The Two Gentlemen of Verona is possibly Shakespeare’s earliest single-authored play, a suggestion supported by long stretches of inactivity for some characters, as though he forgot all about them. In act two, scene four, for example, Sir Thurio (a hapless role all round) remains silent for 79 lines and the witty servant, Speed, for 183, while the main drama takes place in front of them: the Duke, his daughter Silvia, and Valentine welcome Proteus (Valentine’s friend) to the court of Milan.
Though minor in comparison to what was to follow, The Two Gentlemen of Verona bears careful reading because here we can see Shakespeare finding his feet as a dramatist, bodying forth ideas, techniques and situations that would feed into his later works. In what follows I look for Shakespeare’s DNA as a writer: characterisation, dramatic situations, stagecraft and poetic expression that would find further expression throughout his career. The Two Gentlemen of Verona shows us how Shakespeare is in part always sourced in ‘Shakespeare’. Like Johann Sebastian Bach, he was a great recycler of his own work, but always inflecting it differently each time around.
Two of Shakespeare’s first female characters, Julia and her maid Lucetta, meet to talk about rival suitors. Kate and Bianca will do the same in The Taming of the Shrew (2. 1.), as will Portia and Nerissa in The Merchant of Venice (1.2.), and Cressida and her servant Alexander in Troilus and Cressida (1.2.). Desdemona and Emilia will compare tales about the qualities of husbands in Othello (4.3). Julia’s decision to disguise herself as a boy and to visit Proteus in Milan makes her the first of the boys playing women to disguise themselves as boys or young men. Julia becomes Proteus’s pageboy, sees him in love with Silvia, and has to convey tokens of love between them. Shakespeare uses this same plot device to provide sexual and emotional tensions for Rosalind in As You Like It and Viola in Twelfth Night, or What You Will. In The Merchant of Venice, Portia and Nerissa have more power as a result of their disguise, whereas Jessica in the same play and Innogen in Cymbeline use their disguise as boys in order to aid escape (Jessica from her father and Innogen from a plot to murder her).
The Two Gentlemen of Verona contains Shakespeare’s first visual gag (and one of his best): the rope ladder that Valentine must hide about his person in front of the Duke so that he can successfully elope with the Duke’s daughter, Silvia. The Duke knows about Valentine’s plans (Valentine’s ‘friend’ Proteus has betrayed him) so the episode is a game of cat and mouse, the rope ladder a farcical time bomb that the audience, with delighted anticipation, is waiting to be detonated. In a later play, the banished Romeo will use a rope ladder secretly to meet Juliet on their wedding night. Valentine’s plot is uncovered, the hidden ladder discovered, and he is banished, but not before he speaks one of Shakespeare’s most lovely and lyrical speeches:
And why not death, rather than living torment?
To die is to be banished from myself,
And Silvia is myself. Banished from her
Is self from self, a deadly banishment.
What light is light, if Silvia be not seen?
What joy is joy, if Silvia be not by?
Unless it be to think that she is by,
And feed upon the shadow of perfection.
Except I be by Silvia in the night,
There is no music in the nightingale.
Unless I look on Silvia in the day
There is no day for me to look upon.
She is my essence, and I leave to be
If I be not by her fair influence
Fostered, illumined, cherished, kept alive.
I fly not death, to fly his deadly doom.
Tarry I here I but attend on death,
But fly I hence, I fly away from life.
(The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 3.1.170–87)
The musicality of the verse is compelling, especially because of the gentle echoes of ‘night’ and ‘nightingale’, ‘essence’ and ‘influence’. In the 1998 film Shakespeare in Love it is Shakespeare himself whose ear is caught by his own lines when a newly arrived actor (who he thinks is a boy) speaks them. Valentine’s emotional and intellectual difficulty – that the self is defined in part through another person – would find fuller expression in the reunion of the twins in The Comedy of Errors and in Twelfth Night, or What You Will, and the lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Stories of banishment seem to have fascinated Shakespeare. Valentine’s place in Silvia’s affections is usurped by Proteus and he is banished. In As You Like It Duke Frederick usurps his brother, Duke Senior, and banishes him. In The Tempest Antonio usurps and banishes his brother, the magician Prospero. Boling-broke is banished by Richard II, Romeo by the Prince of Verona, the Earl of Kent and Cordelia by King Lear, Timon of Athens goes into self-imposed misanthropic exile and, at opposite ends of Shakespeare’s career, King Tarquin in Lucrece and Coriolanus are banished by the people of Rome.
The character of Proteus (whose name suggests he can change shape and therefore dissemble) represents the first of Shakespeare’s Machiavels. These scheming figures were popular in plays and claimed cultural sanction from the Italian philosophy of Niccolò Machiavelli: all is fair in love and war. Proteus anticipates the more fully fledged Shakespearian schemers such as Richard of Gloucester in the second and third parts of Henry VI and Richard III, Philip the Bastard in King John, Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing, Brutus in Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Angelo in Measure for Measure, Iago in Othello, Macbeth, and Giacomo in Cymbeline. The speed with which Proteus decides he wants to forget Julia and instead take Silvia away from Valentine (apparently only moments after Proteus has arrived in Milan and seen Silvia, 2.4.190–212) anticipates the suddenness of King Leontes’s notoriously inexplicable jealousy in a much later play, The Winter’s Tale.
ONE MAN AND HIS DOG
Then there is Lance, the deadpan, clownish servant of Proteus. He appears on stage with his dog, Crab. One of the great pleasures of seeing any stage production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona is watching a real dog take part in the main action. Shakespeare’s script accommodates anything that the dog might do. In answer to a question from Speed (Valentine’s servant) about whether it will ‘be a match’ (a marriage) between Proteus and Julia, Lance replies:
LANCE Ask my dog. If he say ‘Ay’, it will. If he say ‘No’, it will.
If he shake his tail and say nothing, it will.
SPEED The conclusion is, then, that it will.
(2.5.31–3)
Much later, the actor playing Lance has a gift of a monologue when he returns to tell us about how Crab cocked his leg against a gentlewoman’s dress in the Duke’s court:
He had not been there – bless the mark – a pissing-while but all the chamber smelled him. […] I, having been acquainted with the smell before, knew it was Crab, and goes me to the fellow that whips the dogs. ‘Friend’, quoth I, ‘you mean to whip the dog.’ ‘Ay, marry do I,’ quoth he. ‘You do him the more wrong’, quoth I, ‘’twas I did the thing you wot of.’ He makes me no more ado, but whips me out of the chamber. How many masters would do this for his servant? Nay, I’ll be sworn I have sat in the stocks for puddings he hath stolen, otherwise he had been executed. I have stood on the pillory for geese he hath killed, otherwise he had suffered for’t. (To Crab) Thou think’st not of this now.
(The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 4.4.18–33)
Lance’s humour is quintessentially Shakespearian because of its unabashed description of a bodily function. A dog peeing does not need to be anything more than it seems, but the moment is touched with the warm sentimentality of Lance’s sympathy for the animal. It is a marvellous episode that exemplifies Shakespeare’s ability to tell a story and to sketch a picture of an off-stage reality. He often describes for us what we cannot see and which he cannot easily dramatise. Biondello’s comic description of Petruccio and his horse’s outrageous appearance and journey to church to marry Kate (The Taming of the Shrew, 3.2.42–61); the Duke of Clarence’s account of his nightmare about being drowned (Richard III, 1.4.9–63); Mercu
tio’s fantastical observations about the ‘fairies’ midwife’, Queen Mab (Romeo and Juliet, 1.4.55–94); the First Lord’s moving account of Jaques crying and moralising about a wounded stag in the Forest of Ardenne (As You Like It, 2.1.25–63); Hamlet’s adventure narrative of being taken by pirates and his sneaking across the ship’s deck to exchange the fateful letter that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were carrying (Hamlet, 4.6.11–28 and 5.2.13–63); and the understated and terrible memory of dead King Duncan that haunts Lady Macbeth during her famous sleep-walking scene – ‘yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?’ (Macbeth, 5.1.36–8) – are all other examples of Shakespeare’s powerful off-stage pictures.
The passage about Crab the dog illustrates beautifully Shakespeare’s use of prose. Only five plays (all histories) are written entirely in verse: Henry VI Part Three, Richard II, King John, the collaborative Henry VI Part One and Edward III. Elsewhere Shakespeare uses prose extensively and to great effect, often for servants and non-aristocratic figures, but not exclusively. In prose Shakespeare is differently eloquent, often humorous, moving and sentimental. Stylistically, Shakespeare’s use of prose was to have a lasting effect on his dramatic verse. It is possible that he found he could write prose more quickly than verse and it is interesting that in the mid-1590s there is an explosion of prose in his plays. Perhaps the newly formed Lord Chamberlain’s Men required several plays to be written as soon as possible in order to become established and popular. The play with the highest proportion of prose is The Merry Wives of Windsor; Much Ado About Nothing is a close runner-up. The verse in his early plays tends to be highly regular and rhetorically shaped. As Shakespeare’s use of prose increased, so too did his ability to write verse which sounds more and more like prose, that is, when the verse flows onto the following line. This starts to happen as early as Romeo and Juliet (the Nurse’s speech in 1.2.18–50 was set as prose in the first quarto edition, even though it is verse). The vivid, dramatic poetry of Hamlet’s soliloquies was made possible by the profound effect that writing prose had on Shakespeare. So, Lance’s speeches in The Two Gentlemen of Verona mark an important feature of Shakespeare’s artistry.
PROBLEMATIC ENDINGS
The ending of The Two Gentlemen of Verona is characteristic of Shakespearian comedy. Order is restored. Marital bliss and new generations are anticipated. All of Shakespeare’s comedies either end with or look forward to marriage (in the case of Love’s Labour’s Lost a year and a day later). But because Shakespeare always gives and questions at the same time, human problems remain. Proteus tries to rape Silvia in the forest, but Valentine suddenly appears and intervenes. Proteus apologises and Valentine offers Silvia to his ‘friend’. Julia (still disguised as Proteus’s page) painfully observes the scene, faints, and her true identity is revealed. ‘There are, by this time,’ remarked the critic Arthur Quiller-Couch, ‘no gentlemen in Verona’.19 The Duke arrives with Sir Thurio (his husband of choice for Silvia) and the outlaws who have taken them as prisoners. Sir Thurio steps forward to take Silvia as his bride, but Valentine intervenes again and threatens to kill him. The Duke applauds Valentine’s spirit, gives Silvia back to him after all, pardons the outlaws (at Valentine’s request), and the two couples look forward to being married on the same day. And all, apparently, leave the stage to live happily ever after. Little wonder, then, that in some productions, the relationship between the servant Lance and his pissing dog is portrayed as the most mutually loyal and genuinely loving one in the entire play.
Other problematic endings include: how far Kate might be speaking tongue in cheek when she proclaims her loyalty to her husband (The Taming of the Shrew, 5.2.141–84); Duke Orsino who has fallen in love with Viola disguised as a boy waiting to see if she is still as attractive to him when dressed as a woman in Twelfth Night, or What You Will; and Bertram having to take up Helen whom he has been forced to marry and who has tricked him into getting her pregnant in the ironically entitled All’s Well That Ends Well. Measure for Measure used always to end with the marriage between Isabella and the Duke, but in Shakespeare’s script she remains silent. John Barton’s 1970 production for the Royal Shakespeare Company was, as far as anyone knows, the first time when Isabella seemed to be stunned rather than delighted by the Duke’s offer. Since then productions of the play have explored different conclusions. The Duke hints at marriage to the novice Isabella three times in the final scene, but why should she accept him? He has manipulated her life and made her believe her brother has been executed. All she wants is to become a nun. Even A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which seems to end happily, raises questions. We know that Demetrius can only love Helena because he has been doped by love-juice and that the happiness of their marriage will always rely on the fairy kingdom’s magic.
The endings of Shakespeare tragedies are no less problematic than his comedies. Just as we might feel that there are questions to be raised about the future happiness promised by marriage, so too our emotions usually feel divided at the end of a Shakespearian tragedy. Rather than judge his characters, Shakespeare requires us to take on multiple perspectives. When the Earl of Kent and Edgar look upon the dying King Lear who enters carrying his dead daughter, the innocent Cordelia, they share the following exchange:
KENT Is this the promised end?
EDGAR Or image of that horror?
(The Tragedy of King Lear, 5.3.238–9)
Two questions, and one answer to both is staring them in the face. But Kent and Edgar also invite us to compare the horror of the moment to the end of the world. To ask where Shakespeare’s sympathies lie is to ask the wrong question. It is far more satisfying to experience the ending of a Shakespearian tragedy through the eyes of characters who experience it, to take upon ourselves their perspectives, to allow these to manipulate and inform our own: Cleopatra and her waiting gentlewomen Charmian and Iras as they prepare for their suicides, and Octavius Caesar as he returns to the monument too late and finds them dead; Horatio as he bears in mind the number of dead around the royal court of Denmark (Polonius, Ophelia, King Claudius, Queen Gertrude, Laertes, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern and Hamlet) and promises to tell their histories aright to the new-conquering Prince Fortinbras (Hamlet, 5.2.327–39); the representatives of the Venetian state (Lodovico, Montano, Graziano and Cassio) who witness Iago’s murder of his wife Emilia and Othello’s suicide. The wicked Iago does not die and remains a lingering problem to the Venetian state at the end of Othello. He promises to remain silent forever, even when faced with torture:
IAGO
Demand me nothing. What you know, you know.
From this time forth I never will speak word.
(Othello, 5.2.309–10)
We know what we know because of what Shakespeare has shown us. He wants to let us into some, but by no means all, of his characters’ minds. Shakespeare wants us to go on thinking about what we have heard Iago say beyond the scope of the play, keeping him alive and aggressively silent in order for us to do precisely that.
SHAKESPEARE THE POET
By far and away the most successful publications by Shakespeare in his lifetime were his two narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.
The best-loved books get read to pieces, so much so, that only one copy of the first edition of Venus and Adonis (1593) survives (in the Bodleian Library, Oxford). Poems based on stories from Ovid started to become popular in Europe from the middle of the sixteenth century, and both of these works represent Shakespeare’s own significant contributions to that literary vogue. For much of the poem the goddess of love is naked and begging for sex before Adonis, but he resists her advances. It is an erotic masterpiece, a tragi-comedy propelled forward by male sexual fantasy. Unsurprisingly, the poem was popular among university undergraduates. In 1600, the writer and Cambridge academic, Gabriel Harvey, observed that ‘the younger sort take much delight in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis.’ Gullio, a character in one of the three Parnassus plays, student entertainments about col
lege life performed at around the same date by Cambridge students, says that he will honour ‘sweet Master Shakespeare’ and that to do so he will sleep with a copy of Venus and Adonis under his pillow.
Shakespeare produced his two narrative poems in 1593 and 1594 when the theatres were closed for almost two years because of the plague. Both poems include fascinating physical descriptions of bodies and facial expressions, as if Shakespeare were directing his own theatre of the mind. The descriptions provide insight into the kind of theatre that Shakespeare himself most wanted to see, and was used to seeing from the actors he worked with. You can almost imagine the following as Shakespeare’s own advice to his players. From Venus and Adonis: ‘I’d like you to “stop […] his lips / And, kissing, speak […], with lustful language broken’” (lines 46–7); ‘When he breathes on you, could you “feed […] on the stream as on a prey” (line 63)?’; and ‘Could you deliver the line more as though you had “fear lurk[ing] in [your] eye”, please (line 644)?’. From The Rape of Lucrece: ‘Could you mix sighs with the little you have to say (line 563), “which to [your] oratory [would] add […] more grace” (line 564)?’; ‘Try putting “the period [or full-stop] often from [its] place, / And midst the sentence so [would your] accent break […] / That twice [you would] begin ere once [you] speak […]” (lines 565–7)?’; ‘Could the on-stage crowd create such an impression that the audience “might see [your] far-off eyes look sad” (line 1386), and when you re-enter please could you march “on with trembling paces” (line 1391)? Thanks.’
Lucrece (1594), which Shakespeare himself called ‘a graver labour’ in his dedicatory epistle for Venus and Adonis, is resolutely tragic in tone. It too is erotic, but darkly so. Any sexual arousal that it inspires will implicate the reader in King Tarquin’s raping of Lucrece (which leads – eventually – to her suicide, as well as to the end of the Roman monarchy). Although the act of rape itself is not described (though it seems to take place at some point between lines 680 and 686), the reader is drawn into something with which he or she should not want to be complicit. The claustrophobic moment during which Tarquin looks at Lucrece and gains his necessary erection is one of the most physically erotic passages in all of Shakespeare. Notice how, in the second stanza quoted here, the consistent lengthening of the rhyme royal lines with the unstressed syllable ‘-ing’ seems to imitate Tarquin’s throbbing tumescence:
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