The Two Gentlemen Of Verona – William Shakespeare, c. 1589-93 ★★

The One with the Rape

Shakespeare plays, like so much else in life, thrive or fade on how they get summed up in one line. This helps explain why The Two Gentlemen Of Verona is so forgotten today: It’s the one with the rape.

Not an actual rape, but a threatened one that is stopped and forgiven, which may make it worse. The best that can be said in the play’s favor is that when you summon the emotional investment of a marshmallow, lapses in taste and morality are more easily forgiven. Two Gentlemen Of Verona’s overall lightness is its best defense.

Two friends, Proteus and Valentine, part company in their hometown of Verona. Valentine meets Silvia in Milan. They fall in love. Then Proteus is sent to Milan, away from his lover Julia. Seeing Silvia, Proteus decides to have her for himself, and the heck with Julia and Valentine:

PROTEUS

Julia I lose and Valentine I lose:
If I keep them, I needs must lose myself;
If I lose them, thus find I by their loss
For Valentine myself, for Julia Silvia.
I to myself am dearer than a friend,
For love is still most precious in itself… [Act II, scene vi, lines 19-26]

As I make my way through early Shakespeare, I often find myself at some point deciding this must be the Bard’s first play. I did so with A Comedy Of Errors, with Henry VI Part 1 and Part 2, and especially with Titus Andronicus. So I feel very seasoned in declaring that yes, Two Gentlemen is probably the oldest surviving play in his canon.

In his Oxford Shakespeare introduction to this play, Roger Warren makes this claim. He suggests the play may have been something he wrote as an amateur playwright back home in Stratford-on-Avon. A famous clown named Richard Tarlton worked on stage with a dog; scenes in Two Gentlemen seem tailored to his act. Tarlton died in 1588, when Shakespeare was not yet established in London. Was Two Gentlemen something he wrote before going there?

A glimpse at early Shakespeare? The Grafton Portrait, seen above, is one of several suggested representations of Shakespeare made in his lifetime, and if so, the earliest. Image from https://medium.com/the-history-buff/is-this-a-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man-d5f43ac610e.

Warren notes a “contrast between verbal accomplishment and underdeveloped theatrical technique.” In scenes with more than two characters, two carry the dialogue at one time while the rest look on silent, suggesting a novice at staging. Odd gaffes pop up, like traveling from Verona to Milan by sea and an emperor that becomes a duke.

It certainly is a play by William Shakespeare, though. You have some signpost motifs: cross-dressing, faithlessness, and the mutability of the human condition. You have broad comic relief in the form of clowns. You have the Italian Renaissance as backdrop. And the pastoral language is suggestive of his Sonnets verse:

PROTEUS

O, how this spring of love resembleth
The uncertain glory of an April day,
Which now shows all the beauty of the sun,
And by and by a cloud takes all away! [I, iii, 84-87]

Proteus is the play’s main character; like other early Shakespeare protagonists Richard III and Aaron the Moor, he is a villain, too. Like the mythical god he is named after, changeability is Proteus’s main feature. His attitude is that of a romantic mercenary, devoted to whatever consumes his mortal passions until something better come along.

When he greets Valentine at the outset, there is a sly hint of what is to come: “Wish me partaker in thy happiness/When thou dost meet good hap…” [I, i, 14-15]. Of course, his partaking Valentine’s happiness in Silvia becomes our play. But Proteus doesn’t start out a dissembler. We first meet him earnestly pining over his yet-unrealized love for Julia, and he is a willing victim while she puts him through the wringer.

Two Gentlemen works best as a series of comic interludes on matters of love. Early on, Julia questions the sincerity of Proteus’s feelings for her, in an exchange with her lady-in-waiting, Lucetta:

JULIA

His little speaking shows his love but small.

LUCETTA

Fire that’s closest kept burns most of all.

JULIA

They do not love that do not show their love.

LUCETTA

O, they love least that let men know their love. [I, ii, 29-32]

Later on, to make the loveplay more overly comical, Julia tears apart a love note from Proteus, only to relent and spend the rest of the scene on her knees, collecting the pieces and pressing them within her bosom.

Playing off the main story, Shakespeare veers off to spotlight the antics of Lance and Speed, respective servants of Proteus and Valentine. I’ve seen Lance spelled “Launce;” suffice to say he is the one with the dog and a lion’s share of the play’s best lines.

Lance (Roger Morlidge) and Crab, in a 2014 Royal Shakespeare Company production. Though rarely staged in comparison to other Shakespeare plays, and even more seldom filmed, Lance and Crab do make a cameo in the 1998 Oscar winner, Shakespeare In Love. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-reviews/10986101/The-Two-Gentlemen-of-Verona-Royal-Shakespeare-Theatre-Stratford-upon-Avon-review-superb.html

Lance has his own unique standards when it comes to love:

SPEED

‘Item: She hath no teeth.’

LANCE

I care not for that neither, because I love crusts.

SPEED

‘Item: She is curst.’

LANCE

Well, the best is, she hath no teeth to bite.

SPEED

‘Item: She will often praise her liquor.’

LANCE

If her liquor be good, she shall: if she will not, I
will; for good things should be praised.

SPEED

‘Item: She is too liberal.’

LANCE

Of her tongue she cannot, for that's writ down she
is slow of; of her purse she shall not, for that
I’ll keep shut: now, of another thing she may, and
that cannot I help. Well, proceed. [III, i, 331-342]

Lance’s strongest devotion is reserved for Crab, a dog he rescued from a litter of drowned pups who gives Lance little in return. Still, Lance is always there for him.

LANCE

Nay, I remember the
trick you served me when I took my leave of Madam
Silvia: 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? Didst
thou ever see me do such a trick? [IV, iv, 33-38]

Lance is the play’s lovable goofball, prone to absurd antics and touches of the surreal, so disconnected from the main story he and Crab are discarded before the final scene. Yet you need him more than most clowns. Without Lance, you would be left with a dire, bitter play.

Proteus is an operator; Valentine a stick. The latter gets one funny lengthy scene with Silvia’s father, but feels underused on the whole. Proteus is more a mover, but unlike Richard and Aaron, a bit dull in his focused selfishness. He has a good ploy or two, but that’s it.

As with many of Shakespeare’s comedies, the ladies are more interesting. Julia especially draws our notice, first with her comedy in the tearing-up of Proteus’s note, then with her decision to disguise herself as a man and travel after Proteus to Milan. There she looks on in sad disguise as the man she loves courts an unwilling Silvia:

JULIA

She dreams of him that has forgot her love;
You dote on her that cares not for your love.
‘Tis pity love should be so contrary;
And thinking of it makes me cry ‘alas!’ [IV, iv, 79-82]

Silvia is the play’s most likably pragmatic character, urging Valentine to write a love-note to send to someone she loves, and enjoying his confusion when she gives the note back to him. Between her craftiness and Julia’s spirit, you wish Shakespeare made the play more about them and less about their lunk-headed suitors.

The famous final scene: Valentine (at left) rushes in to save Silvia from Proteus's clutches while Julia (at right) looks on in Angelica Kauffman's 1789 painting of the last scene in Two Gentlemen Of Verona. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Gentlemen_of_Verona.

This brings us to the rape scene, actually a threatened rape where Proteus, frustrated by his failed attempts at wooing Silvia, decides it is time for direct action instead. Once this is averted, Proteus asks Valentine to forgive him. Valentine does, and even offers to share Silvia with him, though it is unclear how Shakespeare meant this:

VALENTINE

And, that my love may appear plain and free,
All that was mine in Silvia I give thee. [V, iv, 77-83]

It’s not the outrage of the threatened act, but the careless way it all gets swept under. After Proteus’ many acts of betrayal, you expect something of a real reckoning here, only to see a slap on the wrist instead.

Two Gentlemen is not a bad play. It moves fast, generally hits the right notes, and offers some fine words about infatuation if not quite love. But it often reads like a novice’s work, thin and clumsy. One bad moment was enough to doom it to obscurity. With another Shakespeare play, you might think that unfair. Here, history’s judgement feels right.