The Two Gentlemen of Verona (2 page)

As well as establishing oppositions between generations and genders, Shakespeare also sets up a dialogue across the barrier of class by means of witty banter between master and servant. Valentine goes to Milan in pursuit of honor, but once he gets there he finds himself in the same situation as Proteus back in Verona: “metamorphosed with a mistress.” His mockery of lovers’ affectation in the first scene comes back to haunt him. Meanwhile his servant Speed is there to anatomize the characteristics of the mooning courtly lover: he observes his master folding his arms like a melancholy malcontent, relishing love songs, walking alone, sighing like a schoolboy who knows he’s going to be in trouble for losing his spelling book, weeping, speaking in a whining voice, and rejecting food like someone on a diet. Much as the play celebrates the transforming energies of young love—and indeed engages with its destructive potential—it also mocks the courtly idiom of love language, not least through the contrast between the artificial poeticisms of the genteel characters and the robust prose voice of their servants.

The name “Speed” suggests the quickness of wit that is confirmed by this servant’s linguistic facility and awareness of the gentlemen’s foibles. He always seems to be one step ahead of Valentine, anticipating what his master’s going to do next in an aside shared with the audience. Proteus’ servant Lance also has a name that suggests mental sharpness: Shakespeare himself was often praised by his contemporaries for having a wit that was as sharp as the spear in his name. Ironically, though, Lance’s way of proceeding is anything but pointed: his role is that of the clown for whom everything goes wrong and who confuses his words (“the prodigious son” for “the prodigal son,” “a notable lover” misheard as “A notable lubber”). When he tries to use his shoe, his staff, his hat, and his dog to act out the scene of his farewell from his family, he gets into a terrible tangle. The joke is that this should be as a result of the unpredictability of the live dog onstage, but actually it is due to Lance’s own incompetence. At the end of the fourth act, Lance has a second two-hander with his dog, Crab, a riff on the theme of a servant’s obedience to his master. As Lance makes a mess of the demands of Proteus, so Crab fails to do the will of Lance: “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?”

While Speed mocks Valentine’s transformation into a lover, Lance succumbs to desire in the manner of his master. He falls in love with a milkmaid, the unseen prototype of the hoyden character type that will be incarnated in the fat kitchen maid of
The Comedy of Errors
and
As You Like It
’s goatherd Audrey. Lance’s catalogue of the milkmaid’s down-to-earth virtues and vices parodies the courtly lover’s enumeration of the beauties of his mistress.

In the world of Shakespearean comedy, young women are usually seen in one of three settings. With their parents, where they are expected to be obedient, which ultimately means marrying the man of the parents’ choice. With a female confidante, such as a servant or kinswoman, in whose company they can talk of love. And in a position of vulnerability, away from home, where their courage is tested and they have to live by their wits (for example, by taking on male disguise), but where they have unprecedented freedom to explore and express their true selves, their hopes, fears, and desires. Silvia enters in the first role, under the eye of her father, the Duke of Milan, as he measures up her potential suitors. The beautiful lady of courtly romance, she is the object of men’s devoted gaze and fantastic desire, a woman on a pedestal who reveals little of her inner life. Julia, by contrast, wears her heart upon her sleeve as she moves from the second to the third of the female situations when she sets off in pursuit of Proteus. Her decision to do so reveals the sexual double standard that was pervasive in Shakespeare’s time: whereas a young man is condemned for “sluggardizing” at home, a young woman risks being made the object of scandal by setting out from home.

One of Shakespeare’s favorite techniques was the dramatically ironic counterpointing of scenes: we see Julia proving her love for Proteus by setting off on her dangerous journey immediately after we have seen Proteus renouncing his love for Julia because he has been smitten by the sight of Silvia. The scene when Valentine introduces his best friend to the girl he has fallen in love with is brief but very subtly written. It turns on the correspondence between the language of courtesy and that of courtship. Valentine asks Silvia to welcome Proteus “with some special favour” and to “entertain him” in her service. What he means is “please treat my friend with respect,” but since in the courtly idiom the language of service is synonymous with that of love, Proteus is given an opening to project himself into the role of a rival lover—when Silvia modestly refers to herself as a “worthless mistress” he responds by saying that he would fight to the death anyone else who described her thus. In a sense, the crux of the play lies in the double meaning of the word “mistress.”

Proteus explores his own transformation in two soliloquies that come in rapid succession. In the first, he introduces the image of his love for Julia as akin to a wax image melted to oblivion by the heat of his new desire for Silvia. At the same time, he recognizes that what he has fallen in love with is merely a “picture,” the outer image of her beauty. The play begins to probe more deeply into the nature of love when in later scenes a series of questions are asked about the relationship between the “shadow” of surface beauty and the “substance” or “essence” of personality within. In parallel with this motif, the action develops the concerns of Proteus’ second major soliloquy: making and breaking vows, finding and losing selves, and the conflict between “sweet-suggesting Love” and “the law of friendship.” “In love,” Proteus asks at the play’s crisis point, “Who respects friend?”

Prior to the last few years of Shakespeare’s career, his plays were performed without an interval. Despite this, there is often a perceptible change in the action at the beginning of the fourth act. The plot has been wound to the full, so now the unwinding begins. Here the turning point is marked by the movement away from court and city to a wood peopled by some rather genteel Outlaws. One of them swears “By the bare scalp of Robin Hood’s fat friar,” and it is the jolly camaraderie of the merry men, stripped of the old story’s violence and political edge, that is evoked by these Outlaws.

Desire feeds itself on rejection. The more Silvia spurns Proteus, the more he desires her. By the same account, the more he spurns Julia, the more she dotes on him. In the play’s richest sequence, music is introduced to establish a nocturnal setting in which Proteus displaces Turio and woos Silvia at her window, not knowing that he is overheard by Julia in her page-boy disguise: This is her dark night of the soul. But then in a bold and very Shakespearean twist, when Proteus confronts the disguised Julia face-to-face he takes rather a fancy to her boy self: “Sebastian is thy name? I like thee well and will employ thee in some service presently.” The words “employ” and “service” maintain the punning on the shared language of domestic obligation and sexual engagement. Anticipating Viola in
Twelfth Night
, Julia finds herself in the painful position of being “servant” to the man whose “mistress” she really wants to be. Hitherto Proteus has regarded Julia as nothing more than a decorative blonde. Now that he thinks she is Sebastian, he unwittingly begins to intuit her inner qualities.

At this point, the play reaches its highest point of sophistication and self-conscious artfulness. The audience is offered two images: a portrait of Silvia and a description of Sebastian, dressed in Julia’s clothes, playing the part of a rejected lover, Ariadne deserted by Theseus in a famous story from classical mythology. The contrast between the two images effectively turns the scene into a Shakespearean claim for the superiority not only of the player’s art to the portrait painter’s but also of his own dramatization of love to the static vision of courtly romance. The painting, like the lady of romance, is but a “senseless form” to be “worshipped, kissed, loved and adored.” The actor, by contrast, can evoke the real pain of passion so convincingly (“so lively acted”) that the audience may be moved to tears. No one is better than Proteus at expressing eternal adoration in the artful language—all sighs and poetic hyperbole—of the courtly lover, but his fickleness reveals the essential insincerity of the code. Paradoxically, it is the play actor who is truly sincere: “Sebastian” is really Julia, passioning not for Theseus’ but for Proteus’ perjury and unjust flight.

Painters can achieve tricks of the eye—perspectival illusions of depth, anamorphic representations that vary in appearance according to where the viewer stands—but the theatrical imagination can do much more: the imagined performance of Sebastian as Ariadne is mapped onto the achieved performance of both Julia as Sebastian in the world of the play and the boy actor as Julia on the stage where the drama was first brought to life. Throughout his career, Shakespeare will return to such complex layered effects of illusion and reality, in accordance with his core belief that we are all players in the great theater of the world.

Having gone emotionally deep in the fourth act, Shakespeare speeds toward a conventional comic conclusion in the fifth. The forest of the jolly Outlaws is his device for doing so. It is not a psychologically complex environment, like the wood in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
. Rather, it is a place where the polished veneer of civil society is stripped away, allowing people to act impulsively on their desires. Proteus wants Silvia, so he threatens to rape her. Proteus asks forgiveness, so Valentine seeks to demonstrate that he values friendship above love by offering him Silvia. Sebastian reveals that s/he is Julia, so Proteus recognizes that he really loved her all along. Turio comes on to claim Silvia but instantly recognizes that only a fool “will endanger / His body for a girl that loves him not.” The father is won round and the play is over. This is the ending we expect and desire, but the abruptness with which it comes about is a sign of impatience or immaturity on Shakespeare’s part—but then again, his mind was so restlessly inventive that he never really cared for endings.

Shakespeare endures through history. He illuminates later times as well as his own. He helps us to understand the human condition. But he cannot do this without a good text of the plays. Without editions there would be no Shakespeare. That is why every twenty years or so throughout the last three centuries there has been a major new edition of his complete works. One aspect of editing is the process of keeping the texts up to date—modernizing the spelling, punctuation, and typography (though not, of course, the actual words), providing explanatory notes in the light of changing educational practices (a generation ago, most of Shakespeare’s classical and biblical allusions could be assumed to be generally understood, but now they can’t).

Because Shakespeare did not personally oversee the publication of his plays, with some plays there are major editorial difficulties. Decisions have to be made as to the relative authority of the early printed editions, the pocket format “Quartos” published in Shakespeare’s lifetime and the elaborately produced “First Folio” text of 1623, the original “Complete Works” prepared for the press after his death by Shakespeare’s fellow actors, the people who knew the plays better than anyone else.
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
, however, exists only in a Folio text that is generally well printed so there is little textual debate about this play.

The following notes highlight various aspects of the editorial process and indicate conventions used in the text of this edition:

Lists of Parts
are supplied in the First Folio for only six plays, one of which is
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
, so the list here is based on “Names of all the Actors” at the end of the play. Capitals indicate that part of the name used for speech headings in the script (thus “SPEED, a clownish servant to Valentine”).

Locations
are provided by Folio for only two plays, of which
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
is not one. Eighteenth-century editors, working in an age of elaborately realistic stage sets, were the first to provide detailed locations (
“another part of the forest”
). Given that Shakespeare wrote for a bare stage and often an imprecise sense of place, we have relegated locations to the explanatory notes at the foot of the page, where they are given at the beginning of each scene where the imaginary location is different from the one before. In the case of
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
, the action moves between the Italian cities of Verona and Milan and the countryside round about.

Act and Scene Divisions
were provided in Folio in a much more thoroughgoing way than in the Quartos. Sometimes, however, they were erroneous or omitted; corrections and additions supplied by editorial tradition are indicated by square brackets. Five-act division is based on a classical model, and act breaks provided the opportunity to replace the candles in the indoor Blackfriars playhouse, which the King’s Men used after 1608, but Shakespeare did not necessarily think in terms of a five-part structure of dramatic composition. The Folio convention is that a scene ends when the stage is empty. Nowadays, partly under the influence of film, we tend to consider a scene to be a dramatic unit that ends with either a change of imaginary location or a significant passage of time within the narrative. Shakespeare’s fluidity of composition accords well with this convention, so in addition to act and scene numbers we provide a
running scene
count in the right margin at the beginning of each new scene, in the typeface used for editorial directions. Where there is a scene break caused by a momentary bare stage, but the location does not change and extra time does not pass, we use the convention
running scene continues
. There is inevitably a degree of editorial judgment in making such calls, but the system is very valuable in suggesting the pace of the plays.