The Two Gentlemen of Verona is a comedy by William Shakespeare from early in his career. It is regarded by most critics as inferior and is seldom performed today. The highlight of the play is considered by many to be the comic servingman Launce and his dog Crab.
Synopsis
The two gentlemen of the title are Valentine and Proteus. Valentine leaves Verona to visit Padua (or possibly Milan, the context is often unclear), where he soon finds his lustful affections engaged by Silvia, an aristocratic lady who is not at all averse to his favors. Proteus later visits Valentine, leaving his fiance, Julia, in Verona. There, Proteus too falls for Silvia. The classical triangle is sent spinning when Proteus’ lady love puts on man’s attire to pay an unexpected visit. The play concludes in a tense confrontation in a forest, where Proteus attempts to rape Silvia. Valentine saves her, but then ‘gives’ her to Proteus in the name of friendship. Proteus refuses and returns to Julia, thus producing a happy ending, at least in name.
In the comic subplot, even Launce finds romance, whereupon he devises a comic resume of the attributes of a lower-class girl “whose faults exceed her hairs.”
Date
The date of composition is uncertain, although it is commonly believed to have been one of Shakespeare’s earliest works. The play is believed to have been written in the early 1590s, although the first evidence of its existence is in Francis Meres’s list of plays, published in 1598. It was not printed until 1623 when it appeared in the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays.
Source
The ultimate source for the play is the story of Felix and Felismena in Diana, a collection of stories by the Portuguese writer Jorge de Montemayor. Shakespeare could have read this in translation, but a play (now lost) based on the story is known to have been performed by the Queen’s Men in 1585, and so Two Gents may simply be an adaptation of that play.
Themes
A major theme of the play is the contest between friendship and love: that is, the question of whether the relationship between two male friends is more important than that between lovers. This is a common theme in Renaissance literature, since some aspects of the culture of the time celebrated friendship as the more important relationship (because it is pure and unconcerned with sexual attraction). This partly helps explain the bizarre sequence in which Valentine ‘gives’ Silvia to Proteus out of friendship, without even asking her.
Connections with Shakespeare’s other work
- Valentine’s attempt at rescuing Silvia from her controlling father, and his subsequent banishment, is distantly reminiscent of what happens to Romeo in Romeo and Juliet.
- Shakespeare returned to the subject of close friends fighting over a woman at the very end of his career, in The Two Noble Kinsmen.
- Valentine’s and Silvia’s plan to elope in the night and their interactions with Proteus and Julia in the forest, are reminiscent of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
- This could very well be the first play where Shakespeare utilized the plot device of having a female disguise herself as a male, later used in such plays as As You Like It and Twelfth Night.
- Launce is noted to have many similarities with the character Launcelot Gobbo, from The Merchant of Venice. Not only are their names similar but also their manners of speech, their occupations, and their similar dramatic functions in their respective plays.
Two Gents in popular culture
- Galt MacDermot, John Guare and Mel Shapiro adapted the show into a musical that opened on December 1, 1971 and closed May 20, 1973.
- A staging of the play at court is depicted in the movie Shakespeare in Love (1998).
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