiavelli, Catholicism, poison and [79] treachery in general as seen in early modern tragedies. There may be outlaws on these roads, but they are all ‘gentlemen’ capable of reformation. (79-80)
Shakespeare also brings together, as he was to do later in his work, the rustic clown and the witty servant—the latter developed, the rustic clown and the witty servant—the latter developed from Platus and Lyly. [Speed is the typical Lylian page—witty, critical ot both his master and his master’s friend, ultimately linked to the tricky servant of Plautine comedy. Yet Hunter, Lyle, 314-315, notes that ‘Lyle’s servants have a simple and definite set of characteristics—quick wit, love of mischief, empty bellies’, but that Lance and Speed ‘are much more difficult to define’ (for example the Lylian Speed certainly has wit, but he is outwitted by the more clownish Lance in 2.5). So Campbell and Salingar.] (83)
While Two Gentlemen was certainly known in Shakespeare’s lifetime, as Francis Mere’s comments in 1598 make clear (see p. 129), no record exists of any staging of Two Gentlemen from the time of its composition in the 1590s until Benjamin Victor’s adaptation was performed at David Garrick’s Theatre-Royal in Drury Lane, in London, 1762-3. (84)
It is noteworthy that the first recorded production of the play was of an adaptation, Benjamin Victor’s… The dialogue concerning the decorative codpiece for Julia, of course, vanished from the text—evidently one of the many ‘weeds’ with which ‘this comedy abounds’ (‘Advertisement’ in Victor). (86)
Proteus has been variously depicted as sinister from the beginning of the play, as a haplessly naïve innocent and as a confused young man sexually attracted to Valentine as well as Julia and then Silvia. Valentine has been portrayed as an obtuse pretty boy and as a naïve young man who, learning the hard way, turns into a near-heroic mature figure. (88)
One of the most successful twentieth-century productions was that of Thacker in 1991, set in the 1930s of Noel Coward…This production began with approximately fifteen minutes of songs (from a big-band orchestra and blonde chanteuse) by George and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin and Cole Porter, among others, to which couples in period evening wear danced. … As Peter Holland notes, the music and setting ‘validated’ the ‘characters’ obsession with love’ (Holland, 87). (89)
Valentine’s offer of his beloved Silvia to his now suddenly penitent friend Proteus, who has just attempted to rape her: … Throughout the recorded stage history of Two Gentlemen, critics, audiences, adapters, directors and actors have been trying to understand, rationalize or simply evade this moment of the offer. (92)
Macready, in his 1841 production, made wholesale changes to the text, including adding lines and transposing speeches, but he did restore the offer for the first time in decades… (93)
I rehearse this performance tradition to document briefly the theatrical and editorial energy expended over two centuries on the infamous offer. It is widely considered an embarrassment in Two Gentlemen and, many feel, ought to be negotiated away in some manner. … Yet while editors, adapters and directors have considered the offer (which is not even accepted) highly offensive, the attempted rape of Silvia has [95] by contrast been found dramatically acceptable, even compelling, and does not have a similar revisionary theatrical history: … (95-96)
The theatrical history of the offer, then, reveals a continuing effort to minimize or even erase it, form rewriting the scene to overrunning the lines with action, while the theatrical history of the attempted rape, by contrast, reveals a growing effort to maximize it, from its inclusion even in softened form in the earliest adaptations, to increasingly violent modern stagings and even the representation of an actual rape. … The different textual and performance histories of these paired actions, in which an offer made in friendship is frequently considered more heinous, more of an embarrassment onstage, than an attempted rape, may partly be explained by the collapse of the discourse of male friendship, even as early as the eighteenth century. Yet the attempted rape and the offer are mirroring actions (see pp. 28-30). Not to stage them for what they are is therefore to miss a profound, and profoundly disturbing, connection between them which the play intensely makes. (99)
Janet Adelman perfectly articulates the issues: / in order for the play to enact this fantasy [that allows both relationships’ simultaneous fulfillment], the autonomy of both Silvia and Julia as fully realized figures has to be sacrificed: Silvia stands by silently as she is swapped from Valentine to Proteus, who has just tried to rape her (indeed, she never speaks after the rape attempt); and Julia is not permitted to notice, or to care, that her man is a would-be rapist. The sacrifice of the autonomy of these hitherto sensible characters suggests the extent to which the deepest concern of the play is with the male bond. / (Adelman, 79) [Janet Adelman, ‘Male Bonding in Shakespeare’s Comedies’, in Peter Erickson and Coppelia Kahn (eds), Shakespeare’s Rough Magic (1985), 73-103)] (104)
One can hardly fault directions for creating stagings that seek to rationalize what they see as the play’s difficulties. …virtually all [of the stagings] fill in Silvia’s long silence. Every effort to make Silvia speak, however, with transferred lines or silent action, ignores how the play has depicted Silvia as more or less constituted by masculine discourse. (108)
…the more general judgement that comedy was a less ‘serious’ genre than tragedy or history, hence less deserving of comment. (108)
[note 2] George Eliot quotes Valentine’s lines—‘Who by repentance is not satisfied / Is nor of heaven nor earth, for these are pleased’ (5.4.79-80)—in letters dated 1846 (Eliot, 8.11) and 1859; in the latter, she astutely observes ‘that doctrine is bad for the sinning, but good for those sinned against’ (Eliot, 3.66). Elsewhere, the offer in the final scene, with ‘Silvia standing by’, Eliot claims, ‘disgusted’ her (Haight, 178). (109)
Malone cannot defend the play’s ‘neglect of geography’ by an appeal to youth, but noting that one of Shakespeare’s ‘latest productions’ [The Winter’s Tale] is liable to the same objection’, he concludes that Shakespeare had no interest in the unities; rather, ‘he seems to have thought that the whole terraqueous globe was at his command’ (Boswell-Malone, 7). [Edition of Shakespeare: Boswell-Malone, , Plays and Poems, ed. James Boswell, 21 vols (1821)] (111)
The Romantics, more concerned with plays like Hamlet, showed relatively little interest in Two Gentlemen. Coleridge doubts the authorship at one point in 1809—‘the Gent. Of Verona not a word of his’ (Coleridge, Fragments, 252)… (112)
Keats seems hardly to have acknowledged the play, but a reference in a letter of 15 April 1817—‘I saw…a little Wood with trees look you like Launce’s Sister “as white as a Lilly and as small as a Wand”’ (Keats, 17; cf. 2.3.19-20)—reveals a sharply specific memory of one of the comic scenes. (112)
…many readers and audiences have judged The Gentlemen, as one of Shakespeare’s earliest plays, to be aesthetically inferior to most of his others: ‘early’ comes to connote ‘immature’, hence relatively incompetent, … (Introduction, 2)
I aim to break this critical cycle, not by mounting a new (and doomed) argument about the play’s aesthetic perfections, but by enlisting and, if possible, augmenting some stimulating recent critical and theoretical work on the early modern period and also related texts to cast light on Shakespeare’s dramatic strategies in Two Gentlemen. Thus, the Introduction that follows begins by placing the play in relations to sixteenth-century discourses of [2] friendship, which have been seen to contextualize (although not satisfactorily for modern tastes) Valentine’s behaviour at the end of the play. I hope that this edition, in exploring the early modern discourse of male friendship, will show how Shakespeare’s use of the tradition is more complicated and indeed more searching than what has sometimes been seen as a rather immature, incompetent appropriation of it. (3)
The Introduction them moves on to a consideration of other topics of significance: the bearing on the play of the story of the Prodigal Son, the problematics of the cross-dressed boy actor (the first in a Shakespearean comedy), metamorphosis as a central motif revealing the play’s indebtedness to Ovid and Lyly, the use of letters, the identity of Crab’s breed, the play’s confused geography and its dramaturgy. (3)
The dominant cultural content of The Two Gentlemen of Verona appears to be registered in the discourse of male friendship, derived from an amalgam… (3)
The dissemination of the precepts of friendship was extraordinary widespread, yet two figures stand out as essential in every account: Aristotle and Cicero. Aristotle’s comments on friendship were widely known and quoted, though they were not concentrated into a single essay. Cicero’s essay De Amicitia, on the other hand, was at the heart of the entire textual field. Generations of schoolboys read and translated this essay and took up its moral lessons, even more than its style, … (5)
Among the most important of friendship texts was one evidently known to Shakespeare, Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Boke Named the Governour, published in 1531, … (5)
Cicero’s essay establishes, if it does not historically originate, the basic tenets of friendship theory. The first of these, as in John Harington’s translation (reprinted by Ruth Hughey), is the moral necessity that ‘friendshippe can bee but in good men’ (Hughey, 147, 1. 361) (5)
So close do true friends [5] become that, in the most famous phrase of the entire tradition, ‘of two he wold make one’ (Hughey, 172, 1. 1233). [The phrase seems already common by the time of Aristotle: ‘all the proverbs agree in this;...] (5-6)
…the other most frequently quoted tenet of friendship is that, in Harington’s translation of Cicero, ‘he surely is a [6] freend, that is an other I’ (Hughey, 172, 11. 1223-4). … ‘another the same’, … an ‘alter ego’, another I or self. (6-7)
Among the other key elements of the Ciceronian tradition are the frequently repeated insights that … no one needs a true friend to speak the blunt truth more than princes and kings, yet no one is less able to accept such friendship, in part because ‘it is a chiefe poinct in freendeship, … to equal theim selves with their inferiours’ Hughey, 168-9, 11. 1095-6, 1120-1) (7)
For almost all (male) writers, friendship is a possibility among men only, not among women; ‘the ordinary sufficiency of women’, Montaigne asserts, / cannot answer this conference and communication, the nurse of this sacred bond: nor seeme their mindes strong enough to endure the pulling of a knot so hard, so fast, and durable…this sex could never yet by any example attaine unto it, and is by ancient schooles rejected thence. (Montaigne, 1.199) (8)
Women’s friendships, of which there are numerous examples and accounts, are ‘commonly portrayed in the Renaissance, but normally as coexistent with marriage’, rather than in opposition to it (Shannon, 55, n. 1). Shakespeare, however, does depict some women as strong friends, as in Helena’s reminiscence in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, [8] … As with male friends, romantic love here injects discord into the now past-tense ideal friendship; ‘two seeming bodies but one heart’ have now split apart, and at the end of the play the two couples will leave behind same-sex friendship for marriage. (9)
Yet despite the use of similar language to describe both male and female same-sex friendship (and A Midsummer Night’s Dream even explores conflict between friends over love), none of these plays really derives from the Ciceronian friendship tradition of idealization, which took men as its exemplars: … If female-female relations could not really be true friendship, neither could male-female relations. The question, again, was one of stability, as Montaigne argues: … (10)
In John Lyly’s Endymion, 3.4.114-16, Eumenides, torn between his desire for Semele and his friendship with Endymion, comes to realize that ‘The love of men to women is a thing common and of course: the friendshippe of man to man infinite and immortall’ … (11)
…all of Cicero’s examples, as with later writers, are men, and in the early modern period a clear misogynist line emerges. True friendship, in virtually all cases, could only exist between men. (11)
The idealization of the power and transcendent virtue of male-male friendship lies at the heart of the male friendship tradition as Shakespeare explores it in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. In most pre-Shakespearean works engaged with the [11] tradition, the bonds of friendship between two male friends—what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick terms homosocial bonds—prove stronger than male-female desire. Usually, one of the young men falls in love with a woman, but the prior friendship with a male friend produces enormous anxiety and conflict; or one male friend falls in love with his friend’s beloved, leading to conflict and anxiety on both sides. The nature of such male-male friendship is both platonic and to some extent erotic, and its power is sufficient to cause a man to renounce his own life to save his friend (as in the stories of Damon and Pythias and Titus and Gisippus), to renounce wife or fiancée in preference to the bond with another man, or even, in perhaps its most extreme form, to offer his female beloved to his friend. / This idealization of male-male friendship reflected a Neoplatonic exaltation of both selfless devotion to and ideal union with another, as well as mastery over sexual desire. (12)
Early modern texts stressing the powerful emotional bonds of male-male friendship frequently figured this closeness as a clearly physical intimacy. (12)
Bruce Smith also traces the themes of male friendship through a wide range of early modern literature (particularly in relation to the ways in which it is distinguished from but also allied to master-servant sexual relations), noting the ‘improbable, magical circumstances that allow friendship to be reconciled with marriage’ in the early plays of Shakespeare (Smith, Desire, 69). (13)
Some critics describe the idealization of male friendship as a kind of fantasy of denial, an embodiment, in psychoanalytic terms, of the paralysis of normative development from same-sex to other-sex erotic relations— [See Garber, 31-2, and Adelman, 75. Haslem, 129, notes that the ‘female communicative bond’ established between Julia and Lucetta in the first half of the play ‘is in effect discarded, erased, en route to achieving the male-female love relationship.’] (15)
One might also note here changing conceptions of marriage in the early modern period, in which romantic companionate [Among works on companionate marriage in the early modern period, see Fletcher, ‘Marriage’, Jardine, ‘Companionate’, and Macfarlane.] relations are elevated as equal or superior to purely arranged marriages based on economic considerations. The idealization of male friendship as superior to male-female love (which was considered not romantic or companionate but merely lustful, hence inferior in some accounts (see p. 10)) therefore performs a project of cultural nostalgia, … (15)
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, or, from still another viewpoint, a fantastic instance of a patriarchal culture’s ‘traffic in women’ (Gayle Rubin’s term). (16)
Rene Girard would describe the resulting triangle as a consequence of mimetic desire—Titus desures Sophronia just because Gisippus does [Girard makes a similar arugement about Two Gentlemen: ‘Valentine and Proteus can be friends only by desiring alike and, if they do, they are enemies’ because ‘The mimesis of desire is both the best of friendship and the worst of hatred’ (Girard, 233 and 242). Ostergaard offers a refutation of Girard’s argument. (Rene Girard, ‘Love Delights in Praises: A Reading of The Two Gentlemen of Verona’, Philosophy and Literature, 13 (1989), 231-47)] –but Titus himself puts a slightly different interpretation on it: / Why wolde ye have me see that, whiche you youre selfe coulde nat beholde without ravisshinge of minde and carnall appetite? Alas, why forgate ye that our mindes and appetites were ever one? And that also what so ye liked was ever to me in like degree pleasant? (Elyot, 139), (20)
It is a critical moment in the play, to which I will return; I want to emphasize here that the offer of the beloved is not accepted in Shakespeare. (21)
Shakespeare seems not to have been the dramatist who would pass up the chance to use a bed trick. In All’s Well That Ends Well, he takes up a bed trick that is in his source material (William Painter’s The Palace of Pleasure, 1566), while in Measure for Measure, he invents a bed trick that does not exist in any of the source materials (see Doran, 385-9). In the Renaissance versions of the Titus and Gisippus story following either Elyot or Boccaccio, the offer of the woman is not only accepted, but it is accomplished through a bed trick. The bed tricks in Measure for Measure and All’s Well work against the male—in the dark, he cannot distinguish his wife from the woman whose place has been taken; in both cases, he rightly believes he is deflowering a virgin (the aptly named Diana in All’s Well) or even a nun (Isabella in Measure for Measure), though wrong about that virgin’s identity. The blindness of the [22] man in these stories figures male desire as primally aggressive and narcissistic; the woman is reduced to a maidenhead, undistinguishable from any other maidenhead. Thus the usual bed trick enacts a male rape fantasy, one which is magically resolved: the virgin/nun taken in the dark turns out to be the man’s wife after all, a woman both sexual and virginal. Eventually, the exposure and guilty knowledge of their actions leads the men to some kind of penitence or apparent reformation. (22-23)
Where does the attempted rape come from? No attempted or completed rape exist in any of the available analogues of Two Gentlemen: in Elyot’s version of Titus and Gisippus, Sophronia goes willingly with Titus under a misapprehension, and in Julio und Hyppolita, the female is simply deceived into accepting a new lover. …In traditional source studies of the play, Ovid is referenced almost exclusively in relation to Proteus’s name… Ovidian influence, however, clearly informs the play at the end as well as in these other moments, for love in the Metamorphoses itself is all too frequently enacted as rape; … Perhaps one way in which to reconceive Ovid’s influence on Shakespeare in Two Gentlemen is to consider Valentine as no less Ovidian than Proteus, and to see the two gentlemen as in essence one man split into two parallel but distinct figures. [Simmons, 862, calls them subject (Valentine) and anti-subject (Proteus).] (24)
In Two Gentlemen, Shakespeare can therefore be seen to be bringing together two figurations of male desire from the narratives of the two gentlemen of England and Italy, Elyot and Ovid. (27)
Often in Shakespeare the ‘ring’ has a sexual connotation—it was a slang term for the female genitalia (Rubinstein, 220-1; cf. AW 4.2.59-62). (29)
By substituting an attempted rape for the rape fantasy (the bed trick) as the action which mirrors the offer, Shakespeare drastically raises the emotional temperature of the play. (30)
…the attempted rape and the attempted offer are thus equivalent, or at least parallel, enactments of an ideology of male possession. Yet in Two Gentlemen, where neither action is completed, both ultimately lead to the same thing: marriage. Shakespeare understood better than most, how powerful, transforming and at time destructive a force male desire could be, and he learned this, in [30] large part, from his reading of Ovid. (30-31)
…writers from Cicero onward had considered whether true friendship could exist between male and female, and whether romantic love could develop into the idealized form of friendship; the answers were invariably negative. (31)
…Two Noble Kinsmen deploys, at some point, a comparable ambivalence about the friendship tradition, and suggests, as Two Gentlemen does, that romantic desire is a vastly stronger power than male-male friendship. (34)
The parable of the Prodigal Son was widely known in early modern England [Young, 20, notes that ‘following the issue of The New Church Calendar in 1561, it was established that the parable of the Prodigal Son should be read three times every year in church, on 4 March, 3 July, and 29 October, provided that those dates did not coincide with a Sunday or a Holy Day’.] and is, according to Richmond Noble, 277, ‘the most frequently mentioned Parable of the Gospels in [Shakespeare’s] plays’. The parable serves as a deep narrative for many plot lines in several of Shakespeare’s plays, perhaps the most obvious being the development of Prince Hal from I Henry [36] IV to Henry V. (36-37)
In many of Shakespeare’s plays there are few references to mothers, … Fathers in comedy, and in New Comedy particularly, of course, rarely applaud their children’s loves, at least at the beginning of the plays (cf. Egeus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.) (38)
…Proteus has a father much in evidence onstage, Antonio, who is ‘resolved’, ‘peremptory’ and determined to ‘suddenly proceed’ (1.3.66,71,64)—in short, the typical father-figure of comedy who, wittingly or not, thwarts the romantic desires of his child. (39)
The prodigal daughters of Two Gentlemen, Julia and Silvia, undertake journeys for love, to Verona and to the forest, while the journeys undertaken by the two prodigal sons, Proteus and Valentine, are, initially, explorations of their own identities—… (40)
The prodigal son motif substantially overlaps with the male friendship tradition: both concern the process of the individuation of male identity—or, more generally, of masculinity itself [See Adelman, Garber and Kahn]. As Shakespeare plays out the parable in Two Gentlemen, the sons leave their families in search of a place in society, but the ‘hunt’ for ‘honour’ (1.1.63) is soon short-circuited by love. Loss of self is associated with being in thrall to sexual desire, as in Proteus’s [40] soliloquy, but also with immaturity. Sexual and psychological maturity evolve as the child leaves behind the limitations of the ‘fraternal or sororal bond…which must yield priority to a marital and sexual bond’ (Garber, 38). [Marjorie Garber, Coming of Age in Shakespeare (1981)]. (40-41)
Shakespeare achieves, unsatisfactorily in some views, a resolution of his own narrative by using a second woman in order to break the triangle of desire and allow for the marriage of both men. (42)
In Silvia, Shakespeare created a formidable woman character, more intelligent than any of the men who desire her. Silvia’s strong characterization in most of the play explains in part the continuing efforts of directors and editors to invent positive stage actions for her during her long silence in 5.4 (see pp. 104-8). The romance heroine Julia, by contrast, does write a letter directly to Proteus (1.3.45-7) and, like her model Felismena in Diana, rather than finding a male escort for her journey to her beloved. She actively, and far less cautiously, expresses and seeks to fulfill her desire. In this aspect Julia anticipates, as many critics have noted, such later Shakespearean heroines as Portia, Rosalind and Viola. / When Julia agrees to take on the disguise of a man, she follows in the steps of innumerable heroines of romance narratives. … earlier saints’ lives, [44] chivalric romances, romantic epics, ballads and novellas. (44-45)
Such cross-dressings, so common in literary romance, were considerable rarer on the public stage until the 1590s. … Despite these earlier examples, [45] especially Gallathea, the fact remains that Shakespeare is among the first playwrights to introduce this romance motif into the theatre, and he is certainly the first to develop the idea to the sophisticated levels we see in Two Gentlemen. (45-46)
…breeches cause these two women the greatest difficulty. Lucetta insists that, to appear as a man, Julia ‘must needs have them with a codpiece’ (53), and when Julia protests that the codpiece ‘will be ill-favoured’ (54), Lucetta insists that ‘A round hose, madam, now’s not worth a pin/ Unless you have a codpiece to stick pins on’ (55-6; see 2.7.56n.). Julia, like almost all such heroines in similar situations, fears that ‘undertaking so unstaid a journey…will make me scandalized’ (60-1) but proceeds nevertheless (see Figs 4 and 5). (46)
The multiple levels of comments on the power of acting here reflect the wit and self-consciousness of a young playwright making discoveries about the stage’s possibilities. (51)
Although similarly sophisticated moments of self-consciousness about dramatic art, in relation to the heroine’s gender disguise, may be found in the vast array of romance poems and narratives that stand behind the play, what particularly distinguishes Shakespeare’s treatment of the subject is his self-consciousness about the physical reality of the boy actor beneath the female role. (51)
Much recent scholarly work has engaged with the material conditions, metadramtic thematics and erotic suggestiveness of the boy actor on the early modern stage (see, for example, Shapiro, Gender, Levine and Orgel). Two Gentlemen does not seem to go as far as As You Like It…or Antony and Cleopatra…in acknowledging its own practice, … That said, the language of Two Gentlemen does at times reveal the boy actor: … (51)
…a ‘passioning’ performance, with ‘tears’ (4.4.165-7), a stereotypical ‘female’ signifier, like the codpiece for the male. (52)
This exchange highlights the androgynous aspects of the boy actor and further destabilizes any supposedly clear demarcations of gender. In his discussion of the ‘body beneath’ the woman’s clothing on the early modern stage, particularly in regard to scenes of women characters in bed or undressing to reveal themselves, Peter Stallybrass effectively demonstrates the impossibility of fixing gender, nothing that/ all attempts to fix gender are necessarily prosthetic: that is, they suggest the attempt to supply an imagined deficiency by the exchange of male clothes for female clothes or of female clothes for male clothes; by displacement from male to female space or from female to male space; by the replacement of male with female tasks or of female with male tasks. But all elaborations of the prosthesis which will supply the ‘deficiency’ can secure no essence. On the contrary, they suggest that gender itself is a fetish, the production of an identity through the fixation upon specific ‘parts’. (Stallybrass, 77) [Peter Stallybrass, ‘Transvestism and the “body beneath” : Speculating on the boy actor’, in Susan Zimmerman (ed.), Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage (1992), 64-83] / Any consideration of the boy actor in Two Gentlemen, and the potential erotic charge of the phenomenon in general (see Orgel) [Stephen Orgel, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge, 1996)], must take account of the fact that Shakespeare’s introduction of [52] the female-disguised-as-male-page was relatively daring in the early 1590s (as indeed later). Antitheatrical writers like John Rainoldes were constantly inveighing against the moral dangers of the boy actor let alone the multiplied effects of the further transformation of the female character into the boy page. [Among the vast literature on antitheatrical discourse, see Barish.] [Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley, Calif., 1981) (52-53)
Any moral dubiety arising from the boy actor playing a female is also partly subverted by having the female character disguised as a page, and at the end of the play the boy playing Julia remains in a more suitable male [53] costume: Julia’s revelation of her identity does not involve removing, or threatening to remove, her clothing. (53-54)
In Two Gentlemen Shakespeare has begun to explore, with some considerable sophistication, the dramatic possibilities raised by the material reality of the boy actor: the boundaries of gender identity, a metadramatic self-consciousness about his own craft and the erotic frisson of transvestite wooing. (54)
Ovid’s texts (the Heroides and the Metamorphoses especially) resonate not only in particular allusions… but more generally in the relentless instability experienced by [54] many of the figures in the play—the transformations of character, the shifting of allegiances, the erosion of resolve, the instability of language. (54-55)
As in most of Shakespeare’s comedies, love constitutes the great agent of transformation in Two Gentlemen. (55)
Yet there are centres of constancy in the two women, Julia and Silvia; their love for Proteus and Valentine remains immovable,… (56)
Proteus’s changeability is both his vice and the means of his regeneration, for he can recover quickly as he fell. His sudden repentence—‘My shame and guilt confounds me./ Forgive me, Valentine’ (5.4.73-4)—may seem psychologically absurd, but it works thematically, … (57)
The recurring interest in metamorphosis and transformation in Two Gentlemen may rightly be traced to Shakespeare’s extensive indebtedness to Ovid, but it may equally be indebted to the Ovidianism of John Lyle’s drama: … (58)
These letters, variously delivered and read, or intercepted and torn up, become metonymies for sexual desire. Their errant and self-referential paths effectively reflect the confusions and failures [59] of the main love plots. [As Kiernander, 36, observes, ‘The characters cannot relate to one another directly but only through various highlighted mediating devices—messengers, letters, portraits and a gift. The signals these media are intended to transmit are subject to a great deal of interference.’ …] (59-60)
The vagrancy and instability of language in Two Gentlemen indicate a far more complex and ambiguous world than the naïve lovers imagine at the beginning of the play. Julia, for example, before she knows of Proteus’s betrayal, equates constancy in language with constancy in love: … (64)
…there seems little doubt that actual dogs did appear onstage, as is made clear by entry stage direction in Every Man Out of His Humour, 3.2.0.1: ‘one leading a dog’ (Jonson, 1.338), … (67)
The lower down the human social scale, the less refined the breed of dog, and the greater the number of complaints about their uncleanliness and impurity. … Crab’s excretal energies (see 4.4.36n.) also mark him as low… (68)
…a lady’s lap-dog, ‘usually a toy spaniel in the early sixteenth century and a pug in the seventeenth’… (73)
Verona is named in Two Gentlemen solely, however, as the place of origin and the point of departure for five of the main characters. Milan is where most of the action takes place, the location of the Duke’s (or Emperor’s) court—clearly, in the play’s terms, a larger, more sophisticated world where the full flowering of the Italian Renaissance might be found. (78)
…Romeo and Juliet is set in Verona… (79)
The plays that are set in or refer substantially to northern Italy—Taming of the Shrew, Two Gentlemen, Romeo and Juliet—are ‘romantic’ in nature, … Shakespeare’s Italy in these plays, then, is the Elizabethans’ romantic Italy, not that other Italy which was home to Machiavelli, Catholicism, poison and [79] treachery in general as seen in early modern tragedies. There may be outlaws on these roads, but they are all ‘gentlemen’ capable of reformation. (79-80)
Shakespeare also brings together, as he was to do later in his work, the rustic clown and the witty servant—the latter developed, the rustic clown and the witty servant—the latter developed from Platus and Lyly. [Speed is the typical Lylian page—witty, critical ot both his master and his master’s friend, ultimately linked to the tricky servant of Plautine comedy. Yet Hunter, Lyle, 314-315, notes that ‘Lyle’s servants have a simple and definite set of characteristics—quick wit, love of mischief, empty bellies’, but that Lance and Speed ‘are much more difficult to define’ (for example the Lylian Speed certainly has wit, but he is outwitted by the more clownish Lance in 2.5). So Campbell and Salingar.] (83)
While Two Gentlemen was certainly known in Shakespeare’s lifetime, as Francis Mere’s comments in 1598 make clear (see p. 129), no record exists of any staging of Two Gentlemen from the time of its composition in the 1590s until Benjamin Victor’s adaptation was performed at David Garrick’s Theatre-Royal in Drury Lane, in London, 1762-3. (84)
It is noteworthy that the first recorded production of the play was of an adaptation, Benjamin Victor’s… The dialogue concerning the decorative codpiece for Julia, of course, vanished from the text—evidently one of the many ‘weeds’ with which ‘this comedy abounds’ (‘Advertisement’ in Victor). (86)
Proteus has been variously depicted as sinister from the beginning of the play, as a haplessly naïve innocent and as a confused young man sexually attracted to Valentine as well as Julia and then Silvia. Valentine has been portrayed as an obtuse pretty boy and as a naïve young man who, learning the hard way, turns into a near-heroic mature figure. (88)
One of the most successful twentieth-century productions was that of Thacker in 1991, set in the 1930s of Noel Coward…This production began with approximately fifteen minutes of songs (from a big-band orchestra and blonde chanteuse) by George and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin and Cole Porter, among others, to which couples in period evening wear danced. … As Peter Holland notes, the music and setting ‘validated’ the ‘characters’ obsession with love’ (Holland, 87). (89)
Valentine’s offer of his beloved Silvia to his now suddenly penitent friend Proteus, who has just attempted to rape her: … Throughout the recorded stage history of Two Gentlemen, critics, audiences, adapters, directors and actors have been trying to understand, rationalize or simply evade this moment of the offer. (92)
Macready, in his 1841 production, made wholesale changes to the text, including adding lines and transposing speeches, but he did restore the offer for the first time in decades… (93)
I rehearse this performance tradition to document briefly the theatrical and editorial energy expended over two centuries on the infamous offer. It is widely considered an embarrassment in Two Gentlemen and, many feel, ought to be negotiated away in some manner. … Yet while editors, adapters and directors have considered the offer (which is not even accepted) highly offensive, the attempted rape of Silvia has [95] by contrast been found dramatically acceptable, even compelling, and does not have a similar revisionary theatrical history: … (95-96)
The theatrical history of the offer, then, reveals a continuing effort to minimize or even erase it, form rewriting the scene to overrunning the lines with action, while the theatrical history of the attempted rape, by contrast, reveals a growing effort to maximize it, from its inclusion even in softened form in the earliest adaptations, to increasingly violent modern stagings and even the representation of an actual rape. … The different textual and performance histories of these paired actions, in which an offer made in friendship is frequently considered more heinous, more of an embarrassment onstage, than an attempted rape, may partly be explained by the collapse of the discourse of male friendship, even as early as the eighteenth century. Yet the attempted rape and the offer are mirroring actions (see pp. 28-30). Not to stage them for what they are is therefore to miss a profound, and profoundly disturbing, connection between them which the play intensely makes. (99)
Janet Adelman perfectly articulates the issues: / in order for the play to enact this fantasy [that allows both relationships’ simultaneous fulfillment], the autonomy of both Silvia and Julia as fully realized figures has to be sacrificed: Silvia stands by silently as she is swapped from Valentine to Proteus, who has just tried to rape her (indeed, she never speaks after the rape attempt); and Julia is not permitted to notice, or to care, that her man is a would-be rapist. The sacrifice of the autonomy of these hitherto sensible characters suggests the extent to which the deepest concern of the play is with the male bond. / (Adelman, 79) [Janet Adelman, ‘Male Bonding in Shakespeare’s Comedies’, in Peter Erickson and Coppelia Kahn (eds), Shakespeare’s Rough Magic (1985), 73-103)] (104)
One can hardly fault directions for creating stagings that seek to rationalize what they see as the play’s difficulties. …virtually all [of the stagings] fill in Silvia’s long silence. Every effort to make Silvia speak, however, with transferred lines or silent action, ignores how the play has depicted Silvia as more or less constituted by masculine discourse. (108)
…the more general judgement that comedy was a less ‘serious’ genre than tragedy or history, hence less deserving of comment. (108)
[note 2] George Eliot quotes Valentine’s lines—‘Who by repentance is not satisfied / Is nor of heaven nor earth, for these are pleased’ (5.4.79-80)—in letters dated 1846 (Eliot, 8.11) and 1859; in the latter, she astutely observes ‘that doctrine is bad for the sinning, but good for those sinned against’ (Eliot, 3.66). Elsewhere, the offer in the final scene, with ‘Silvia standing by’, Eliot claims, ‘disgusted’ her (Haight, 178). (109)
Malone cannot defend the play’s ‘neglect of geography’ by an appeal to youth, but noting that one of Shakespeare’s ‘latest productions’ [The Winter’s Tale] is liable to the same objection’, he concludes that Shakespeare had no interest in the unities; rather, ‘he seems to have thought that the whole terraqueous globe was at his command’ (Boswell-Malone, 7). [Edition of Shakespeare: Boswell-Malone, , Plays and Poems, ed. James Boswell, 21 vols (1821)] (111)
The Romantics, more concerned with plays like Hamlet, showed relatively little interest in Two Gentlemen. Coleridge doubts the authorship at one point in 1809—‘the Gent. Of Verona not a word of his’ (Coleridge, Fragments, 252)… (112)
Keats seems hardly to have acknowledged the play, but a reference in a letter of 15 April 1817—‘I saw…a little Wood with trees look you like Launce’s Sister “as white as a Lilly and as small as a Wand”’ (Keats, 17; cf. 2.3.19-20)—reveals a sharply specific memory of one of the comic scenes. (112)
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