Two Gentlemen

Some notes on Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona .

1) Garber has a long helpful list of the devices first used in Two Gentlemen and repeatedly used in later plays: a love triangle that leads one heroine to find refuge with a friar; a second heroine who disguises herself as a boy to pursue the man she loves and who intercedes for that man as he attempts to woo another woman; outlaws who have stepped right out of Gilbert and Sullivan, if not Monty Python; an elopement; a “clown who speaks the truth in his malapropisms”; a father who refuses to give his daughter to a suitor; a pair of young male friends who become rivals for love.

2) “Proteus” is a giveaway. He is his name, protean in the flexibility of his affections. He’s not alone. The play is stuffed with Protean characters, whose love is a “chameleon love.”

3) Like Comedy of Errors , Garber sees a “lose oneself to find oneself” dynamic at work in Two Gentlemen . Proteus makes this explicit in a speech in 2.6.

4) This is, in part, a comedy of flight. Silvia loves Valentine, but her father stands in her way. She flees to a convent, while Valentine falls in with outlaws that generously make him their leader. Escape to a world where normal laws don’t apply, where one can be dealt with individually instead of as a category, is the way to renewal.

5) Garber suggests that Julia’s disguise highlights the artificiality of gender, the fact that male and female are roles being played. After all, the “girl” who disguises herself as a boy on the Elizabethan is actually a boy in disguise as a girl. The disguise is really what he is. The double disguise of a boy-playing-girl-playing-boy, and this complexity hints at the fluidity of gender. Garber may be going trendily far here, but Shakespeare surely notices – and plays up – the gender complications of his stage.

6) Garber suggests that Launce’s relationship with his dog Crab runs parallel to the romantic plots of the play. His devotion to his dog, expressed in his willingness to bear the dog’s blame for urinating under a table, is a comic, yet genuine, expression of selfless love. And his willingness to give Crab away anticipates Valentine’s sudden, surprising willingness to give Silvia to Proteus.

7) Nuttall tries to defend the scandalous ending of Two Gentlemen, in which we move with dizzying speed from a rape scene (Proteus attempts to rape Silvia), to a rescue (Valentine intervenes), to repentance (Proteus is abject), to an offer an offer to give the victim to her rapist (Valentine offers Silvia to Proteus). Nuttall says that this scene cannot be an accident or clumsy; it’s too integrated into the imagery and action elsewhere in the play. But he goes further to suggest that the scene is psychologically truthful. He thinks Proteus truly repentant and Valentine truly generous – offering Proteus what he desires out of love for Proteus. He also defends the dramatic sense of the scene: “In the theatre the effect is electrifying,” and he describes a performance in which he “emerged from the theatre moved, confused, and joyful.” This doesn’t mean that the ending is wholly satisfying. There is disquiet. Shakespeare’s fairy tales end with mutual affection and harmony, but with no “ever after.”

8) Harold Goddard suggests that the play is ironic, a satire and spoof on the gentlemanly vices of the time. Everyone in the play is an exaggerated distortion: The fathers are tyrants, Proteus is a sum of all aristocratic vice, and Valentine is his silly, uncomprehending companion. There is only one gentleman in the play, Launce, and his Quixotic chivalry is displayed mainly to his dog. Goddard sees this irony in the final scene of the play, as Valentine chivalrically gives away his beloved to her rapist, Thurio chivalrically backs down and slinks away, and the Duke chivalrically agrees to let Sylvia have Valentine. The “psychological hash” of the scene cannot be serious, Goddard says, and is missed only because Shakespeare, like Chaucer, retains his affection for his characters, for humanity, in the midst of exposing them at their worst. Shakespeare is not quite satirical; he doesn’t lash his characters so much that he “lashes himself to blindness.” Goddard concludes by pointing to Shakespeare’s repeated return to the Renaissance ideal of gentlemanliness.